Tribute to a warrior of peace 190911b
Tribute to a warrior of peace
By Njoki Chege and Agencies
DEKHA IBRAHIM ABDI, who died in July this year aged 46, was one of the people responsible for preventing many civil wars in North Eastern Kenya
. She became a global peacemaker, helping resolve violent conflict in many of the world’s most divided countries
Last Saturday, Kenyans gathered at Karura Forest’s new Peace Garden for peacemakers to pay tribute to a distinguished peacemaker, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, who tragically died recently from injuries sustained in a car accident.
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| The late Dheka Ibrahim |
Dekha was born in 1964 in Wajir, near the Somalia border, to a humble Somali pastoralist family. She enjoyed a good education, thanks to her father’s unending support.
She was born at a time and in a culture where women were only supposed to be seen and not heard. However, she did not let her situation define her and she chose a different path… that of being a trailblazer.
From a tender age, she emerged as a leader among young Somali women. She took her education seriously and began changing her world, one life at a time.
“My mother and I were born into a violent, unstable society. I wanted peace in the most basic sense of safety. I wanted my child to be able to count on civilian law to protect her,” said Dekha of her background.
She began her career in the mid 1980s as an untrained primary school teacher in Tarbaj Primary School, Wajir County.
The school children loved her.
“She was that teacher that you would always look forward to her lessons, not only because she loved what she did, but also because of her courage to tackle ‘taboo’ topics without fear or favour,” writes Buunkalax, a blogger who was one of her pupils.
Dekha talked about menstruation in girls and how they could manage it; she introduced the concept of sanitary pads to young girls who would have otherwise stayed at home, ashamed of their condition.
“She coached the girls to hold their heads up for there was nothing to be ashamed about,” writes Buunkalax.
Her cheery voice
In spite of the fact that she was untrained and inexperienced, Dekha gracefully and tactfully went on with her duties, but also doing the things others thought were impossible.
To talk about women’s affairs in public at a public school was unheard of, but to Dekha, it mattered less.
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| Dekha Abdi when she received the Hessen 2009 Peace Award in Germany. |
“Another first by a female teacher, which has stuck to my mind to this day, is Dekha teaching the lower primary children how to enjoy themselves at break time,” writes the blogger.
“Dekha’s cheery voice could be heard as she encouraged them to dance to Mr Elephant’s antiques — a lilting nursery rhyme. This, again, was something that was simply not done by women. They were seen but not heard for most of the time,” Buunkalax narrates.
To Dekha, producing all rounded pupils was her joy, besides teaching them the value of hard work and courage by using her own life as a testimony.
This quickly propelled her to the top; from an untrained teacher to the headmistress of a primary school.
Not the type to settle in a comfort zone, Dekha chose to extend her boundaries and got herself extensively involved in grassroots activism.
In the early 1990s, a conflict between clans over water and livestock claimed 1,500 lives in Wajir. To this end, Dekha started a peace initiative with women from other clans. The initiative received negative perception and opposition from traditional leaders but this uplifted Dekha’s spirit even more. She organised mediation talks between the warring clans.
Peace building
Dekha always gave dialogue a chance during her conflict resolution activities, by first listening to both parties without interruption. To her, humiliation was one of the main drivers of violence. The best antidote to humiliation was respect. Once everyone felt their point of view was understood, Dekha would work to restore relations between the victim and the offender.
Her efforts saw two warring Somali clans agree to sign a peace agreement under the Al-Fatah Declaration, thereby calming the volatile situation.
In 1998, when the Christian community in Wajir was suffering violent attacks, Dekha was on the ground assisting in the formation of a disaster committee of Muslim women to assist and reconcile with the Christian community.
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| The late Dekha Ibrahim signs a peace agreement in Germany |
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| She stresses a point during a conference. Photos: courtesy |
To follow up the implementation of these peace agreements, she helped set up Wajir Peace and Development to bring together clans, Government security officers, parliamentarians, civil servants and religious leaders.
Around the same time, Dekha joined the staff of Responding to Conflict, an international non-governmental organisation based at Woodbrooke (Quaker) College in Birmingham, UK.
From then on, Dekha worked as a consultant trainer on peace building and pastoralists’ development with many local and international agencies in various countries, including Cambodia, Jordan, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, Netherlands, Israel, Palestine, Zimbabwe, the UK, Uganda and Kenya.
Her peace efforts did not go undetected, for in 2005 she was named Kenyan ‘Peace Builder of the Year’. In 2007, Dekha was awarded the alternative Nobel Prize — the Right Livelihood Award from the Stockholm-based foundation of the same name, “for showing in diverse ethnic and cultural situations, how religious and other differences can be reconciled, even after violent conflict, and knitted together through a cooperative process that leads to peace and development…”
It is notable to recognise that she gave her prize money to help start a Peace University in Wajir.
Dekha is also the holder of the Hessen 2009 Peace Award in presented Germany.
Cut short
During the post-election violence in 2007/2008, Dekha’s expertise in peace building came into play as she was part of the peace negotiating team.
The Guardian, in her obituary, reports that one of the methods employed by her and her team was to ask the 60,000 members of a women’s organisation who had mobile phones to look out of their windows and report what they saw. The information was used to plot not only the ‘hot spots’ of the violence but also the ‘cold spots’. It was important to know where people were running to so they could be protected.
Unfortunately, Dekha’s life was cut short by a road accident on July 14, an accident that also claimed the life of her second husband Abdi Nuur. She is survived by four children from her first husband.
An appeal has been made for Dekha to be posthumously awarded the Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear (MBS) in honour of her life and work fighting fearlessly for peace, for which she was much beloved and admired, in Kenya and around the world.
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