For years now, women’s groups in Southern Africa have campaigned tirelessly to ensure that the Southern African Development Community adopt the Protocol on Gender and Development. Yesterday, the SADC finally took that historic step. Member states will be obliged to amend their laws to ensure equal rights for women across a wide range of issues, from provisions that require member states to enshrine equality in their constitutions, to firm commitments to reduce maternal mortality by 75 per cent. But while that’s a cause for celebration, the Protocol still does not refer explicitly to domestic violence, and it still doesn’t oblige states to introduce legal provisions that criminalise marital rape.
A diamond may be forever, but perhaps the diamond trade is not. The industry has been embarrassed by revelations about how some brutal rebel forces in Africa use gems to sustain their fighting. The United Nations has slapped diamond embargoes on rebel-held areas of Angola and Sierra Leone in the hopes of taming those civil wars.
