In a corner of Kenya, women rule
Neglected rights create a village
By Emily Wax, Washington Post  |  July 15, 2005

UMOJA, Kenya -- Seated on tan sisal mats in the shade, Rebecca Lolosoli,
matriarch of a village for women only, took the hand of a frightened 13-year-old
girl. The child was to wed a man nearly three times her age; Lolosoli told her
she didn't have to.

The man was Lolosoli's brother, but that didn't matter. This is an area where
women rule.

''You are a small girl. He is an old man," said Lolosoli, who gives haven to
girls running from forced marriages. ''Women don't have to put up with this
nonsense anymore."

Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umoja, which means
unity in Swahili, on a field of dry grasslands. The women said they had been
raped, and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who saidthey had shamed
their community.

Stung by the treatment, Lolosoli, a charismatic woman with a crown of dark hair,
decided no men would live in their village of mud-and-dung huts.

The men of her tribe started their own village across the way, often monitoring
activities in Umoja and spying on the women.

What started as a group of homeless women looking for a place of their own
became a successful and happy village. About three dozen women live in Umoja,
and run a cultural center and camping site for tourists visiting the adjacent
Samburu National Reserve. Umoja has flourished, eventually attracting so many
women seeking help that they hired men to haul firewood, traditionally women's
work.

The men in the rival village also attempted to build a tourist and cultural
center, but were not very successful.

But the women felt empowered with the revenue from the camping site and cultural
center, where they sell crafts. They were able to send their children to school
for the first time, eat well, and reject male demands for daughters'
circumcision and marriage.

They became so respected that troubled women, some beaten, some trying to get
divorced, started showing up in this village in northern Kenya. Lolosoli was
even invited by the United Nations to attend a world conference on gender
empowerment in New York.

''That's when the very ugly jealous behaviors started," Lolosoli said, adding
that her life was threatened by local men right before her trip to New
York. ''They just said, frankly, that they wanted to kill me," Lolosoli said.

Sebastian Lesinik, the chief of the male village, described the division he saw
between men and women. ''The man is the head," he said. ''The lady is the
neck. A man cannot take, let's call it advice, from his neck."

''She's questioning our very culture," Lesinik said in an interview at a bar on
a sweltering afternoon. ''This seems to be the thing in these modern times:
troublemaking ladies like Rebecca."

In a mix of African women's strengthand the trickling in of influences from the
outside world, a version of feminism has grown alongside extreme levels of
sexual violence, the battle against HIV and AIDS, and the aftermath of African
wars.

A package of laws has been presented to Kenya's legislature to give women rights
to refuse marriage proposals, fight sexual harassment at work, reject genital
mutilation and to prosecute rape, an act so frequent that Kenyan leaders call it
the nation's biggest human rights issue. The most severe penalty, known as the
''chemical castration bill," would castrate repeatedly convicted rapists and
send them to prison for life.

In neighboring Uganda, thousands of women are rallying this month for a measure
called the Domestic Relations Bill, which would give them specific legal rights
if their husbands take a second wife, in part because of fear of HIV infection.

Eleven years after the genocide in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000 people
were killed, women in the country hold 49 percent of the seats in the lower
house of parliament. Many of them are war widows who have said they felt
compelled to rise up in protest after male leaders presided over the 1994
slaughter of Tutsi tribal members by the Hutu majority.

In West Africa, Nigerian women are lobbying strongly for the nomination of more
women politicians, including a president in 2007, saying that men have not run
the country properly.

Focusing on the meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Scotland last week, women
said they hoped international aid intended for Africa would include funding for
women seeking rights in their court systems and more representation in their
statehouses.

''We are at the start of something important for African women," said Margaret
Auma Odhiambo, a leader of western Kenya's largest group for widows. The members
are women whose husbands have died of AIDS.

Lolosoli's effort to speak out for change in her part of the continent reflected
the difficulties of changing the rhythm and power structure of village
life. Before Lolosoli even went to the UN conference, she was going house to
house in the nearby town of Archer's Post, telling women they had rights, such
as to refuse to have sex with their husbands if they were being beaten or poorly
treated.

''A woman is nothing in our community," she said, referring to the members of
her tribe.

''You aren't able to answer men or speak in front of them whether you are right
or wrong," she said. ''That has to change. Women have to demand rights, and then
respect will come. But if you remain silent, no one thinks you have anything to
say. Then again, I was not popular for what I was saying."