Word: africa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hopefully, President Obasanjo's optimism will spread beyond the geographical boundaries of Nigeria, and the country's lost role as the "Giant of Africa" can be recast as the "Phoenix of Africa...
When Charlene Smith found the intruder in her house in Johannesburg, South Africa, she started screaming. But he had a knife, and very soon her hands were tied behind her back with rounds of thick masking tape. Then he raped her. But her ordeal was not over after he left. In a country with one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world, bureaucratic and hospital red tape kept her from getting preventive drugs for 5 1/2 hours. If she had not complained loudly and bitterly, she might never have got the medication. The experience left her stunned...
Smith, a free-lance journalist and author, is the most eloquent voice in a country in the throes of an epidemic. South Africa recorded 1,263 rapes in 1979. Today the official annual figure is nearly 50,000, but rape-crisis researchers say only 1 in 35 is reported. That means there are more than 1.6 million rapes a year--the highest incidence in the world, according to Interpol. (In 1998 the official South African rate was 104.1 rapes per 100,000 people; in the U.S. the rate was 34.4 per 100,000.) Worse, the cultural and legal attitudes toward...
...outrage. "Nowhere since the final days of apartheid has there been greater activism in a national social issue," says Smith, 42, who was an antiapartheid journalist of some repute. "Rape victims are speaking out because we are people, not statistics. We have nothing to be ashamed of. [South Africa is] a so-called moral society that does nothing, that should be filled with shame." Indeed, in a country in which race remains hugely sensitive, the debate centers, surprisingly, not on race but on gender equality. An antirape TV ad by actress Charlize Theron, for example, was temporarily pulled because...
...East Timor [ESSAY, Sept. 27] is dictated by the importance attached to the transgressor in terms of foreign policy. It seems as if nations such as Russia, China and Indonesia literally get away with murder. By that token, what can be read into the apathy shown toward Africa's humanitarian crises? None of the transgressors can be considered "important" in that context, so why have America and the rest of the world shown scant interest in the suffering of the innocent civilians of Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African states? PAUL MATHIAS Pretoria, South...