Women in Kenya's North Eastern Province (NEP) say they will not be able to play a more active role in politics unless concerted efforts are made to provide basic services in the vast and arid region. "Where is the time for politics if women there have to walk about 100 kilometres, or spend between seven and ten hours each day, to get water?" asked Sophia Abdi Noor, executive director of Womankind Kenya, a development organisation in the NEP. "Unless such basic matters are addressed, we cannot expect much in terms of women here participating in the political arena," she told IPS.

As donors launch record appeals to help feed millions of Kenyans, the country's politicians have provoked outrage by demanding a huge rise in travel expenses. MPs, whose salaries compare favourably with their European counterparts, are trying to force the government to increase their mileage allowance.

An increase in cases of measles has prompted Kenya's health ministry to embark on an emergency vaccination campaign to protect children against the disease, which has claimed the lives of 41 patients around the country over the past six months. About 1,600 cases of the disease have been reported during the same period, according to the director of medical services in the health ministry. The first phase of the vaccination campaign - scheduled to start on Saturday and last until 5 May - will target 560,000 children in 16 high-risk areas, including eight divisions in the capital, Nairobi, where 16 of the deaths have been reported.

More than 60,000 HIV infected people in Kenya have received a major boost after Britain announced it will provide life-prolonging drugs worth millions of shillings. The Sh370 million funding will be used in buying first-line antiretroviral drugs and HIV testing kits, the Department for International Development head in Kenya has announced.

Millions of Kenya's cellular phone users could soon benefit from what would become East Africa's lowest mobile phone call rates, according to a report by Business Week. Information attributed to sources in the Ministry of Information and Communications, indicates that government is in the process of harmonising and drastically lowering cellular phone call rates by nearly 90%.

Internews Network is currently seeking a resident advisor to lead our Local Voices health reporting project in Kenya; Local Voices is designed to support professional television and radio broadcasters in creating high-quality, locally relevant coverage of HIV/AIDS issues for their audiences.

A debate about the extent to which mother tongue schooling improves the quality of education is emerging in Kenya, with certain experts campaigning for children's mother tongue to be used as the language of instruction in schools.

The government of Kenya wants to control the press by imposing restrictions on media ownership. A Cabinet subcommittee charged with the responsibility of sprucing up the government's image is considering proposals for setting a ceiling on the number of shares a person may own in a media house and banning the alternative press publications as some of the strategies for dealing with a hostile press. The report also identifies NGOs as major threats to the Government's image and proposes placing them under tighter supervision, including close surveillance by the security intelligence service.

In the countdown to the World Social Forum due to be held in Nairobi in January 2007, Mouhamadou Tidiane Kasse analyses the trajectory of the social forum movement in Africa and warns that a lot of work remains to be done if the transformative potential of the movement is to be optimised. “By taking the torch from Bamako in January, the Kenyan social movement and the secretariat of the WSF find themselves faced with a lot of work, at the level of the structuring of the social movement in Africa, to raise awareness and popular mobilisation within the country itself, and to consolidate the dynamic of regional solidarity,” he writes.

When Africans first participated in the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, they were only about thirty people, drowned by tens of thousands of others. At the meeting in Mumbai in 2004, their delegation was bigger, but they still comprised no more than 500 people in a sea of anti-globalisation protesters which exceeded 100,000. Their lack of presence was almost laughable.

Africa’s voice was nonetheless heard at the International Council of the WSF, when it was raised to lay claim to the big-tent anti-globalisation event for Africa. Despite the scepticism of some people, even amongst the African delegates themselves, that Africa could welcome such a popular mobilisation on the continent, and could host an event of freedom where so many freedoms are abused, the request was granted. Holding the WSF in Africa will become a reality in 2007, and it will fall on Kenya to host it. But behind the enthusiasm, the challenges facing the Africans are numerous.

When the Indian Social Forum took place in Mumbai, the aim was to de-localise an event associated with Porto Alegre, and to enhance its popular dimensions, thematic richness and excellent organisation. Moreover, on the Asian continent, there were particular concerns at stake within the framework of structural global inequalities. In Asia, the imbalances are not only vertical between the South and North. They are also horizontal and endogenous, and cut across the societies of the Southern countries: the issue of the Indian caste system characterised the Mumbai forum.

The successes of India strengthened Africa’s wish to host the big anti-globalisation event. This was despite some doubts about the suitability of its political environment to host the iconoclastic and critical debates, about the continent’s capacity to host and organise an event for tens of thousands of people, and to ensure real, mass mobilisation.

Until the polycentric World Social Forum in Bamako in January 2006, meetings of African social movements had never been anything but quasi-confidential conclaves. The African Social Forum in Lusaka in December 2004 failed to attract more than 1000 people to the Mulungushi International Conference Center, which resounded with a despairing emptiness. Barely 50 people participated in the march on the streets of Lusaka, and in any case, a ban on demonstrations would have aborted the skeleton procession, which only made it as far as 500 metres from conference centre.

The first west-African social forum in Conakry in November 2004, which attracted about 2000 people, gave a glimpse of the kind of local mobilisation that is possible. But the ensuing events have not exceeded this level of participation, and the popular voice remains restrained. That the events have no roots in the majority populations is evident. Nowhere, with the exception of the last WSF in Bamako, which claimed some 30,000 participants, has the event been strongly linked to the local agenda. It is as if there is a disjuncture between the ferment of opposition and the daily lives of ordinary people.

The African social movements still lack visibility even though the pertinence of the ideas and causes they embrace are in keeping with the urgent matters confronting Africa in the construction of a better world. There have been delays in implementing mechanisms which would allow this dynamic to reach through to the roots of society, and create a genuinely popular movement. From one meeting to another, the debates struggle to escape from the circles of those in the know. Panel discussions are essentially bringing together the same people, going over the same old ideas, and struggling to find an anchorage in people’s realities. The structure of the organisation probably also needs to be challenged, and their chief instigators could do with being reconsidered.

Getting it off the ground

Said Saadi, a member of the Moroccan social forum, stated at the African social forum in Lusaka: “After three meetings, we are at a turning point. The forum must be strengthened by opening it up to all the other groups, which are fighting on the ground. What about the trade unions for example?...We must avoid looking like a group of NGOs, which are keen on travelling but do little real work at grassroots level. The forum must position itself to redress the balance, and outline an opposition agenda with a precise timeframe.” In the same tempo, Abdourame Ousmane from Niger remarked: “It is time to develop alternatives that take account of the aspirations of the populations at the bottom of society, that will be legitimised by nature of their democratic anchorage.”

The social forum evidently remains a space where participation is not predetermined. It is not about groupings that anyone is looking to engineer, rather is organised in such a way that ideas ferment reciprocally and experiences inspire change elsewhere. But certain tendencies are favoured. There will not be real change unless there are veritable actors at the centre of the processes. Whatever the merits of the unions and the rural movements, there is a virtual absence of organised social movements in Africa at present. The themes discussed in the panels and workshops are omnipresent, discussions about the future – ‘a different world is possible’ ¬– are shaped from the perspectives of ordinary people, and yet their own dynamic does not let itself be felt.

The question of the unions in Africa in relation to globalisation was usefully analysed at the Conakry meeting in 2004 in terms of the necessity for their re-orientation. First of all, solidarity is an imperative. When the multinationals set out to blackmail the workers, there is no better defence than union solidarity. How can this be achieved? There must be a fusion of the groups of affiliated unions at both national and global levels. In this respect, the Anglophone countries are further on. COSATU in South Africa is a good example. The second stage involves the promotion of international norms: International agreements, treaties, UN institutions, the World Bank and the IMF must integrate union liberties that symbolise the social dimension of development politics.

The final stage of mobilising the unions in the struggle for ‘another world is possible’ involves the ‘enlargement of the mandate of the union movement’. This change must take effect in several stages. It requires the mobilisation of supporters, sourcing of funding, the democratisation of the union movement, and the construction of partnerships with governments and multinationals. But the union representation in Conakry was not sufficiently consistent to institute a real debate on this ‘road map’.

For the five years that the African social movement has been aligned with the anti-globalisation movement, it has still not identified the motor to get itself off the ground. The key actors for change and the path of ‘liberation’ has been identified, but the forces yet to be unleashed remain marginal to the event.

Can the ‘Women’s Court’ for example, launched in Lusaka in 2004, and again in Bamako in 2006, push for the mobilisation to change the situation of women, moving beyond the mere habitual condemnations of violence and the denial of all sorts of rights, which through being churned out again and again, risk becoming clichés? Will the ‘youth forum’ be a space for the raising of awareness where the identity of the future can be constructed around values which break with the discredited politics of the day? The discourse often betrays a willingness, but the means of bringing about change are neither clearly identified nor widely-embraced.

Paving the way for the younger generation

At the centre of the youth element of the African Social Forum in Conakry, the Ivorian Ouattara Diakala expressed the problem thus: “Young people are out of touch…with the objectives of the WSF. The struggle against neo-liberalism for example - what does that mean to them? What are the ins and outs of it? When someone does not understand a given situation, it is difficult for them to engage. We are going to have a find mechanisms for supporting mass youth participation in these discussions, to generate more activities in which young people can get involved locally.”

At the 2006 forum in Bamako, the rallying cry to pave the way for the young people was around Thomas Sankara, a symbol of protest, defined as an anti-globalisation pacesetter – in word and in deed – ahead of his time. But a representative from an NGO in Burkina Faso remained unconvinced about the impact of this strategy: “Sankara lived what he lived, but the important thing is what he did. He had a strong instinct of what had to be done, and this is what young people today must imitate. Today’s youth strikes me as being more ideological than pragmatic. They need to flesh out their talk with work.”

The secretariat of the WSF is conscious of the importance of the Nairobi forum for the structuring of the movement in Africa. The choice of Kenya from amongst several other candidatures, more-or-less the officially advanced countries such as Morocco, was decided on the basis of criteria drawn up and approved at the World Social Forum held in March 2005. These imply, that at the level of the host country, there is the opportunity for the freedom of expression of opinions, including through public marches and demonstrations, publications, radio and TV broadcasts, and contact between the local populations and the organisers from abroad; and for the possibility of ‘mass social mobilisation’. To ensure the forum achieves an impact, the application must issue from the mainstream social movements of the candidate country, and the sub-region. At the same time, the social movement of the candidate country must prove a certain level of organisation and dynamism, as well as the capacity to mobilise the population around national, continental and international issues.

By taking the torch from Bamako in January, the Kenyan social movement and the secretariat of the WSF find themselves faced with a lot of work, at the level of the structuring of the social movement in Africa, to raise awareness and popular mobilisation within the country itself, and to consolidate the dynamic of regional solidarity.

From Bamako to Nairobi, one trend is to favour ‘linkages’, to give a reality, indeed an identity, to the African social movement. The aim is to construct a continental solidarity which goes beyond the linguistic divisions and sub-regional groupings which have thus far marked the evolution of the WSF through its polemics and internal conflicts.

Bamako also identified a trajectory: “Beyond all political, cultural, economic, and social resistance at the basis of anti-globalisation, one of the challenges in Nairobi will be to resume the process of establishing a Charter of unity, for the people and future of Africa, the foundations of which were laid sixteen years ago in Arusha. Between now and then, there must be a process of consultation throughout society and within social movements, so as to achieve a meeting of ideas, consensus, and an affirmative assembly in Nairobi in 2007.”

* Mouhamadou Tidiane Kasse is Coordinator of Flamme d’Afrique, a daily newspaper published by IPAO and ENDA on occasions of meetings of social movements.

* This article was translated from French by Stephanie Kitchen. It was originally published in the French version of Pambazuka News, Please send comments to [email protected]

A book about alleged British atrocities against Kenyan Mau Mau independence fighters has won this year's US Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Caroline Elkins wins $10,000 for her book "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya". She says that many thousands of Kenyans died in British detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Her research also suggests British colonial officials exaggerated the number of people killed by the rebels.

More than 10,000 people have fled their villages in two districts in northern Kenya following a spate of violent raids by cattle rustlers in which several people were killed and thousands of livestock stolen, according to the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) and the police. Police said seven people were killed by the armed assailants. Herder communities in northern and northeastern Kenya have a tradition of attacking each other's villages to steal livestock, but the raids have become increasingly violent as herdsmen illegally acquire firearms, which are readily available in the area.

The March attacks on The Standard and the Kenya Television Network (KTN) by the Kenya police represented a deteriorating relationship between the media and the government, according to the former permanent secretary, John Githongo. Talking to the American Press on a recent visit to the US, he said that the Kenyan media was the primary tool that mobilised and rallied public opinion against corruption in Kenya, putting the media on a collision course with the government. Asked whether he believed the President was behind the attacks, he said, "Given that the President has made no apology for these attacks, one presumes that these attacks happened very much with his acceptance and acknowledgement that it was the right thing to do, which is very unfortunate.”

In the museum map for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wangechi Mutu's work is listed as: "Site-specific gallery installation by up-and-coming artist. Visitors may find certain works in this exhibition challenging. Parents/guardians are advised to preview the exhibition before sharing it with children."

One might be forgiven for thinking that Mutu, born and raised in Kenya, now based in New York, has already "up and come". Her work resides in museums of modern and contemporary art in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. It has been exhibited at prestigious art museums and galleries in London, Paris and Tokyo. It has received critical attention in numerous glossy journals and publications.

"Beauty" and "horror" are the two words most frequently used about the Mutu opus. She creates collaged images of women, using clippings from fashion magazines, news magazines, and porn magazines (which feature, she's asserted, the most realistic brown skin). Smooth shiny arms that end in manicured talons, sexy stiletto-shod legs, emerge from bodies which are continents of mineral, wood, plant, forest, flesh, rock, jewel, feather. Close up, we see that each of these bodies is mutilated in some way – amputated, pierced, shattered, bleeding.

"There are elements and references to violence, but my work is not about violence," says Mutu. "It concerns what brings about violence, and ideas of power – female power, how history is proscribed or worked out on the bodies of women."

The installation I viewed in San Francisco is entitled "The Chief's Lair is a Bloody Mess". One wall of the white box gallery space has been gouged with dozens of small holes, like gunshot wounds, tinged with red pigment. Three chairs dominate the center of the room, poised on extended spindly stilt legs. A bottle of wine hangs over each one, drips on the chair and spills on the floor, drying to sticky odorous bloodstains. These "thrones" are a satire on Western global hegemony: "A leader can sit on his seat and tell people to go out and fight the wars he has created." Yet the ease with which the same seats could be toppled, as they wobble on their perches, suggests the precarious base of military dominance.

In the collage "Bloody Old Head Games", a tiny figure, half-female, half-bird, perches on the elbow of a gigantic standing woman with scars and dark patches where we would expect to see breasts. A pistol in the hand of the avian woman points directly into the skull of the main figure, spews an explosion of red and brown particles. The eye moves down the picture to a girdle of pubic hair that morphs into long dangling strands of a grass skirt, over a leg raised as if to dance. Mutu plays a head game with the viewer, challenges our preconceptions, seduces and frightens, lures and repels.

The work of an African artist exhibited in the Western world is never free of imposed expectations of "authenticity". San Francisco museum curator, Tara McDowell, says of Mutu's work: "Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, she creates work that reflects her African identity and heritage as well as a politics of place with which she is deeply familiar, having spent years exposed to the mutilations that are common in parts of Africa debilitated by civil strife and the diamond trade."

Wangechi Mutu was a schoolmate of mine at Loreto Convent, a private Catholic girls' school in Nairobi. The mutilations referred to may be common in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo – they did not figure in the experience of upper middle-class Nairobi schoolgirls in the 1980s. While Mutu admits to a "Catholic-obsessed mind", and clearly draws on the iconography of the ritualized sacrificial body, we see at work in McDowell's comments the unexamined racism of "collective representation". Anyone hailing from the African continent is assumed to have first-hand experience of every aspect of the social, political and economic history of every region of the continent. This is the only way their art can be legitimate. Unlike Western artists, Africans may not address a subject simply because it engages them – it must reflect some aspect of their own heritage.

If Mutu's work does indeed reflect a politics of place, it is a universal place she explicates herself: "I position myself as a violator, a person who destroys. There's something horribly satisfying about it. People have to clean up after you. Someone has to come around to heal the wall. And it takes a lot to repair. It's also about creating that cycle of responsibility that's part of the performance of this piece. Women's bodies […] are like sensitive charts - they indicate how a society feels about itself."

It takes creative courage to gouge out a white gallery wall. It takes intellectual and artistic courage to recontextualize mass-produced images of the female body in ways that may still be misinterpreted. Mutu's work has been reproduced on magazine covers with captions such as "Fashion and Art", or worse, "Sex Sells". But there is a deeply satisfying aesthetic fused with a radical politics here. A holy mess that draws us into the best kind of head game - one that forces us to re-examine our conditioned responses to the imagery that surrounds us.

* Visit for more information. Shailja Patel is a Kenyan Indian poet and spoken word artist. Visit www.shailja.com

* Send comments to [email protected]

Thanks to Kenya’s free primary education initiative, many children who had dropped out of school are back in class. "I would still be at home, because my aunt who took me in after my parents died could no longer afford to pay for my fees," said Akinyi, a class-seven pupil at Ayany Primary School in Kibera, a sprawling shantytown in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Kibera is said to be one of the largest slums in Africa, with hundreds of thousands of residents.

The onset of rains, especially after a prolonged drought, is not always a blessing in Kenya's semi-arid north. Here, the rains come with increased incidents of cattle rustling as many communities seek to restock after losing animals to drought. Cattle rustling creates tensions amongst these pastoralist communities. In neighbouring Samburu, pastoralists say once the grass starts sprouting and the land becomes green once again, they are likely to witness increased and sustained raids by neighbouring communities who want to restock thousands of livestock they lost during drought.

A row has broken out between parallel importers of medicines and local pharmaceutical companies over the planned introduction of a law barring importation. Those who trade in parallel imported medical products claim they are being harassed by Pharmacy and Poisons Board officials and the Police. Parallel importation means that a country can source for patented products from countries where they are cheaper rather than buy locally from manufacturers who are mostly multinationals. It is a key provision in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) agreement.

The government of Kenya plans to trim its fiscal deficit to 2.5 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the 2008/09 financial year, a senior finance ministry official has said. According to the country's finance minister, taxpayers contributed 96 per cent of the money that went to the budget in the current financial year. He revealed that the Government had broken the dependence on donors as only four per cent of the total budget was funded using donor funds.

In Kenya calls to a competing network are so expensive that most people simply do not call across mobile phone networks. A chief executive of one of the mobile phone companies candidly admits that the high tariffs are a marketing strategy to keep subscribers. "It's a marketing decision. We want more people on our network. It started out as a cost issue but this is no longer the case." His counterpart at a competing network is even more blunt. "It's a tool to trap the customer inside the network, this is the rationale behind it."

As the international community commemorated this year’s World Health Day on April 7th, the issue of poor remuneration for health workers in Kenya was debated. "The pay for doctors and other health care givers in the public service is so low that many of these people could not devote their full time to public service – like I have had to engage in private practice because the money I get from the university is not enough to feed me," said the chairman of the Kenya Medical Association (KMA).

Misoprostol is not exactly a household name as far as drugs are concerned; however, it has the potential to improve and even save thousands of women's lives in Kenya. This medication is one of a number of drugs that can be used to induce abortion, in a procedure that has come to be known as "medical abortion", or "abortion by pill". It provides a cheaper alternative to surgical termination of pregnancy, results in fewer complications if administered correctly and can also be used to stop haemorrhaging after delivery.