Raped, chased, expelled: The women of Umoja
Now we are slaughtering ourselves, and we eat like the men.
It has become evening, and in the village announces great things: Napei, the goat, is slaughtered. Once a month, the women treat themselves to such a feast. At the village tree, a large acacia tree, Margaret, Rebecca, Paulina and the other women spread out a sheet of laminated oil cans as a base. Napei's dying takes three minutes. Blood gushes from the throat and runs into a dried gourd. Every piece of meat is precious. The women put it in a huge saucepan, squat down and nibble it all evening.
Previously, with their husbands, they were left with only the remains. Now they eat what belongs to them. One woman stands over the other, burly she is, the pearls typical of Samburu women lie like a shield on her breast. It is Rebecca Lolosoli, founder of Umoja, the only women's village in Africa. She says: "The men have only ever fed us the innards, and now we are slaughtering ourselves and eating like the men." Then she laughs, a bit embarrassed. "Sometimes it seems weird."
Umoja means "unity" in Swahili, and uniting many of the current 50 or so women are experiencing unity for the first time in a long time. Umoja is a provocation in Africa. Your life too. They set up their village because they had been raped by their men or by local men, including British UN soldiers, whose training camps are not far from Umoja. They have fled the violence in their families, from forced marriage or genital mutilation; and because they no longer want to accept that being a woman in Africa means not having a choice.
Rebecca Lolosoli is sitting there, almost swallowed up by the darkness, just barely recognizing the dust in the curls on her forehead. She tells how it all began: in the early 1990s she fled her village when men threatened her with an ax. Her own husband was not home that day. Rebecca had repeatedly rebelled against the domination of the Samburu men over their wives, she was considered rebellious, the men did not like; The Samburu are a nomadic people, the men are warriors who traditionally regard their wives as their possessions. They beat Rebecca hospitalized. When she asked her husband to avenge the attack, he just shrugged. Rebecca left him. The memory of this day is hidden as a scar under the pearl headband.
We were looking for a place to finally be left alone.
On her flight she met Samburu women with similar fate. After a short time they were already 15, they camped in the wild or came under benevolent people. They tried to trade vegetables to make their own money, but hardly anyone wanted to buy from them. Not with these women. They had not kept silent about the power of men. Women in Africa learn early that talking about sexual offenses means excluding themselves from the community - in the eyes of others, raped women are themselves to blame. "We are double victims," says Rebecca. "The community is hurting us because our families chase us away. We are considered soiled." Honor counts, not the woman.
All the women here have these experiences. In brightly colored dresses they sit next morning in front of their huts made of cow dung, 48 windowless dwellings in the dusty red sand. About 350 kilometers away is the village of Nairobi, in the middle of the savannah, on the edge of the Samburu National Park. The bed is a goat skin on the ground, the cabinet a cardboard box, the kitchen a plastic bag. Something else makes the women rich in Umoja. Your freedom.
A village like Umoja is a provocation in Africa: women who belong only to themselves
"We were looking for a place to be left alone," says Rebecca. She tells how she has several times gone to the manager of the region to convince him of the women's village, and finally got the approval of the Kenyan Ministry of Culture and Social Affairs. They struck the first piles, covering the first roof on the land that belonged only to them. Every woman who comes to the village receives six goats and a goat. The first kittens go back to the community. "Most girls get married at the age of 12. Then you are important because your father gets cows for you," says a young woman. She is sitting in front of her hut. "You sell a girl and get animals."
Besides farming, women earn money with embroidery. Three, four days are needed for one of the kilo-heavy hangers. They take 20 to 40 euros for this, which is more than the souvenir shops in the lodges in the Samburu National Park demand.If a chain is sold, a quarter of the revenue goes into the community fund, the rest can keep each for themselves.
I was so ashamed afterwards.
Common inputs and outputs are in a cash book, the numbers are scrawled wildly. From the village cash, corn, beans and sugar are purchased in Archer's Post, eight kilometers away. Almost every day, the women from Umoja do their errands there. They are still being insulted by men on the way there. Get out of here, they say. And: you did shameful things. Local health authorities and non-governmental organizations estimate that as many as 16,000 Kenyan women are raped each year. At least half of all Kenyan women have experienced violence since the age of 15, often on their way alone, on their way to goatherds, fetching water or gathering wood. Almost three quarters of women in Umoja have been raped by British UN soldiers.
Life here seems backward, and yet it is state-of-the-art: women own livestock and land, they are self-determined - that is the lifelong dream of village founder Rebecca Lolosoli
Like Paulina, late thirtieth. She does not like to think back to that day, a few years ago, when she moved away from her cabin to gather firewood. Suddenly, two men in military garb stood before her, holding their mouths shut, throwing them to the ground. "I was so ashamed afterwards," says Paulina, burying her head in her hands. She entrusted herself to a friend. A woman would understand her, she hoped. But she continued to tell it, and a few hours later Paulina's husband drove her away. "He yelled, 'The white man has infected you with AIDS.'" Only her daughter could grab Paulina and take her away.
In May 2006, the Kenyan government passed a law against sexual violence. Although it provides for tougher penalties for rape and abuse, rape in marriage and female sexual mutilation are still punishable. An investigation by an association of Kenyan lawyers revealed that even in remote areas of the country not even the text of the law has been distributed to courts and police stations.
What should come of it when perpetrators question perpetrators?
Umoja is out of the woods, but Rebecca is tirelessly campaigning for it; at congresses in New York or at the World Social Forum in Nairobi. She has made the village known, also in England, where the London human rights lawyer Martyn Day became aware of the assaults of his compatriots. She does not believe that his investigations bring anything. "What should come of it," she asks, "if perpetrators question perpetrators?" The anger of the men over the strong women of Umoja is still breaking over them. The women would only invent their stories to provoke pity, they say. Others were sent by their husbands to be fed in the village. To protect their village, the women have wove a fence of thorn bushes, "because men stalk from time to time," says Rebecca. "They invade our huts or lay in wait for them." The women set up their sons for protection. One of them is Mohammed, 26, during the day he lives outside the village, in the evening he stands watch. He says he does not want women to be treated badly. "There must be other times, even for our fathers, who drove our mothers away, and that's why I'm here now."
They are silent about the past to soothe it
It is washing day. The women are rubbing their clothes on the bank of the Uaso River. You have to be careful because of the crocodiles. At the right moment they jump with their clothes into the brown broth, wash their short-cropped heads, splash wet. They rarely talk about what happened to them. Those who ask, reap silence. Not talking about it - they have internalized it. "Whatever has been done to each one of us," says Rebecca, "we try to laugh and soothe it."
Meanwhile, women from other tribes have arrived in the village, others have left it again. Because they wanted to try it again with their husband or with another. Five women's groups have now formed in the North African Samburu district, all trying to become independent - with micro-loans or village schools for women.
I find it pleasant to live without men.
"Living without men is not difficult, but it's difficult to live with them," says Margaret. She has been in the village from the beginning, came here with her two children, and is Rebecca Lolosoli's right-hand man. "They keep cursing you, I like living without men, no controls, no accusations, nobody beating us, we're happy."
Thick smoke ripples from the rafters of the huts, inside the women stir fire and do not come out as biting smoke wafts them around. Hut next to hut, steaming roofs in the desert sand. Njekiyo is new to Umoja, she says she should be married to an old man and run away to save herself from the blows of her father.Damaris is sitting next to her, telling that she was the second wife of a man whose first wife could not have children. When Damaris had two children, he began to torture her. "I heard about this village, I ran off with my two children, people avoided us because they were afraid we were damned, I was glad when I got here."
For most women, Umoja is a salvation, a new life. "We try to laugh away grief together," says Rebecca. But that does not succeed everyone
More than 30 children live in Umoja, they go to a school on the outskirts of the village, the money comes from international donors, a part brought the government. On the walls there are boards that explain in pictures what equipment is needed for agriculture and that father, mother and children belong to a family. The textbooks are second- and third-hand donations, and from the neighboring villages mothers send their children to Umoja. For three months they have to pay one euro.
The Umoja cosmos is well thought out. There are plans: The village should grow. More people are supposed to come here. Tourists who so far head for Samburu National Park; For them, the women of Umoja build bungalows by the river. Further huts and a restaurant are planned. A few men, sent by the African Wildlife Foundation, are finishing up a small museum where women want to showcase the Samburu tradition. The men are allowed to work at any time. But do you want to live with a man again? "No," says Margaret, she has to laugh. "Never again," says Paulina. "Every woman is free to go outside and have a boyfriend," Rebecca says. "We do not want to ban our lives." But to be the property of a man no longer wants.
Women and sexual violence - the facts
- Sexual violence is the crime that is growing the most in the world.
- Every fourth woman in Germany has experienced physical violence at home; it is about 40 percent among Turkish women.
- In Guatemala, the numbers of murdered girls and women are rising, and almost every day such a crime occurs somewhere in the country. The victims are poor, young and were abused and raped before they died.
- At least every single minute there is a rape in South Africa. Only about every ninth crime is displayed. In a survey of 1,200 students, 40 percent said they had been raped before.
- In civil wars, the frontline almost always runs over the bodies of women. Rape has become a weapon of war. In the Darfur conflict in Sudan, children and pregnant women were systematically abused.
- Out of 400 rape victims in South Kivu (Congo), over 70 percent never went to the doctor or hospital (see also Interview with Medica mondiale).
- Women in Liberia are among the most raped women in the world: three out of four experienced sexual violence during the civil war between 1993 and 2003.
- In the Congo, UN soldiers forced girls into prostitution. They got a dollar or something to eat for their sex services.
- In July 2007, 700 Moroccan soldiers were suspended from service in Côte d'Ivoire for allegedly sexually abusing young women and girls.
- In November 2007, 111 Sri Lankan UN soldiers were withdrawn from Haiti; they had paid women, including minors, for sex.
- Publicly speaking about sexual violence is still a taboo in many African regions.
- The body of a woman must not become a weapon of war. He does not belong to the man or society
