Posts from ‘November, 2009’

In June of 2009, a young woman was out celebrating her college acceptance with two police officers she apparently knew. They proceeded to get her drunk, take her to a hotel, and then they took turns raping her. On October 27, they were sentenced. It is at this point that the series of events takes [...]

The rebels fought for resources. Charles Taylor fought to stay in power. Young boys were recruited to fight in a war they barely understood. And the women of Liberia, they fought for survival, theirs and Liberia’s.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a gripping, tear-jerking, yet empowering story of the resilience of the human spirit [...]

The Rev. Gideon B. Byamagusha is a person of courage, a person of the hearts of hearts. Byamagusha is an Anglican priest in Uganda, in a parish outside of Kampala. In 1992, Byamagusha announced that he was living with HIV. He was the first African religious leader to do so. In 2003 he founded the [...]

Speciosa Wandira was Vice-President of Uganda from 1994 to 2003, and was actually the first woman Vice-President on the continent. She is also a physician, and her story provides insight into the Anti-Homosexuality Bill passing through the Ugandan Parliament.
Dr. Wandira was once married to an engineer named Kazibwe. They had been married for some time. [...]

Thanks to the reminders of the violence that was meted on thousands of innocent Kenyans in the period that is now known as Post Election Violence I am unlikely to sleep tonight. Two years ago seated in my Minnesota living room I listened in horror (emails and phone calls) to stories about women being raped. [...]

Thirty-five years ago, Sherry Ortner argued that women’s universal oppression could be explained by their seeming closeness to nature and humanity’s tendency to devalue nature in favor of culture. Today, most feminist anthropologists have recognized the flaws in that nature/culture binary and in searching for a single, universal explanation of women’s subordination. Yet, much of [...]

Uganda is under attack and, as always, it’s the mothers of the nation who are to blame.
An Anti-homosexuality Bill has been tabled before the Parliament of Uganda. Many have risen to denounce and oppose it, both within the country and from across the globe.  Many others have risen to support it. Some in the Church [...]