BIOGRAPHY – The Extended
Version
A few of the interviews posted here – especially
the Island Where one – give an idea of the process leading
to my career in Africa development; this Long Version of my bio tries
to go a bit deeper into the process, to give a sense of what I did
before turning to writing.
Even before getting my Masters degree in Third World
Development and starting firmly down that path, I was drawn to the Continent
because of the cultural similarities between the Caribbean and West Africa. Following
six months as an exchange student in Nigeria, I spent a few summers of
my early 20’s wandering around West Africa doing “cultural
research.”
With
My Girls outside our dorms, way back in the day at University
of Nigeria, Nsukka.
To the right is one of my closest friends
and godmother to my son, Huguette Njemanze Fafunwa.
Chinyere
is to the left with her classic Look and Stella had just woken
up and didn’t have on her make-up.
What that means is that I sought out every wine-carrying, naming ceremony,
funeral, and yam festival being held anywhere a bush taxi, overcrowded
bus, lorry, or open-backed pick-up truck would carry me; once a friend
and I hitched a ride with a Nigerian military aircraft. I kid you
not. We sat on the floor; it wasn’t the kind of plane with
seats and I remember being deaf for several days, partly due to the noise
of the engine and partly due to the un-pressurized cabin.
I also traveled by catching rides with Peace Corps volunteers (motorbikes),
UN development workers (much more comfortable: 4-wheel drive vehicles
with strong air conditioning, and no getting out at gunpoint at the hundreds
of military checkpoints or borders along the way). Not to mention
rides from strangers, some of whom remain my friends to this day. I
never once stayed in a hotel, and would show up at the homes or businesses
of friends of people I’d just met, or people I knew back in New York,
sometime with a note of introduction, usually just saying “so-and-so
told me to come.”
Looking back, I’m stunned at how presumptuous I was about the
thing we call “African hospitality” – which runs much
deeper than those words indicate and have to do with a cultural obligation
to take care of strangers. And I also reflect that indeed God does
take care of fools and babies – at that time, I qualified for both
categories.
 
When I was a fool and baby.
Geneva and Jean
In between college and grad school, I worked in Geneva, Switzerland
with the World Council of Churches, first as an intern with the communications
department, and then with the Programme to Combat Racism (PRC). I
seem to have had things “placed in my path”in terms of the
course my life would take: I ended up in Switzerland because my
Aunt Doreen Boyd, who was head of Development at the World YWCA headquarters
there, had heard from someone at the WCC that the communications department
was trying to get applications from a wider geographical to offset the
preponderance of applications from European countries (if you were wondering,
I believe in affirmative action). She sent me an application form,
I applied, and found myself – almost miraculously -- at the World
Council of Churches.
This was in the mid-eighties, when South Africa and Namibia dominated
the global social justice agenda, and my grounding in these issues is
thanks to my departed mentor, an activist of amazing capacity, Dr. Jean
Sindab. Jean
passed away too young, at barely 51, in early 1996, but not without giving
everything she had to The Struggle, and not without mentoring a whole FLEET
of young people who, without her influence, would probably have turned
out quite differently. Me included. Please take a moment
to read about Jean, whose life is briefly chronicled in the cover story
of this Sojourner magazine issue.
Labors of Love: The courage and compassion of Jean Sindab.
by Martha F. Andujar, Nadine R. Gartrell, and Deborah K. King
Click here to read more
To read about The Jean Sindab Project for Breast Cancer Research, established
in her name in 2005 with a gift of over 2 million dollars click
here.
The African Development Foundation
Much as I wanted to stay on with the Programme to Combat Racism under
Jean’s mentorship, Geneva was killing the 25-year old me; it was
a cultural wasteland. Encouraged by Jean to get at least a masters
degree, I went back to New York and got my MIA from Columbia University. I
began working with the African Development Foundation in D.C., in 1991,
where I had The Boss From Heaven, Dr. Cherri Waters (a close friend of
Jean’s from Yale), who believed in finding intelligent people who
worked hard, giving them responsibility, and allowing them to rise to
the occasion.
It would take pages and pages to write about what a stimulating, exhilarating
experience that was -- working with African researchers as they tried
to find solutions to various development-related problems by involving
the affected communities in the research. I met people like Madame
Koubakouenda in Congo, who’d noticed out that the fish in the river
pools where women soaked their cassava were huge – and wanted to
show women how to “kill two birds with one stone” with no-cost,
no-labor fish farming. People like Dr. Kiwuwa in Uganda, encouraging
small farmers to rear rabbits as a protein source, since all the livestock
had been decimated during the Amin regime and the aftermath. I
funded ideas for reducing malaria and schistosomiasis, innovations in
food processing – credit schemes, you name it. Hopefully,
one day I’ll be able to write about these projects in detail. For
now, though, I’ll just direct you to the website of The African
Development Foundation, www.adf.gov,
whose mandate remains much the same as when I worked there.
I stayed with ADF for four years, and might still have been there to
this day if the Republicans hadn’t taken over Congress back in
1995, and cut the Foundation’s funding by almost fifty percent – accompanied
by a fifty percent staff cut. As one of the few non-U.S. citizens
working for a federal agency by special dispensation, I was first on
the list of the Reduction in Force (maybe that’s why I felt personally
vindicated when the Democrats finally got it back in 2006 – about
time.)
Global Rights: Partners for Justice (“The Law Group”)
Two years later – now with a husband and two children, babies,
in fact – I went back to work with the International Human Rights
Law Group, now called Global Rights: Partners for Justice, www.globalrights.org. A
human rights organization with a development approach, as their website
will explain, it was a unique, exciting, and challenging environment
to spend the next five years of my life (1996 – 2002).
I began at the Law Group, as it was called by insiders, just as Mobutu
was falling and Zaire was becoming the Congo once again. Much of
my early work was coordinating and developing programs of support for
the nascent human rights organizations there; and as funding for the
organization increased and more staff came on board, I worked more with
Nigerian pro-democracy organizations in a time of such heavy military
repression that we had to meet in Ghana, with the attendees crossing
the boarder by road disguised as orange traders, because they would have
been recognized and arrested if they tried to board a plane.
That Nigeria program was conceptualized by the then-director of Global
Rights, Gay McDougall, who had been a leader in the U.S. anti-apartheid
front, and brought together South Africans with expertise in organizing
under heavy repression, to share their techniques with the Nigerians,
whose repressive military regime rivaled that of South Africa. At
one of those clandestine meetings in Ghana, the Nigerians infiltrated
anyway, but they were too late to do anything except try—unsuccessfully
-- to take the South African trainers off the plane as they were
leaving Ghana.
I consider myself fortunate and blessed to have been given the chance
to work with these kinds of people, people who put their lives at risk
on a daily basis for their commitment to justice -- and even more
fortunate to have seen the situation in Nigeria turn around: the next
meeting we had with the same group of people was inside Nigeria, under
a democratically elected government; and instead of training on how to
organize underground, we were training on techniques for NGOs to lobby
an elected government to bring about progressive laws.
A Balancing Act
As the challenges of balancing my desire to spend time with my children
against my desire to continue with my work grew, I began to work part-time. In
an arrangement for which I’m ever grateful to my then-employers,
I worked full days from Mondays to Wednesdays (the days my children were
in pre-school); and then had Thursdays, Fridays, and the weekend with
the kids.
It was also only possible with the goodwill of all of my colleagues
at Global Rights – and in particular, the dedication and skill
of two young women who worked as “my” assistants (they were
really departmental assistants): first Abby Richardson; and when she
went on to law school, Eileen Pastora. Looking back I can see Jean’s
influence in how I related to Abby and Eileen, seeing their potential,
appreciating their intelligence and drive, and giving them ownership
of their work, so that their commitment to was no less than mine. I
can say that I literally would not have been able to do that work without
them.
Of course, part-time work meant working from home on those “off” days,
something I was happy to do. There was many a conference call
from my special spot on the playground – just far enough away
from the slides and swings so that the playground screaming of children
wouldn’t be heard through the cell phone. Later, when Trey
and Elyse went to school daily, I also went to work every day, but still
part-time, organizing my hours so that I could pick them up on time.
The Denial of Women’s Inheritance Rights in Africa
Working part-time also meant that I eventually reduced the scope of
my work until I mainly worked on the issue I had “brought” to
the Law Group – the denial of women’s inheritance rights
in Africa. I’d first heard about it at the African Development
Foundation, where a Ugandan woman was seeking an “information dissemination
grant” -- funding to let women widowed by HIV/AIDS know that their
right to inherit was protected by statutory law. Her proposal explained
how, in the HIV/AIDS era, women were becoming widowed much younger than
even a decade earlier; and girl children orphaned by AIDS were becoming
heads of households. Without the right to inherit their land and
homes, a social and economic catastrophe was in the making.
When I was being interviewed by Global Rights, I was asked to give an
example of a human rights issue I thought was important. I told
my interviewers about the denial of inheritance rights in Africa, and
I requested and received permission to develop it as a new Global Rights
program.
I kicked off the program, The Women’s Inheritance Rights Initiative,
in 1999 with a meeting in Accra, Ghana bringing together women from around
the continent who had been working largely in isolation. When
I left Global Rights in 2002, the Women’s Inheritance Rights Initiative
had grown into a large network of mostly women’s Non-Governmental
Organizations in Africa, and significant strides had been made towards
getting a higher profile for the issue at the international level; getting
more awareness of the need for protective laws at the level of the individual
African countries; and at the grassroots level, in terms of training
and awareness-raising.
 
(Left) - My final inheritance rights
training in Ghana before leaving the Law Group in 2002 -- women working
on inheritance rights came from all over Africa to discuss the different
levels at which the struggle was being launched; and to undergo intensive
training on working at the local level.
(Right) - Nigerian Global Rights Program Officer
Anne Ikpeme breaks it all down
If I could write pages about my work at the African Development Foundation,
I could write a book about my work on inheritance rights at Global Rights;
but for the moment, I’ll just direct you to the three links below,
which not only will describe the problem and its significance, but it
will show you that a small group of committed individuals and organizations
can indeed take an unrecognized problem out of obscurity and bring it
to the attention of the world. Step by step, from the first meeting
in 1999, through countless email campaigns, Days of Action, trainings,
and lobbying, we kept going until The New York Times “broke
the story” with an editorial in 2004, followed by an in-depth
article in early 2005.
The New York Times Editorial on Africa’s Homeless Widows
The 2004 New York Times editorial on “Africa’s
Homeless Widows” is of greatest significance to me, and is
all the evidence I need to prove that the work we did on inheritance
rights succeeded in bring the attention of the world to an issue that
had remained below the radar for too long:
Back in mid-2004, I was in Antigua, deep into writing Unburnable,
when I got a call from a woman who writes editorials for the New
York Times, Tina Rosenberg. She’d seen an article written
by Abby Richardson (my former assistant, mentioned above) in Human
Rights Brief, published by the American University Washington College
of Law, where Abby was then a second-year student. Immediately
before starting law school at American University, Abby had designed
and undertaken a six-month, five-country inheritance rights assessment
mission. Her brief, Women’s Inheritance Rights in Africa:
The Need to Integrate Cultural Understanding and Legal Reform, had
caught Ms. Rosenberg’s attention,
and she wanted to write something for the New York Times about
it. Although
others had written elsewhere about the denial of women’s inheritance
rights in Africa, I see this editorial was the most important step thus
far in bring the issue into a wider discourse – the cultural importance
of the New
York Times needs no elaboration.
And by February of the next year, 2005, the New York Times had
followed up the editorial by running a substantial article outlining
the connection between inheritance rights and HIV/AIDS – a connection
that had been the cornerstone of our awareness-raising campaigns.
Here is the first New York Times editorial, written with information
provided primarily by Abby Richardson:
Africa's Homeless Widows
June 16, 2004
Women feed Africa. They grow 80 percent of the continent's
food, yet the land they cultivate is not theirs. Women own
only 1 percent of the land in sub-Saharan Africa. Tradition
says that when a man dies, his property passes to his adult
sons or brothers. The widow and her children are often
evicted and left
destitute. Click to read full article
And this is the February, 2005 New York Times follow-up to
that editorial, which describes what happens to women and children in
harrowing detail.
AIDS and Custom Leave African Families Nothing
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
Published: February 18, 2005
BLANTYRE,
Malawi - There are two reasons why 11-year-old Chikumbutso Zuze never sees
his three sisters, why he seldom has a full belly, why he sleeps packed sardinelike
with six cousins on the dirt floor of his aunt's thatched mud hut.
One is AIDS, which claimed his father in 2000 and his mother in 2001.
The other is his father's nephew, a tall, light-complexioned man whom
Chikumbutso knows only as Mr. Sululu.
It was Mr. Sululu who came to his village five years ago, after his father
died, and commandeered all of the family's belongings - mattresses, chairs
and, most important, the family's green Toyota pickup, an almost unimaginable
luxury in this, one of the poorest nations on earth. And it was Mr. Sululu
who rejected the pleas of the boy's mother, herself dying of AIDS, to
leave the truck so that her children would have an inheritance to sustain
them after her death.
Instead, Chikumbutso said, he left behind a battery-powered transistor
radio
Click here to read more
And finally, below is an interview from one of my trips to Nigeria,
for a Day of Action on Women’s Inheritance Rights in 2001, carried
on a California-based on-line public news station.
Women's Inheritance Rights in West Africa
Click here for links to websites of organizations
working on Women’s Inheritance Rights.
NCM Online, By Donal Brown,
August 31, 2001
Women are organizing in West Africa to establish a right
taken for granted in the United States -- a woman's right to
inherit
property from her
husband. As it stands now, the practice of denying widows
inheritance rights contributes significantly to poverty in Africa.
In a village forty miles from Enugu, Nigeria, a mother of
five girls, two married and three in secondary school, had taken
care of
her husband when he was sick and dying. She was the husband's third
wife.
Before he died, in recognition of her hard work and
devotion, the husband
gave the woman the four plots she had always planted with
cassava, a
staple crop in Nigeria. When she tried to harvest her
crop this year, the
sons of her co-wives barred the way.
And when she tried to return to the plots, she was
chased, beaten and had
a tooth knocked out. Her husband's sons harvested the
cassava and the
mother could no longer afford to send her three daughters
to school.
The mother told her story during a day of testimony last
week sponsored by
a Washington, D.C.-based organization, International
Human Rights Law Group with offices throughout Africa.
 
(Left) - Widow
tells story during day of action testimonies.
(Right) - Day of action participants leave the workshop
to petition on behalf of the disinherited widow.
In a telephone
interview from Enugu,
the group's Coordinator for African Programs, Marie-Elena
John Smith, said
that the first step in mobilizing people to fight for
these rights was to
hear these women's stories.
Women from Togo, Ghana, the Cameroon, and the Congo
joined Nigerian women
in telling their stories. The women ranged from the very
young to the very
old and from the poor and illiterate to lawyers and
businesswomen. The
common thread in their stories was that they were denied
housing and land
although some were denied access to bank accounts and to
businesses they
had built with their husbands.
John Smith thinks it is important to consider the problem
as one of
oppression rather than tradition and culture. That way
they can view it in
terms of competition for scarce resources and see that
power is used
unjustly to oppress the weak and realize that the problem
is one with
solutions.
She said some people are responding to the injustice but
that there are
limits to what can be accomplished right now. A
traditional ruler did try
to intervene for the Nigerian mother. He even violated
local custom by
going to the home of the husband's sons to break kola
nuts with them -- a
ritual gesture of peace, friendship and hospitality --
and argue the
mother's case, but the sons rejected his views.
John Smith believes that good laws help the cause. She
said a local
legislator was introducing a widowhood bill concerning
some issues such as
fetish oaths requiring wives to drink water used to bathe
their dead
husbands. She praised him for his bill but when she asked
him to consider
the inheritance problem, he said that was where he drew
the line.
As with most other African countries, Ghana has laws in
place but still
has a lot to accomplish. The Ghanaian Constitution
guarantees that a woman
can inherit her husband's property, and the Intestate
Succession Law
passed in 1985 bolsters the Constitution. In many places,
law systems
co-exist -- religious, customary and statutory. Customary
law often
prevails to prevent women from gaining inheritance.
Illiterate women in
poor villages are also most often unaware of their rights
and subject to
violence and other forms of intimidation.
In Togo, for a woman to inherit her husband's estate, the
husband must
renounce customary law and make public his wish that
modern law be
applied. His widow can then inherit 25 percent of his
estate. The
remaining 75 percent goes to his children.
This denial of inheritance rights for women in Africa is
a pervasive
problem, exacerbated today by the AIDS epidemic. It is
common now for a
husband to die of AIDS at a young age with perhaps three
wives and
numerous children. These wives become heads of households
but find
themselves impoverished without a wage-earning husband or
inheritance. A
recent survey in eight African countries showed that
denying widows
inheritance resulted in extreme poverty in 54 percent of
the cases.
Armed with the testimony, John Smith is returning to the
United States to
help raise money for the next step which is to help
non-government
organizations in West Africa to begin grassroots
movements.
The organizations will train supporters to work with key
groups in the
community such as traditional rulers who often act as
mediators and groups of women vested with authority over widowhood rites.
* * *
The decision to move to Antigua and to write full-time was one that
I made believing that it would be in the best interest of my children. Yet
it was still a very difficult one, because I knew it would mean
suspending this work. In my interview with Island Where,
I describe how I did try to incorporate inheritance rights into one of Unburnable’s sub-plots – unsuccessfully;
and how I plan to ensure that it will be highlighted in my next novel. My
ultimate goal, my fervent hope, is that I’ll be able to use my
writing – my next novel in particular – to re-engage with
my previous work.
Click here to view Island
Where interview
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