As a soldier’s child, Aida Musa was the unlikeliest of human rights defenders. But as a girl in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, she was left with very little choice. Like many African societies, the Nuba people of Sudan’s South Kordofan region are a very patriarchal society. In the 1970s when Aida was born, education was a privilege of boys – girls were forcefully married off barely into their teens, and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) holds pride of place. As a girl-dad though, Aida’s father had different ideas for her daughter and helped fuel her human rights consciousness:
“My dad was my human rights teacher. He believed that girls also had an important role to play in society and believed that being conscious of my rights as a girl would protect me against social and institutional abuse against women which was common in Sudan at the time. So once I started learning about my own rights, then I developed motivation to advocate for the rights of others as well,” she says.
Enabled on by her father, Aida would embrace human rights work as her life’s calling. At school, she mobilised the students’ guild to mainstream institutional issues that hold back women access to equal opportunities as their male counterparts, hoping to inspire her colleagues to become change agents back in their communities.
Inspired by Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim – Sudan’s first female member of parliament and one of her country’s foremost advocates for women’s rights, in 2005, Aida ran for political office and won, becoming a member of South Kordofan’s state assembly, one of a handful of women to achieve the distinction. She used her term to denounce the war between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement(SPLM), which had wrought untold suffering to South Kordofan’s people, including rape and sexual violence against the state’s women and girls.
Aida’s and other civil society groups’ continued denunciation of the war helped mobilise international pressure against the fighting between SPLM and the Sudan government, resulting in the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ushered in temporary peace in South Kordofan and much of South Sudan post 2005. The peace was short lived however and following the breakaway and independence of South Sudan in 2011, violence returned to South Kordofan. By then, Aida was a marked person for her unrelenting activism for women rights and opposition to war, and it was no longer safe for her to stay safe in Sudan.
Exile begins and DefendDefenders comes to the rescue.
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.
“DefendDefenders facilitated our first workshops with both space – they allowed us to use their premises for the workshop and provided basic logistics for it. They also trained us in how to conduct effective advocacy around the issues that concerned us back home in Sudan, and supported us to acquire our first office furniture,” says Aida.
Although she had gradually began to settle down in Kampala, Aida still had a language barrier problem – she could neither speak English nor any of Uganda’s local languages. So DefendDefenders connected her to the Refugee Law Project which at the time was offering a short course in English Language proficiency. She enrolled and used the remainder of her subsistence grant to pay for the course.
Overtime, Aida connected with other members of the Sudanese community in Kampala, which was growing as more people escaped the conflict back home that showed no signs of relenting. In 2014, these came together to found Sudanese Women for Peace and Development, a solidarity and social support association for particularly Sudan women refugees here in Kampala. Aida was elected its founding Chairperson, and she immediately set out to look for partners to support its growth. Like before, she turned to DefendDefenders, and again, the organisation answered her call:
“DefendDefenders facilitated our first workshops with both space – they allowed us to use their premises for the workshop and provided basic logistics for it. They also trained us in how to conduct effective advocacy around the issues that concerned us back home in Sudan, and supported us to acquire our first office furniture,” says Aida.
Most importantly, Aida says it was the networks that DefendDefenders exposed her and her colleagues from Sudan that were consequential and transformative in their efforts to adjust to life in exile. “DefendDefenders introduced us to networks of fellow refugees and exiled human rights defenders from other countries. These colleagues have become a major source of solidarity – we realized that our plight is shared. These networks have since become a great source of inspiration, and for all of us, DefendDefenders was the big safe space at which we met.”