Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

Sexual and gender based violence: everyday, everywhere, and yet …

By Daniel Moshenberg | September 2009

The mathematics of contemporary sexual and gender based violence offer a grim graph of today’s world. In a number of countries, evenly distributed across the globe, up to one-third of adolescent girls report forced sexual initiation. For example, a recent study suggests that in the United Kingdom one in three teenage girls has suffered sexual abuse from a boyfriend, one in four has experienced violence in a relationship, one in six has been pressured into sexual intercourse, one in sixteen say they had been raped. Mass rape of women and girls continues to be seen as somehow a legitimate military weapon. Reports suggest that, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a war that lasted a mere three years, somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 women and girls were raped. Sexual violence against men and boys continues undaunted, unreported, understudied, and too often a source of ridicule and derision. According to a number of studies, somewhere between 5 and 10% of adult males report having been sexually abused in their childhood. Women suffer violence in health care settings, “including sexual harassment, genital mutilation, forced gynecological procedures, threatened or forced abortions, and inspections of virginity.” Sexual violence in schools is off the charts. In Canada, 23% of girls experience sexual harassment.

To be a woman in Kenya: a look at sexual and gender-based violence

By Ann Njogu - Michelle McHardy | September 2009

In 2006, the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW) – a non-governmental organization promoting gender equality and justice through the empowerment of women and elimination of discrimination and violence – took on the case of a woman who was brutally attacked while waiting for a bus at the country’s capital, Nairobi. She was dragged behind a bush and gang raped by 10 men for several hours. Later, in the public hospital, she was asked by the attending doctor (who said that he did not have gloves) to insert her fingers into her vagina and remove the semen with her own fingers and place it on the doctor’s laboratory slab for examination. Still ashamed, embarrassed, and sore from the attack, this completely inappropriate act by the doctor violated her all over again. It was as if she was attacked twice in one night.

AFRICOM and the Geopolitics of African Oil

By Daniel Volman | June 2009

On 1 October 2008, the new Africa Command (AFRICOM) officially became operational as America’s newest combatant command, with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, to oversee U.S. military activities on the continent. Until the creation of AFRICOM, U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands: the European Command, which had responsibility for most of the continent; the Central Command, which oversaw Egypt and the Horn of Africa region along with the Middle East and Central Asia; and the Pacific Command, which administered military ties with Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States.

From The Geopolitics of Petroleum ACAS Blog Series

Bush administration Security Assistance Programs for Africa

By Daniel Volman | July 2008

For Fiscal Year 2009 (which begins on 1 October 2008), the Bush administration is asking Congress to approve the delivery of some $500 million worth of military equipment and training to Africa (including both sub-Saharan Africa and north Africa) in the budget request for the State Department for Fiscal Year (FY) 2009. The administration is also asking for up to $400 million for deliveries of equipment and training for Africa funded through the Defense Department budget and another $400 million to establish the headquarters for the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (Africom).

AFRICOM: The New U.S. Military Command for Africa

By Daniel Volman | July 2008

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom. Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the African continent were conducted by three separate military commands: the European Command, which had responsibility for most of the continent; the Central Command, which oversaw Egypt and the Horn of Africa region along with the Middle East and Central Asia; and the Pacific Command, which administered military ties with Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean.

ACAS Press Statement on the Crisis in Kenya

By ACAS | January 2008

The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS), an organization of United States-based academics and activists, today rejected superficial and misleading popular and media portrayals of the post-electoral violence in Kenya as “tribal.”

U.S. Military Activities in Kenya

By Daniel Volman | January 2008

Now that President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it is easy to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks ago declared the elections free and fair.

U.S. Military Activities in Kenya

By Jesse Benjamin | December 2007

Once President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it was easy for the corporate Western media to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks earlier had declared the elections free and fair. Bush and Fraser’s hands were pushed by the emerging evidence that the elections were illegitimate and that the violence, on both sides, had been orchestrated.1 Maintaining a lopsided alliance with the Kibaki government would not be so easy in the glare of public opinion, now cast briefly on the Kenyan nation, and so we saw a total flip-flop in US policy. But neither position is contradictory as the US is heavily invested in stability in Kenya.

Action Alert : Ngugi and Njeeri Wa Thiongo Wa Ngugi

By ACAS | January 2005

Association of Concerned African Scholars January 14, 2005 Dear Friends, As you may already know, world renowned Kenyan playwright, novelist and social critic Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and his wife Njeeri Wa Ngugi were brutally attacked on August 11, 2003 in an apartment in Nairobi, Kenya. Ngugi was severely beaten and burned with cigarettes, and his […]

The Case Against the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act

By ACAS | March 1998

Since the end of the Cold War, US policy toward Africa has drifted and become increasingly erratic. ACAS thus welcomes new thinking and initiatives. Unfortunately our analysis suggests that the new Africa Growth and Opportunity Act does not represent a step forward in US-African relations. And many Africans agree.