Amran Abdundi is a women’s rights activist based in northeastern Kenya. She runs the Frontier Indigenous Network, an organisation which mobilises female peace builders and rights activists to set up shelters along the dangerous border with Somalia. It offers first aid to the injured as well as to women and girls who have been raped, moving victims to a safer part of Kenya.
As well as protecting citizens endangered by the guerrilla activities of the Al Qaeda-linked group Al Shabaab, Abdundi and her organisation also help those fleeing drought and failed harvests in Somalia. Abdundi is also behind radio-listening groups for women, which share information about access to tuberculosis treatment, among other things.
In a society that teaches women to leave decision-making to men and to look down when men pass, Abdundi’s Frontier Indigenous Network empowers, educates and mobilises rural women to challenge such outdated social codes.
The Al Qaeda-allied Islamist group Al Shabaab has sown terror in the Kenya-Somalia border region, one of the world’s most inhospitable areas. Women in the region are often the victims of violence, rape and murder. The northern region of Kenya is one of deeply conservative social customs, in which a man owns property on a woman’s behalf – even when the woman has bought the land. In the environment Abdundi operates in, a quarter of Kenyan girls and women have endured genital mutilation, despite legislation outlawing the practice.
Abdundi told Index: “I want to see them go to school. I don’t want to see them moving here and there without education – early marriage and female circumcision are also major issues.”
She said that some of the initial challenges the organisation faced have been overcome. In the beginning it was hard to talk to parents about their girls and “how the women have suffered”, she explained. “But now they understand us. They know how good we are and we want to change their lives.”
One of Frontier Indigenous Network’s biggest achievements in 2014 has been in mapping out conflict areas in northern Kenya. It focuses on the factors which fuel armed violence occurring after peace agreements are signed between warring parties. Aware that small arms and light weapons were one of the biggest obstacles to peace in the region, Abdundi and her group mapped many of the weapons used by the combatants. She then instigated a regional agreement to pursue arms traffickers, closing boltholes used by smugglers along the Somali border and developing a register of all recovered weapons. The agreement also targeted a network of groups running an illegal arms trade.
Abdundi has established radio-listening groups specifically for women, in which she encourages them to challenge the repressive cultural values preventing women from being permitted to own property or livestock. She uses the radio groups to reach women with tuberculosis, educating them about access to treatment and breaking cultural beliefs that tuberculosis is caused by curses and bad omens.
Abdundi has also mobilised women along the Kenya-Somalia border to rise against Al-Shabaab, a militant terrorist group, by educating them on the dangers of following the doctrine propagated by the terror organisation; she has received a number of death threats as a result of this work. She has also campaigned against the practice of female circumcision in northern Kenya.
She said: “My dream is to help women, girls and children. I just want to see them doing good. That’s my dream.”
There is, I am told, a war going on in feminism. A war between “intersectionalists” (I think) and TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, as far as I can tell).
I am not about to stick my oar into this particular boating lake, for two reasons:
Reason 1. Self-awareness. I am a white middle class western European media professional, north-London dwelling male, born in a time when there is little chance of conscription. I am practically the most privileged thing that ever existed, and the last thing people struggling for equality need is me, turning up, cheerily shouting “Only me!!!” like Harry Enfield’s Mr-You-Don’t-want-to-do-it-like-that, and telling people how to do a real feminism. That is not to say I do not have a right to have an opinion, but…
Reason 2: lurking in that apparently placid boating lake are piranhas, reading to chew up and spit out any oarsman (or woman) who does not know every ebb and eddie of the lake.
It’s a horrible sight to see. Every so often some poor naive jumps in their little pleasure boat, having been assured by the man that it’s perfectly safe, and rows happily to the middle of the lake. You watch from the shore. They wave back. What’s that sound? They’re singing Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins, their rowing keeping a brisk beat with the jaunty marching tune. “Shoulder-to-shoulder” and-stroke-and-stroke.
Unbeknownst to them, the piranhas have smelled blood. They row on. Gleefully, they reach the crescendo: “Our daughters’ daughters’ will adore us…”. They raise their hands to punch the air. An unattended oar slips into the water. The piranhas stir. Daughters? That sounds like determinism. The water begins to froth. The poor unsuspecting oarsman (or woman) is still singing. Eventually they catch the commotion in the corner of one eye: they hear it grow louder, under the boat, which now seems irresponsibly flimsy.
They sing still, but now in trepidation: “No more the meek and mild subservients we!”.
The frenzy grows stronger, at what was certainly a slight on members of the BDSM community (well, the Ms anyway). Stronger and stronger. Our rower tries to resist, we can see, but the boat is now falling apart, as if rotten, under their feet. Our previously carefree rower feels first a nip, and then a rush. They are simultaneously drowning and being eaten alive.
A final defiant shriek from a the near-eviscerated pleasure seeker, and then there is nothing. The waters are calm once more.
We tut, from the shore. Such a shame, such a loss. Did you see the cowbell dog?
That’s one version, but then try to see it from the fishes’ point of view. Fish have got to live. Piranhas have been, for years, maligned as a generality by the mainstream. The very word “piranha” is thrown around as an insult. Piranhas are irrational, illogical, even abominations against nature. And of course, there is more than one type of piranha, and not every piranha has the same experience of what it’s like being a piranha. Piranha identity is complex, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean piranhas shouldn’t bond together and work together. What outsiders view as a “feeding frenzy” is actually the best – only – way piranhas can continue to exist safely.
Besides, the piranhas grew up in this lake. They know it like the back of their fins – how to navigate, how to communicate. If anyone’s in a wrong place in the boating lake, it’s not the piranhas.
This is not an unreasonable case. The question then (and here’s where the horrendous tortured boating lake analogy comes to an end, you’ll be pleased to know) is: Was George Bush right? Can the human beings and the fish coexist peacefully?
The issue emerged again recently with a terse exchange of letters in the Observer newspaper, which followed the cancellation of a show by comic Kate Smurthwaite at Goldsmith’s college. Smurthwaite said she’d been banned because some university feminists who are pro sex work were threatening to protests against her anti sex work views, and the college security didn’t want the hassle.
A letter was put together, as letters are, decrying campus censorship and the narrowing of debate (with specific mention of the National Union of Students’ policy of “no-platforming” feminist Julie Bindel for statements on trans people). There was a response, disputing the facts of the first letter and suggesting that there are bigger campus free speech issues – around student protest for example – than whether certain already powerful people can take part in a panel debate or a comedy show.
The problem here is the commodification of free speech: who is allowed it and who isn’t, and, in hierarchical societies (i.e. pretty much every society we’ve come up with so far) who grabs it as theirs and who should be granted more in order to even things out, and who can “use” free speech against whom.
This is to treat free speech as a weapon rather than a space. There is not a limited amount of free speech to go round: rather, there is a (hopefully) ever-expanding free speech arena in which we can argue. The signatories of both letters have actually identified the same problem, the narrowing of the space, particularly in education. Perhaps it would be beneficial for them to defend the space in which to argue rather than trying to push the other side overboard.
Songhoy Blues is a four-strong “desert blues” band, based in Mali. It is made up of musicians who fled northern Mali after a loose assortment of militant Islamist groups captured the territory and implemented strict sharia law – including the prohibition of secular music – in spring 2012. The musicians first met at a wedding in Bamako, Mali’s capital city, and started playing together to help recreate the rich tradition of northern Malian music for the growing population of refugees in the south.
Musicians had long been important social figures in Mali. They occupied a specific, revered cultural class, called the “griots”, and their role encompassed entertainer, reporter, historian, and political commentator. Their unique power and influence explains why the invading Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, the largest of the fundamental Islamist groups, were particularly keen to block their activities in August 2012.
The official sentence for breaching the music ban was a public whipping, although Songhoy Blues’ founding member and guitarist Garba Touré was threatened with having his hand cut off if he continued playing. Radio stations were burned down, musical instruments were smashed, and there were reports of people being beaten by the occupying militia just for having polyphonic ringtones.
The Malian military stepped in to counteract the Islamist groups’ advance in February 2013, with the help of troops from France and surrounding African countries. But emotional residue from the conflict lingers, and – despite the lifting of sharia law – many musicians continue to self-censor, fearful of the Islamist groups’ return and retribution.
Garba Touré left his hometown of Diré, upstream from Timbuktu along the river Niger, once his safety in northern Mali had become untenable. He settled in Bamako, 1000km away, alongside thousands of other refugees. Here he met two more musicians from the Songhoy tribe (a North Malian ethnic group), Aliou Touré and Oumar Touré, and local drummer Nathanael Dembélé.
As a band the foursome played rough and rowdy blues-rock anthems, the lyrics of which called for an end to the conflict. Their audiences, which packed out Bamako bars and restaurants, were a mix of refugee Songhoys and Tuaregs – long-feuding northern Malian ethnic groups united against the insurgent Islamist groups.
The band joined forces with Africa Express, a group of Western singers and producers led by Damon Albarn, which had come to Bamako to work with local artists in September 2013. Songhoy Blues collaborated with Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner on a song called Soubour (i.e. “patience” – Garba has said, “We’re asking the refugees to have patience. Without patience, nothing is possible”). This became the lead single for Maison des Jeunes, the album made during Africa Express’s Mali trip.
In 2014 Songhoy Blues went on a global tour, and also supported artists such as Damon Albarn and Julian Casablancas in tours across Europe. Mojo magazine has named them one of 10 “new faces of 2015”. Their debut album, Music In Exile, will be released in February, and its lead single – called Al Hassidi Terei and produced by Zinner – has received critical acclaim. The band are also working on a feature film about the music ban in northern Mali.
Writers discuss the representation of refugees in novels and plays. What ethical questions are involved? Is there a responsibility to represent refugees positively? How do you balance reportage with storytelling? What responsibility, if any, does the creative writer have to represent refugees positively or to tackle negative views?
Featured writers:
Nadifa Mohamed, author of Black Mamba Boy (winner of the Betty Trask Prize) and The Orchard Of Lost Souls. (“A haunting and intimate portrait of the lives of women in war-torn Somalia . . . it captures the bleakness of war and the triumph of the human spirit.” —Meenakshi Venkat, New York Journal of Books)
Chris Cleave, author of books including The Other Hand (“A powerful piece of art… shocking, exciting and deeply affecting.” – Independent). His other novels are Incendiary and Gold. He won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and was short-listed for the Costa Book Prize for The Other Hand.
Zodwa Nyoni, poet and playwright whose play Nine Lives is set to for a UK Tour later this year (“Nyoni’s interweaving of naturalism and poetry is superb, and lifts this show far beyond documentary, into unforgettable solo drama about one of the key experiences of our time.” The Scotsman). Her new play Boi Boi Is Dead also opens in 2015.
Tim Finch, author of The House of Journalists (“A savagely funny broadside aimed at the industry of suffering” Metro “[An] effective mixture of often-light comedy and often-brutal reportage from the front line against tyranny” Daily Mail) and former Director of Communications at the Refugee Council.
Presented by Counterpoints Arts and Platforma Arts & Refugees Network in association with Index on Censorship.
Where: RichMix 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA When: Tue 21 April, 7:30pm Tickets: £5 / Book here
