Africa Media Watch

South African President Thabo Mbeki has urged his people to help stamp out prejudice against women in a speech to mark national Women's Day. This week's Africa Media Watch looks at how society treats women around the continent.

In his speech in Cape Town on Thursday, Mbeki stressed that all South Africans should continue the battle against prejudice.

"It is incumbent upon each and every one of us to be agents of change, to win the battle against sexism and racism and to shape the new nation," he declared.

Women are still the main victims of all the ills that plague our society

The Star

The president said his government had built houses, provided clean water and telephones and increased access to healthcare facilities, all of which benefit women, but admitted that there was still more work to be done to overcome poverty.

"In our daily work, we have to ensure that the agenda for gender equality is given the necessary attention and prominence it deserves so that we move with due speed towards a non-sexist society," he said.

Gender equality

There were celebrations across South Africa to mark Women's Day on 9 August, which was the 45th anniversary of the day when some 20,000 women marched to government offices in Pretoria to demand an end to an apartheid-era law.

We have cornered the market on policy-making but when it comes to implementation, we have proved to be dismal failures

The Star

The law at that time obliged black people to carry passes in much of the country while those without passes were banished to remote, impoverished tribal "homelands".

However, The Star said that since then, South Africa had proved to be a "dismal failure" in implementing its policies for women.

"We have cornered the market on policy-making but when it comes to implementation, we have proved to be dismal failures," it said.

"The laws are in place, but we have not been able to translate this to change the lives of the great majority of women. They are still the main victims of all the ills that plague our society."

For its part, the Mail and Guardian said it was the government itself which was failing to address the issue of gender equality.

Some girls avoid going to school because they're scared they'll be sexually attacked by boys or even teachers

Mail and Guardian

"The Department of Education has massive structures and large budgets for curriculum development... You'll find very few people, and they're usually junior, handling gender."

At ground level, research carried out in 1998 showed that some 75 per cent of schools expelled girls who fell pregnant but only 25 per cent expelled the father of the child, the paper noted.

"Some girls avoid going to school because they're scared they'll be sexually attacked by boys or even teachers... and academic gender prejudice still steers girls away from subjects such as maths, science and technology - conventionally stereotyped as masculine pursuits."

Social outcasts

Elsewhere, the East African Standard reported that women in Kenya were afraid of reporting assault by their husbands for fear of being shunned by society.

Research by the Federation of Kenya Women Lawyers (Fida) showed that only three per cent of women reported the abuse to the police and only one per cent to their doctor.

A sample of 1,067 women showed that 65 per cent of the perpetrators of domestic violence were husbands, 16 per cent were relatives and 11 per cent were boyfriends, the paper said, adding that Fida was taking a multimedia approach to the problem by making a video on spreading awareness of ways of fighting domestic violence.

A similar reluctance by women to report the issue exists in refugee camps in western Tanzania, the UN Integrated Regional Information Network reported.

It said rape, domestic violence and sexual harrassment were "commonplace" among Congolese refugees, which it said was due to their inability to return home because of the war and the strain of hand-to-mouth survival in the camps.

Taking action

In Namibia though, the government has followed the lead of traditional chiefs and the regional authorities by announcing that the police are to receive instructions to apprehend members of the public who evict or use violence against widows.

The occurrences have become too much and we know it is unconstitutional

Government spokeswoman in The Namibian

The ministry of regional and local government and housing said it had been approached by many widows who were threatened by the relatives of their late husbands who wanted to evict them from their homes and fields.

"The occurrences have become too much and we know it is unconstitutional," a spokeswoman told The Namibian.

But in Malawi, some women are not waiting for the authorities to improve their lot but are taking matters into their own hands.

The Chronicle reports that competition is raging between local prostitutes and those from neighbouring Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana who are in Blantyre to ply their trade during the Southern Africa Development Committee (SADC) taking place there.

"Local prostitutes are busy grooming themselves and polishing up their English vocabulary so that they are not out-done by the foreign girls. They know the summit is their best chance to make good money," a Blantyre bartender said, adding that most local prostitutes preferred foreign partners because in most cases they paid twice as much as an indigenous client.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.