Podcast: Truth To Power

Audrey: This is Power of the Streets, a podcast series brought to you by Human Rights Watch about how we speak truth to power. My name is  Audrey Kawire Wabwire, and I’m based in Nairobi, Kenya. 

In our first season, we’ve been hearing from some of the people driving Africa’s #MeToo movement. If you haven’t listened to the first three episodes of this series, please make sure you listen to all of them!

In this episode I’m speaking to someone who spoke Truth to Power by standing up to a man who had been the most powerful person in her country.

Toufah: You don't have to speak up because someone else has spoken up. You don't have to speak up because someone else is telling you to speak up. You speak up when you feel like it's what is going to heal your soul.

Audrey: That’s Toufah Jallow. An activist, writer and former Gambian beauty pageant winner. 

She took her fight to the doorstep of Yahya Jammeh, who was one of Africa’s most ruthless dictators. He ruled Gambia for 22 years, until 2017. When Toufah was 18 years old, Jammeh raped her.

Toufah: You speak up because you're ready to speak up, you think it's time to speak up. You speak up because you want to help other people speak up. It has to be at your own timeline, at your own pace. It could be five months later, it could be two days later, it could be 35 years later.

Audrey: Toufah spoke to me from Canada where she fled soon after the assault. Her story was covered by the international media and it was the centerpiece of a Human Rights Watch report.

Yahya Jammeh’s rule in Gambia was marked by widespread abuses, including forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and arbitrary detention. 

Toufah took me back to the moment when she decided to go public. 

Toufah: You know, I was just trying to look up to find one person who had come out or has a story or has sought the pathway to justice against their perpetrator. And going on, I'm sitting at this computer, I'm wearing my pajamas, and this is like 9:00 AM in the morning. I'm just scrolling through and I'm searching. I went to the search box on Google and I typed ‘Rape Gambia Fighting’. All that came up was UN statistics and World Health Organization statistics. I typed again ‘Gambian victim,’ all the words that you think you can put in to get to some type of article. I did that and nothing was coming up. Again, it was just statistics and numbers. One out of five, 10 out of this. And I said to myself, "Does that mean this doesn't happen in Gambia?"

That's impossible. Right? It happens. It happens, like everywhere else, but everything is hidden behind a number. And how can people talk about this? How can people find a pathway to healing when what happened to them is almost nonexistent in their lives and imagining a younger person than me with less opportunities who's not in Canada trying to figure out what is the blueprint to fighting for yourself and speaking up and realizing that there's nothing on that. That shifted my perspective, I think, more than anything.

Audrey: How did you find courage to finally speak to your mom especially? What did you tell yourself to give yourself courage to actually sit down and tell her what happened? 

Toufah: I have not to this day think I have sat with my mom and spent 20 minutes talking about what happened or how it happened. Directly. Like just to her. No. I am still unable to do that. That’s why this whole thing is a process.

The first thing I did, because I was seeing a therapist at the time, the conversation went from how to find myself and heal, to how do we prepare for coming out? How do we prepare to talk about this from this cultural and social standing? How do we build up your resistance and your ability to take it all? Are you ready for that? Then, it went on. This was again another year of me trying to be ready for that moment, but I knew that I wasn't going to keep quiet as that process started.

Audrey: You have been public about your story for some time now. And I  wonder, you've mentioned some of the things but I want to know more about what the hardest thing about coming forward has been? 

Toufah: I think for me, there's so much. It's just enormous and that's why I'm in a place where I do deeply understand and sympathize with every woman who would rather not talk about it in as much as I'm advocating for speaking up. I think one of my biggest fears and one of the things that really did get to me was the realization that you get to lose yourself in the midst of this, right? Who you actually are and the things you like, the person you are kind of gets stripped away and you just become a victim of this thing and a story of this thing. That's all that it is.

And I think it's been a feeling of mourning for me. Knowing who I am, all that it is that I can offer is somehow lost and takes a backseat as if somehow, I cannot co-exist as all of these things. That has been hard for me personally to realize that I did not see that part coming.

Audrey: Yahya Jammeh was voted out of office and he eventually left Gambia. A Truth Commission was set up to hear from his victims, including those he raped.

Toufah: It’s been a very deliberate effort from me when I testified at the Truth Commission, because I know everybody listens to that in the country from rural Gambia to the open cities and deliberately always and as hard as that was, ‘cause my mom and my dad were sitting in the crowd during my testimony, is that to deliberately mention body parts like vagina and penis and breast. It was a shocking moment because we don't do that. And I deliberately did that because I did not want to not paint the picture of what violence looks like.

And sexual violence to be specific. I did not want to blur the lines I wanted them to see and probably to be able to visualize for the first time what talking about that honestly sounds like. 

And it's been interesting to kind of hear even from other organizations that work within the region who say, after my coming out, when they go into villages, it's been very easy. Cause before when they walk into villages, they have to spend some time with the village head or the chief trying to go around conversations. "Oh, we are here to talk about women and boys, their issues or some of the sufferings that happened between them." And all these coded language to kind of explain and to be able to have access to the young people to kind of discuss sexual violence or harassment in general. And to now hear them say, " Oh, we're here to talk about issues like what happened to Toufah". And there’s a general understanding of what that is.

And to not have to spend hours trying to find a way not sound rude, not to sound inappropriate in order to even provide knowledge to the young people of that community. To just be able to be used as a reference point, to refer to that, it’s been great to push the conversation in that way. 

Those are one of the things I'm really passionate about because once we are able to find a language for something, then it exists. If it doesn't have a language attached to it, it is non-existent and you cannot fight, eradicate and advocate against something that everyone pretends like doesn't exist. 

For me, one of the things I think that has been achieved for me is to just know now we can talk about this. This is a national discourse, great! Just that, just the fact that it is a conversation that we have within our homes, because my issue has been the talk of almost every home and it's "Oh, did you hear that Toufah?". "Oh my God, what happened? This happened, that happened''. But at least probably I'm sure there are some families that even had this discussion for the first time. 

Audrey: Toufah has also focused on normalizing the conversation at home. 

Toufah: My youngest brother knows what has happened to me. We talk about consent. We talk about how he should be a gentleman and all of that. And he understands that at that age. Same with my sister, a privilege they get to have that I did not have and many of us don't have. At the house, my littlest sister, who's like seven years old would scream, "no to rape, no to rape, no to sexual violence". I mean, it's like a song and, it's just been great to know that that is a normalized conversation that we came from zero talks of it to almost frequently all the time talking about it. So, that's been awesome.

Audrey: You’ve talked about the risks, the hardships, the side eyes that you’ve gotten as a result of speaking out and being public about your story. Where do you draw your own strength from? How do you take care of yourself, Toufah?

Toufah: I think the strength in general and the idea of pushing forward comes from a line of feminine energy. My mother is a very mellow, quiet kind of an African mom but also a very resistant one, right? Resistance doesn't just come from the ability of being able to put your feelings and expression into words. There are people that act on it. I might be a bit more outspoken than my mom but I don't think I am stronger than she is. If you consider the socio-cultural backgrounds that they come from. You have my mom who was married off at 18. She had me when she was sitting for her final exams. Fighting for her place in school, even as she was married off without her consent at 18 years old. Not stopping there, but deciding to stop breastfeeding me, leave the village, travel all the way to the city just so she could start college. Against the advice of all the male figures in her life, to have herself go to college, then come back for me later. To gap her child bearing timeframe so she could go to university, married in a polygamous family of four other wives.

That to me is strength and that to me is feminism. To me, I find it very disrespectful when that is not recognized as feminism, but somehow other variations of it in other parts of the world, they consider that. That is not coming from an outside perspective, that is coming from us. That's why it hurts, because somehow when a Black woman stands for herself, she has to be influenced by an outside influence. But our mothers and our grandmothers have been a source of strength, a source of inspiration in their own way. I think we are just a representation of that, but I guess in a more radical way. Yeah.

Audrey:  Toufah set the stage for this whole series of Power of the Streets. We’re going to hear all about the progressive and innovative ways that people are standing up on the continent. 

I was keen to hear what she thinks is missing from the current #MeToo conversations.

Toufah: I think what is missing is a sense of ownership of our stories, right?

My story is out there now not because of me as a person, but because of the person who violated my body, right? The story is out there in a way and it’s sensationalized and it’s huge not because of me, because what happened to me, happened to so many other people, but because of the person who did it to me. My perpetrator, his position and his power, who he is, it's why my story is the way it is. Right? That's a privilege I have to recognize and continue to speak up because it is given that level of attention.

Audrey: But Toufah worries that it’s not just about personal ownership, but who gets to tell our stories to our communities, and the world.

Toufah: If I had gone to a local radio station, if I had gone to a media house, a national media house and met a journalist and kind of talked about this with them, would my story have gotten here? Would it be publicized? It's all these questions, and to know that all of these stories starting from Gambia to Senegal to Nigeria all the way to the east, to realize that the stories become national West African, African conversation, international conversation, only if outsiders pick it up. That is an unfortunate position that we find ourselves in.

I think to engage media houses or journalists in general, in Africa, to build interest in investigating such stories, to put much importance to women and survival stories in as much as we put into who went viral on, I don't know, TikTok. Then we would kind of take a collective responsibility and ownership of what our stories are. Because that's not happening, a lot of fighters who are trying to fight for justice and representation and women's right and victims' voices find themselves being accused of Western feminization or find themselves being accused of being paid money because their stories have been amplified outside, which is great, there is no problem with that, but that takes away a sense of ownership. 

I mean, there's nothing wrong with the outside picking that, but can we start, can it start with us? You cannot be in a country with a citizen of that country, with a woman that has gone through what she has gone through and you get to hear about that story online from New York Times and every media house in that country becomes a secondary source to that. I think that's something we can definitely work on and invite our brothers and sisters in media and journalism to listen and think that we are front page or primetime worthy.

Audrey: Toufah has used her visibility to spark a movement in Gambia. With the hashtag #IAmToufah, many women in the region shared their own stories of rape and resistance. And Toufah led hundreds of young people on a march through the streets of Gambia’s capital, Banjul.

Toufah: Having those women come out in June, in numbers to march with me in the streets to say enough of this for the first time it was worth it. It was worth all of that. To have myself walk into rooms, to mentor young girls who you can see are so proud and so happy to be there. And feel comfortable to talk to me about their uncles touching their bums and their breast, and to realize in that moment that it is not okay. That just makes it all worth it. You know, to hear my aunties who are older than me ... there's this generational gap who opened up to me about their own stories. I mean, an uncle's friend, who's a man opening about his stories. Female friends of mine who take it upon themselves to confront their perpetrators, having people all over online with the  hashtag #IAmToufah and their stories, people I don't know, they don't know me. Just having that open door and for a woman to open her mouth and mention the word rape perpetrator and even put the name of the perpetrator next to rape. It’s incomparable to anything else. That is real lives being affected.

Yeah, it's been worth every insult. It's been worth every sidelining, and it's been worth every side eye look, every rolling eye... it's worth me losing my sense of security. It's worth having to have security at my home for 24 hours. It's worth all of that....it is.

Audrey:  That’s Toufah Jallow from Gambia. She’s living in Canada now and she’s writing a book. She also heads the Toufah Foundation, which aims to create safe spaces for survivors. 

You have been listening to Power of the Streets, a podcast series brought to you by Human Rights Watch. I’m Audrey Kawire Wabwire.

That’s the end of our show. Check out our show notes for more about Toufah and the conversation she started in Gambia.

In the next episode, we’ll take the conversation to Tanzania.

Learn more about Human Rights Watch and our work by visiting our website HRW.org. Follow us on Twitter @HRW and on Instagram @HumanRightsWatch.  

Join the conversation using the hashtag #PowerOfTheStreets  and share your thoughts with Toufah or any of our other guests, and you can tell us how you’re speaking truth to power. 

This episode of Power of the Streets was produced by Jessie Graham and Andisiwe May and this is a Volume production. 

We give special thanks to Frederica Boswell and Amy Costello.

The main theme song, Au Revoir is produced by Young OG Beats.

Till next time, thank you for listening.