Human Rights Defender of the month: Issah Musundi

At first encounter, Issah Musundi is a coy, if not shy, mostly reserved lad. But behind that quiet disposition is a steely character and an enforced existence.

Born 27 years ago in Kenya’s border district of Busia, Issah belongs to Kenya’s sexual minorities community, who have had to win majority rights that other Kenyans take for granted.

Born into a humble family and raised by a single mother – he lost his father when in Primary Seven, Issah struggled to raise school fees, which made him vulnerably dependent on his benefactors. So, when in his form three, he told his mother who had been pestering him for a girlfriend, that he was gay, he knew he had crossed a line that would provoke the ire of his religiously conservative guardians.

“My mum immediately told my uncle. Being a devout Muslim sheikh, it was like a scandal for him. He threatened to withdraw the partial scholarship he had helped secure for me to help afford high school, if I continued with my “satanic ways.”

Issah Musundi Tweet

Days later, when Issah’s cousin also came out as gay, Issah was accused of “recruiting him,” and a mini-religious ritual was organised to “exorcise the ghost of gayism,” from him. Scared, isolated and vulnerable, Issah submitted to the ritual reluctantly, because it was the only way he would retain his uncle’s support to return to school.

Expelled from school because of his orientation and estranged from his own family, the first months of 2012 were difficult for Issah as he contemplated a bleak future for himself. Then, as luck would have it, that July, an aunt from the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa visited. She was more liberal minded towards gender and sexual minority rights, and she immediately offered to return to Mombasa with Issah to afford him an opportunity for a fresh start.

Issa immediately jumped at the opportunity. In 2013, he resumed school and enrolled for a Bachelor’s in Information Technology Management at the Technical University of Mombasa, thanks to the generosity of his aunt and her husband who offered to pay his tuition.

At University, Issah found that the environment was more accommodative of sexual diversity, and he immediately joined the sexual minorities community. But he was soon disappointed and would soon be on a collision course with the community’s leadership.

“The leadership was not interested in truly empowering and advocating for the rights of the less prominent members, who were still being harassed and denied access to basic health care and justice. They were more interested in the privileges and access their positions were giving them, yet elsewhere, our colleagues were suffering. I couldn’t take it,” he says.

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Resolved, Issah decided to start a counter movement to represent the neglected members of the community. But the resultant contest for supremacy between his and the older movement drew disproportionate attention to the community, provoking university intervention. Issah’s aunt was summoned and appraised of the nephew’s activism. In response, she admonished Issah, arguing that while she was okay with his sexual identity, she was not comfortable with the accompanying activism and warned him to desist from it or she would throw him out of her home. But for Issah, that was a difficult choice:

“I had just found my voice and purpose – to speak up for others who like me had for long been oppressed and suffering injustice, and yet I was being asked to give all that up. No matter how much I loved my aunt, I couldn’t just give up all that,” Issah says.

Issah Musundi Tweet

Unwilling to withdraw from his newfound vocation to which he was passionately devoted, Issah was eventually thrown out of his guardians’ house, and denied tuition, and for a second time in five years, he found that he had to drop out of school. Not sure how to start all over again, Issah tried out some menial jobs to survive, and eventually ventured into sex work.

In 2018, Issah came across an organisation called Pema Kenya, which was devoted to advocating for the rights of sexual minorities. Persuaded by his advocacy skills, they took him on as a peer educator, and mandated him to return to the same streets on which he was struggling to survive days back, this time to restore hope to other ostracized members, and to sensitize sex workers and help them access health services to enable them do their work safely. Soon, Issah was an outreach worker, which meant that he could now afford to rent a house of his own.

In 2019, he was sent in Kisumu to attend a month-long Paralegals’ training, after which he was appointed Pema Kenya’s Paralegal. Now rejuvenated, Issah decided to start an initiative of his own, which he named – #KnowYourRights. Via this initiative, he set out to sensitize and empower other members of the community encountering challenges like the ones he had just survived. Whenever he had free time, he would walk to their hideouts and hold small barazas with them, listening to their challenges, helping where possible, but most importantly, encouraging them not to despair.

“Eventually, some of these people started joining the crusade. We would agree on which communities to visit, when, and then proceed there as a team. This would energize the community we have visited and challenge them to look out for others too,” he says.

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Issah’s efforts were creating a ripple effect in communities, and he started getting invited to radio programs to speak. Although these (programs) would enlist a lot of backlash, Issah was unfazed. That was until his relatives and neighbors back in Busia recognized him and started stigmatizing his mother. Suddenly, his mother, to whom he was by now sending a monthly stipend, decided she would no longer take his “satanic” money.

Issah decided to recommend her for P-Flag, a PEMA Kenya program that sensitizes on sexuality and sexual orientation, with a view of facilitating understanding and acceptance between sexual minorities and their parents. After Issah’s mother attended for seven days, she embraced her son and apologized for all the mean comments she had said to him and went a step further to become an ally of the movement.

Issah is now a legal officer with PEMA Kenya. With a bit more financial freedom, he, returned to university, and hopes to graduate in August 2023. He still hosts the #KnowYourRights campaign virtually – on social media, and once on zoom every month.

Last year, he also started a campaign to identify young members of the community, many of them ostracized by their families and living on the street, who he offers shelter at his former house that he vacated. Here, he and his fairly better-to-do #KnowYourRights campaign members look after them, try to talk to their families where possible, and set out to find them an economic opportunity to earn an income.

He acknowledges he and his colleagues have made significant gains but argues there’s still a long way to go:

“Kenya’s Penal code still criminalizes what they call “unnatural sexual acts,” under which they target and harass all other sexual identities other than heterosexuals. I would like and hope that one day, we can have such an archaic law repealed.

See more HRDs of the Month

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Human Rights Defender of the month: Aida Musa

In August 2011, Aida crossed into Uganda, pregnant, and barely able to communicate in another language other than Arabic. The transition was a difficult one, she says: “It was my first-time outside Sudan, and yet I did not know any other language. The first months were very difficult.”
In 2012, still struggling to find her footing in Kampala, Aida was introduced to DefendDefenders, where she was introduced to the organisation’s resource center, and assured, it (the center) would be at her disposal whenever she needed to use it.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Pamela Angwench Judith

For most of her life, Pamela Angwech’s existence has always been a defiant and simultaneous act of survival and resistance. In 1976 when she was born, the anti-Amin movement was gathering pace, and her family was one of the earliest victims of the then dictatorship’s reprisals in Northern Uganda. Her father, a passionate educationist in Kitgum district was one of the most vocal critics of the dictatorship’s human rights excesses, which made him an obvious target of the state’s marauding vigilantes.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Joseph Oleshangay

As a human rights lawyer and advocate with the High Court of the United Republic of Tanzania, Joseph Moses Oleshangay spends most of his time crossing from one court to another, litigating human rights cases, some with life-altering implications for ordinary people. It is a monumental responsibility, one he never envisaged growing up.

As a young boy born into a Maasai household in northern Tanzania, his entire childhood revolved around cattle: “Our entire livelihood revolved around cattle. As a child, the main preoccupation was to tend to cows, and my formative years were spent grazing cattle around Endulen. It a simple lifestyle,” he says.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Julia Onyoti

The situation of South Sudan’s women and girls remains one of those enduring blights on the country’s conscience. The country retains the unenviable reputation of having the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, and at 51.5%, one of the highest cases of child marriages. It is even worse with gender-based violence(GBV): A 2019 study by UNICEF found that one in every two South Sudan women have experienced intimate partner violence, while a recent UN study, alarmed at the widespread nature of conflict-related sexual violence in the country, in which women are tread as “spoils of war” described it as “a hellish existence for women and girls.

Human Rights Defender of the month:SHIMA BHARE

Shima Bhare Abdalla has never known the luxury and comfort of a stable and safe existence inside her country’s borders. When she was 11, her village was attacked and razed to the ground, sending her family and entire neighborhood scattering into an internally displaced People’s Camp, at the start of the Darfur civil war.

That was in 2002. Shima and her family relocated into Kalma refugee camp in Southern Darfur, where, alongside over 100,000 other displaced persons, they had to forge out a living, under the watch and benevolence of the United Nations – African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur, known as UNAMID. It is here that Shima’s human rights consciousness came to life. She enthusiastically embraced whatever little education she could access under the auspices of the humanitarian agencies operating in the camp, to be able to tell the story of her people’s plight.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Martial Pa’nucci

Martial Pa’nucci is a child of what is fondly known as Africa’s second liberation. In 1990 when he was born, the Republic of Congo, like many other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, was undergoing a transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet developments in ordinary people’s lives were not as optimistic. Pa’nucci was born in one of Brazzaville’s ghettos to a polygamous family of two mothers and 19 siblings, where survival was a daily exercise in courage. When he was two, his father died, followed in quick succession by many of his siblings. Pa’nucci did not start school until he was nine, and he had to do odd jobs – from barbering to plumbing to earn his stay there, lest he dropped out like many of his peers.

Human Rights Defender of the month: Veronica Almedom

Veronica Almedom is a poster child of successful immigration. A duo Eritrean and Swiss citizen, she was born in Italy, and grew up in Switzerland where she permanently resides. Her parents are some of the earliest victims of Eritrea’s cycles of violence. When Eritrea’s war of independence peaked in the early 1980s, they escaped the country as unaccompanied minors, wandering through Sudan, Saudi Arabia, before making the hazard journey across the Mediterranean into Europe. There, they crossed first to Italy, and finally, to Switzerland, where they settled first as refugees, and later, as permanent residents.

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