Last week I was with Thabitha Khumalo of the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). She is also now a world ambassador for the Trade Union movement in Zimbabwe, is a labour activist, and women’s rights activist, and the most courageous and inspirational woman I have ever had the privilege to meet.

NUS Women’s Campaign and Action for Southern Africa (Actsa) teamed up to bring Thabitha to the UK to talk to students about the Dignity! Period campaign. Thabitha has been running this particular campaign now for over 6 years and only on this last visit has she finally made some significant breakthroughs in the UK.

Actsa is the successor movement to the Anti-Apartheid movement in the UK and continue to fight in solidarity with the labour movements in South Africa and other Southern African nations for peace equality, democracy and an end to poverty. NUS Women’s Campaign loves working with Actsa because they believe that women’s issues are central to the wider fight for justice in Southern Africa. They recognise that you cannot do development without doing women’s liberation! Yay them.

The Dignity! Period campaign is such a significant one that NUS Women’s Campaign are running it as our priority international campaign this year.

Here’s the bare bones of the campaign: There are few places in the world where it is worse to be a woman than in Zimbabwe today. Under a patriarchal dictatorship, the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe stands at a staggering 80% and the inflation rate is more than 1400%. Thabitha always says that Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa and now it can’t feed its own people. On top of abject poverty and an acute and increasing lack of civil liberties, women lose out more than anybody else. Rape, domestic violence, and a complete lack of economic or political power means that the women’s struggle in Zimbabwe must be a global priority.

But women cannot fight for their rights, or liberate their country if they have no dignity. Women in Zimbabwe have been literally stripped of their dignity as women. The issue? Sanitary protection. That’s right, tampons and sanitary towels. The government have stacked unbelievable taxes onto sanitary protection to the point where only a handful of the country’s women can afford them. And even when Actsa raised over 1 million products, the government levied over $23,000 US Dollars tax onto the products just to get them into the country. The result is that women are forced into back yards, out of work and schools, out of the public eye, into solitary confinement, and into a place without dignity. In rural areas girls and women are expected to dig a hole and stand over it for 7 days, away from the rest of the community. In towns and cities women are using newspaper, the bark of trees, and other materials which are causing infections, for which there is no medicine. Some husbands suspect infidelity when his wife has such an infection and women are experiencing violence at the hands of their partners as a result. And of course girls are in and out of school as soon as they start their periods, most of whom will not pass exams, if they are able to sit them at all.

Thabitha has been through so much, but always says that physical injuries will heal and the pain will fade. She says that she and the women of Zimbabwe are ready to fight. She says that they will liberate Zimbabwe. But not without their dignity. Not without the means to be more than baby making machines. Not when everybody knows when a women has her period.

So we are doing several things for this campaign and here’s what you can do:

IF YOU ARE A WOMAN’S OFFICER OR SOMEBODY WHO WANTS TO LEAD A LOCAL CAMPAIGN:

- order a campaign organisers pack by emailing women@nus.org.uk

- sell Dignity! Period wristbands

- get people to sign up to give monthly to the campaign

- get people to write to MPs, to the Zim government, and to tampon companies lobbying them all to do something about this situation

- raise awareness locally

IF YOU ARE AN INDIVIDUAL WHO WANTS TO HELP:

- go to www.actsa.org and click on the Dignity! Period campaign to do one or all of the following:

1. Buy a Dignity! Period wristband

2. Sign up to give monthly to the women in Zimbabwe

3. Do some letter writing to the Zim government, to our government, to your local MP, and to tampon companies!

IF YOU WANT TO PASS SOME POLICY IN YOUR UNION OR ORGANISATION ON THE DIGNITY! PERIOD CAMPAIGN click here for a sample policy

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