Global Information Society Watch 2011

Say this like a prayer

  the same waters that part us

  fill us with floodlight

  and the womb-flow ages in the eddies

  and the contentious headlines bleed

  fetid rains of sectarian violence

  wrapped around soiled diapers

  and other articles of the seeming non-dead

  We live and breathe as one

  and because of our Blackness

  our sex

  we are hated

  I once stood on a city roof watching birds and children

  above and below take the day with their lightness

  thinking myself to be one less hatred away from human than you

  even as the ugly-eyed clawed the tedium of my undernourished bones

  I was a lover of men

  While you batik touched, plum crushed

  were stripped naked and paraded through public streets

  corpsed in the defecation of rapists and torturers/

  Transatlantic traffickers forging war’s endless obscenities –

  a long neck gourd breaks

  and scarred centuries roll out in shrieks

  the usual stars become jagged and dim

  as they push your voice into underground crotches

  and my own songs darken an omen of moons

  Illegal for a woman to love a woman in your land

  Criminal for a woman to be poor and unloved in mine

  We will no longer field the night resembling shadowed death

  Fear embattles, engages arms

  Veils are blown apart by strong winds of our own making

  We fall and stand together against their noise

  * Kamaria Muntu is a poet, writer and activist currently living in London.

  ** Prossy Kakooza fled her homeland upon threat of death after being found in bed with her same.sex lover, which is illegal in Uganda. The 26-year-old woman and her partner were taken naked to the police station where Prossy was raped and tortured.

  KENYA

  Perceptions and misconceptions: The role of new and traditional media in Kenya’s post-election violence (2007)

  Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet)

  Alice Munyua