Hey, this is Sham, your very own news curator. The people have spoken: Most of you love it when I go deeper into fewer topics. Thanks for participating in the survey. Because this is a one-woman show, I sometimes get too caught up in my own thoughts, and you helped me make a decision faster.
I've got a special this week: I want to highlight more activism in this newsletter. So, on Patreon, I'm talking to Kurdish Gen Z and digital creator Adan Anwar from Sweden. He has started a fundraiser campaign for refugee camps and families in poverty in Kurdistan. Listen to this audio interview and get to him, his motivation and where the money (if you should choose to contribute) will go to.
Issue #305 includes environmental heroes from Nigeria, Ecuador and Thailand, Brazil's long and unfinished history of slavery and the first woman from India to win the International Booker Prize; plus: Iraq's sandstorm problem, Spain's dangerous-for-pro-democracy-activists relationship with Algeria, Afghanistan's male journalists, a justice-serving verdict against a rapist in Bosnia, and so much more.
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Brazil is talking about slavery, again
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Everyone in Brazil is talking about an 85-year-old Black woman called Doña Maria (not her real name). On May 13, her life story became public and the Latin American nation found out that she had been working for a privileged white family for 72 years without a salary or vacation time.
Tell me more about Dona Maria
She does not recognize herself as a slave, nor do her ‘employers’ see themselves as enslavers. Both see what happened as a ‘she’s like family’ kind of situation. In reality, of course, Doña Maria was enslaved as a result of a very perverse power relationship. She is currently experiencing separation trauma (meaning, she doesn’t want to leave because she feels like she still has to take care of her ‘employer’) as social workers are helping her leave the exploitative environment she has called ‘home’ for decades. Naiara Galarraga Gortázar for EL PAÍS wrote a long-read about this recent case of labor exploitation.
Are there other Doña Marias?
Unfortunately, yes. Domestic workers are common in privileged, mostly white households in Brazil. They are mostly Black and come from very poor families. Some of these domestic workers (not all) work in such exploitative conditions that experts call them ‘contemporary cases of slavery’. Some dozen such cases are known. It’s very difficult to find them, as the crime takes place in private homes, making it really easy to hide. Thanks to the awareness-raising work of domestic worker unions and anti-racist movements in the country, along with the journalists that break these stories, this is finally being talked about more often.
Why this matters: The case of Doña Maria is the first case of slavery that was discovered recently and that went on for so long in today’s Brazil.
How come this went on for so long?!
Doña Maria’s case was made public on May 13, on the same day as the 134th anniversary of the day slavery was finally ‘officially’ abolished. Black movements call it ‘the day of the unfinished abolition’. As Gortázar writes: “After abolition, Brazil did not offer land, work or education to the freedmen, whose labor was soon taken over by white European immigrants. Totally helpless, many former slaves preferred to return to their masters, begging for shelter and food.” Today, Brazil is still a very unequal country on many levels.
- Btw, ‘abolition was not something that happened simply through the signing of a bill. Sugarcane fields were set on fire, plantation owners were poisoned, etc,’ as Black activist Katiara Oliveira explains in this piece by Juliana Gonçalves for Brasil de Fato.
F*ck. Does the government do anything about it?
Well, the government knows that slavery still exists in today’s Brazil. It has started a program called Integrated Action that focuses on reducing the damage of separation trauma and helping the victims build independent lives. So far, they have treated a dozen women who had been exploited for up to 30, 50 and 70 years. The program includes therapy and activities as simple as going out for ice cream and choosing their own favorite flavor. Employers aka enslavers can be punished up to eight years in prison.
What’s next for Dona Maria?
If Doña Maria still has relatives and they are willing to take her in, she will stay with them. If not, she will live in a home with other elderly people.
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Chima Williams, an activist in Nigeria, and others win the 'Environment Nobel'
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The Goldman Environmental Prize was announced on May 25 last week. The Prize is also known as the 'Environment Nobel', it's a pretty huge deal among environmental activists worldwide. There were seven winners. Among them was Chima Williams, a legal activist and human rights lawyer from Nigeria.
Why this matters: Some prizes don't mean much (looking at you, Oscars). Others don't mean much either but they give out a lot of money to the recipients and that's sometimes a really good thing. The Goldman Environmental Prize is worth $US200,000. Plus: "While the many challenges before us can feel daunting, and at times, make us lose faith, these seven leaders give us a reason for hope and remind us of what can be accomplished in the face of adversity," said Vice President of the Goldman Environmental Foundation Jennifer Goldman Wallis. Watch the award ceremony on YouTube if you're in need of some inspiration.
Who is Chima Williams?
Williams is the guy who held the oil company Royal Dutch Shell accountable for environmental damages they caused in Nigeria. Shell spilled oil into the Niger Delta communities between 2004 and 2007, causing so much damage, people are still recovering from it today. Williams went to court in The Netherlands for it, sued the sh*t out of them, and 13 years later, in 2021, he won the case.
But how?
Shell is from The Netherlands. Williams went to The Court of Appeal in The Hague, and said, 'they can't do this to us. You have to punish them.' The court agreed with Williams and ruled, 'Shell, you're responsible for what you do all over the world. You and all of your of subsidiaries in the world,' making the ruling the first time a Dutch transnational corporation has been held accountable for the violations of its 'kid'-company in another country.
How's Shell doing?
Oh, not good. Last week, Caroline Dennett, a safety consultant for Shell for 11 years, resigned as POLITICO reports. She sent an email to the executive committee and more than 1,000 employees, saying that as "continued oil & gas extraction is causing extreme harm" to the planet, Shell was "failing on a massive planetary scale." To feel better about itself, Shell is probably looking at this beautiful moment in time.
Tell me more about this Prize
Philanthropists Rhoda and Richard Goldman founded the prize in 1989 in San Francisco. To date, 213 winners have been honoured including 95 women from 93 countries.
Who are the other winners?
To give you a quick overview, I've summarized the main points:
- Niwat Roykaew from Thailand, together with the Mekong community, Roykaew made sure that the Mekong River remains untouched by China's cargo ships. The river is a vital lifeline for more than 65 million people.
- Marjan Minnessma from The Netherlands; she made sure the Dutch government put climate change on its official agenda,
- Juliet Vincent from Australia, he's the guy who made sure that Australia defunds coal by 2030; the country is a major coal exporter
- Nalleli Cobo from the United States; at the age of 19, she stopped new oil exploration sites in Los Angeles,
- as well as Alex Luciatante and Alexandra Narvaez from Ecuador, both are leading an Indigenous movement to protect their people's ancestral territory from gold mining. In 2018, the court even canceled 52 illegal gold mining concessions because of their work, protecting 79,000 acres of rainforest in the headwaters of Ecuador’s Aguarico River, which is sacred to the Cofán (their community).
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Geetanjalu Shree is the first Indian woman to win the International Booker Prize
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Geetanjali Shree has become the first writer from India to win the International Booker Prize for her novel Tomb of Sand (Hindi: Ret Samadhi), as Hindustan Times reports. Look at how proud she's holding the prize. She wins this award together with her English translator Daisy Rockwell from the United States.
Why this matters: It was the first Hindi-language book to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In the words of Shree herself, "World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages. The vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction," she tells Times of India.
What's the book about?
Set in northern India, Shree follows an 80-something-year-old widow who travels to Pakistan to confront the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition and re-evaluates what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman and a feminist. The book was published in Hindi in 2018. It is Shree's first novel to be published in the United Kingdom.
Tell me more about Shree
She is 64 years old. Shree was born in Uttar Pradesh's Mainpuri and is now based in New Delhi. Tomb of Sand is not her first novel. She's already written three novels and several story collections, and has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Serbian and Korean, as India Today writes.
And Rockwell?
She was born in Massachusetts and now lives in Vermont. She has translated classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her 2019 translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize.
How come they chose this one?
The judges described it as a "loud and irresistible novel", having competed with five other titles from around the world, including Poland's Nobel literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Claudia Piñeiro of Argentina, Japan's Mieko Kawakami (one of the largest newspapers in Japan, The Asahi Shimbun was like, 'wow you failed') and South Korea's Bora Chung.
Tell me more about the prize itself
The International Booker Prize is awarded every year to a translated work of fiction published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. It is run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction. The prize was not only set up to give fiction from all over the world a little boost, but to also pay respect to the often unacknowledged work of literary translators.
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More you might have missed
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Burkina Faso: Last week, at least 50 people were killed during an attack in the Madjoari Department (east), as Reuters reports. Those responsible are probably linked to al Quaeda and ISIS. Islamist violence is a huge topic in this part of the world. According to the United Nations, since 2015, more than 2,000 people have died, 1.5 million people have fled their homes. This is why Burkina Faso's president Roch Kaboré was overthrown in January ('he just didn't do enough to keep us safe,' said security forces). Nothing has changed since.
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United States: It was a pretty bad week for the country. In just two weeks, Black, Asian and Latino communities all faced mass shootings. The supermarket massacre (mostly Black victims) in New York state, the shooting in Dallas' Koreatown neighborhood (Korean victims), the slayings at a Taiwanese church in California (victim was also of Asian descent), and then, the Uvalde school massacre (mostly Latinx victims) in Texas. And in Oklahoma, governor Kevin Stitt signed HB 4327 into law, making Oklahoma the first state in the United States that bans most abortions.
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Nigeria: A stampede at a church charity event in Port Harcourt (south) left 31 people dead and seven injured. Many of the victims came to an annual “Shop for Free” charity program organized by the church. Such events are common in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, where more than 80 million people live in poverty, according to government statistics.
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Spain: Back in March 24, the government deported activist Mohamed Benhalima to Algeria, denying him asylum in hopes that the Spanish-Algerian relationship would be on good terms again (they had a falling out two months ago when Spain decided to support Morocco's illegal claim over the Western Sahara). Benhalima repeatedly said that he might face torture and death sentence there as he was a known pro-democracy activist. From Spanish exile, he used to upload videos like this about all the corrupt things that senior members of the Algerian army do on the regular. María Martín and Francisco Peregil write about the whole thing two months later on EL PAÍS: Spain is still singing 'Un-Break My Heart' to Algeria.
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India: A court sentenced Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Malik to life in prison as BBC reports. India believes he is a 'terrorist', Pakistan Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif (he believes Kashmir belongs to Pakistan) doesn't and called it "a black day for Indian democracy".
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Iraq: There have been nine sandstorms this year alone. It's never been this many. Some say, 'this is climate change and we are feeling the effects of it now already', others are like 'well, this is Iraq's own fault, it's water management is no good' (it's also no good because Iran and Turkey control a lot of it). And both are most likely right. One person has died, thousands of others need medical care. There were sandstorms in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well.
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Zimbabwe: Courts rule that the age of consent in Zimbabwe must be raised to 18 (from 16). 'Good move. Too many teens are getting pregnant. As a result, they're dropping out of school,' say rights groups.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina: (Some) justice was served. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced Dusko Suvara to six years in prison for having raped two Bosniak women while he was a member of Serbia's military in the villages Luke and Cukure in the Glamoc area in 1992.
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Afghanistan: It doesn't make up for anything but... the show of solidarity was a little pick-me-up among the very bad news earlier this month when the Taliban issued a decree that women and older girls must cover their faces in public and avoid being outside if possible. Last week, this decree also affected female television presenters. Men are now taking to social media, using #FreeHerFace, posting photos of their faces covered. Look at the staff of Tolo News.
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Mikko Kärnä, a Member of Parliament in Finland, has called for a boycott of Turkish kebabs, holidays and cars, in response to Turkey insisting that Finland and Sweden should not gain NATO membership unless they cease support for groups that they view as 'terrorists.'
If you should crave kebabs still, however, Karna permitted that "it is still worth eating kebabs made by the Kurds."
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That's it from me.
Have you checked out this newsletter's very own Spotify playlist Go Global Weekly yet?
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