Recently, I watched a video message by Namibian First Lady Monica Geingos on the theme of the 2021 International Women’s Day: #ChoosetoChallenge. In her message, she spoke of the misogyny and online abuse faced by her simply because she is a powerful woman living and speaking her truth. She also spoke of her decision to push back against her abusers because, “Your silence won’t protect you”.

International Women’s Day has come and gone but Monica's message has left a lasting impression on me. It reminded me of all the little ways that women shrink and are silenced by society. I remember watching Hillary Clinton face former US President Donald Trump in a 2016 presidential debate.

Wakanda is a fictional East African paradise made famous by the 2018 blockbuster film ‘Black Panther’. It is a well-developed, high-tech, highly functional country inhabited by warriors who possess mystical powers through a special substance only found in Wakanda called vibranium. Wakanda is a powerful and well-governed country. It is a proud nation which has its own official African language. As a result, it has garnered the respect of countries far outside of its borders.

Back on the real African continent, one struggles to find a country that matches the description of Wakanda in all respects. If anything, there is a growing instability around the continent that is unsettling.

I recently came across the story of a young African-American man, Charles Johnson IV, who is fighting for legislation to increase the quality of health care to reduce maternal mortality among African-American women. His own wife died after delivering a healthy baby via caesarean section. She bled to death because doctors at a very prestigious hospital in the U.S. ignored her haemorrhaging for several hours. Her name was Kira Dixon Johnson. She was very well educated and reasonably well-off and yet she became another statistic. In America, African-American women are 243% more likely to die to child-birth than their white American colleagues. Even wealthy, educated African-American women are still more likely to die in child-birth than white women.

There is always an outcry when a child gets raped, except of course in Zambia we do not call it rape. We euphemistically call it “defilement” because an innocent child’s virtue has seemingly been destroyed. No one can fathom that a child would ever want to be raped, and when it happens, no one blames them for it.

But when it comes to women, it is a different story. It becomes about sex. In normal circumstances, sex between adults is consensual or something that women submit to.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is #PressforProgress. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, it will take the world two hundred years to reach gender parity. We are being urged not to sit back. I am the first female leader of the Bar Association in Zambia pre- and post- Zambia’s independence in 1964. At the last count, I was one of only two female leaders of a national Bar Association in Africa. This is a very sad state of affairs.

When puberty hit, so did acne. I had really bad skin and it made me feel ugly. As I grew older, I learnt to cover it up with makeup. I did not go anywhere without make up on. I still have bad skin, but at least now I am prepared to go to the gym without any makeup on, a small victory.

Being a leader and having influence often involves taking face-saving measures, in order to give the appearance of strength.

As an ardent student of history, the subject of leadership has fascinated me for years. In particular, I look for insights into what makes great leaders so great - Mandela, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. to name but a few.

For me, more than anything the pattern that emerges amongst all exceptional leaders is the ability to have the courage of their convictions.

I was recently asked to give remarks at a Media Institute of Southern Africa event on the need to protect the social media space from political interference. I began to think about why the media, particularly social media, is so important and what its impact has been on the world. The media is called the Fourth Estate because it provides checks and balances on government. Traditionally those checks and balances are provided through spoken or written word. It was the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton who coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” or, as Mark Twain put it, “never fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”.

The modern-day advent of the internet and the smart phone has made social media a phenomenon. We only have to think of how social media initiated the Arab Spring, mainstreamed the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or even much closer to home, ended #Lintonlies to see just how powerful it can be.

With a woman’s ambition to lead comes the risk of being undermined, maligned, side-lined or even physically attacked, simply because women are still viewed as the weaker sex. This year, I was elected as the first female President of the Law Association of Zambia in the 53-year history of the organisation and its predecessor the Law Society of Zambia. Having been in office since May this year, I now concur with the late, great “philosopher” David Bowie who jokingly said, “Don’t be the first, be the second”. On a serious note, being a relatively young female leader in a patriarchal society is fraught with challenges; the first of which is actually getting into office.  

Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde has written a follow-up article on governance in Africa. Previously, she examined the institutions that enable a country to function effectively for all its people - or not, as is the case in so many African countries.  In this article, which was published in the Lusaka Times, Kasonde looks at how important an independent judiciary can be in reining in the excesses of a corrupt leadership and holding even heads of state accountable.

Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde shared an article with AFLI that has been posted to the online magazine, The Alchemist. The article is on page 19 of the publication, along with a number of other articles of interest, but if you don't want to click through, the full text follows below.

The following essay, titled "Just another African country: the challenge of leadership in Zambia and the poverty of ambition", was written by Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde.  It examines African leadership and more specifically, leadership in Zambia, as the country recently celebrated its 50th independence anniversary.