Umoja (Frauendorf)
Umoja ( Swahili : unit ) is a village near the town of Archers Post where the foothills of the Mount Kenya massif extend into the desert in Samburu County in Kenya . In the 1990s, Rebecca Lolosoli, a Samburu woman , founded the village to provide women with a safe haven from the violent patriarchy - a place without genital mutilation and forced marriage. The women and their children live together and work to end the tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM).
The women work the fields and make glass bead jewelry that they sell to tourists. The women work with the women's rights organization MADRE . They claim their right to a life without violence and develop new models to promote the health and economic power of women. Her political activities also include the lawsuit against the British soldiers who, according to Lolosoli's testimony, raped over 1,000 Samburu women in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lolosoli has received many international awards and many invitations from all over the world, where she is valued as a speaker. Over the years her radical approach also inspired other women in the surrounding districts to found their own women's villages, in which only women and children live or at least in matriarchal structures.
Movies
- 360 ° - Geo-Reportage: Kenya - The Village of Women (2006)
- The Land of No Men: Inside Kenya's Women-Only Village , Broadly VICE (2015)
Web links
- The Washington Post - A Place Where Women Rule July 9, 2005
- ARD-Weltspiegel (tagesschau.de archive)
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/04/where-men-now-fear-to-tread Hannah Rubenstein: Where Men Now Fear to Tread, April 4, 2012
Coordinates: 0 ° 38 ' N , 37 ° 38' E