Rwanda's parliament has become the first in the world where women claim the majority, writes Stephanie McCrummenin Kigali
ON A continent that has been dominated by the rule of men, this tiny east African nation is trying something new. Here, in Rwanda, women are not only driving the economy - working on construction sites, in factories and as truck and taxi drivers - they are also filling the ranks of government.
Women hold a third of all cabinet positions, including foreign minister, education minister, supreme court chief and police commissioner general. And Rwanda's parliament last month became the first in the world where women claim the majority - 56 per cent, including the chair.
One result is that Rwanda has banished archaic patriarchal laws that are still enforced in many African societies, such as those that prevent women from inheriting land. The legislature has passed Bills aimed at ending domestic violence and child abuse, while a committee is combing through the legal code to purge it of discriminatory laws.
One lawmaker said the committee had compiled "a stack" of laws to modify or toss out - including one that requires a woman to get her husband's signature on a bank loan.
"The fact that we are so many has made it possible for men to listen to our views," says MP Espérance Mwiza. "Now that we're a majority, we can do even more."
The unusually high percentage of women in Rwandan government is in part a reflection of popular will in a country of 10 million that is 55 per cent female. But it also reflects the heavy hand of one man, Rwandan president Paul Kagame, whose photograph hangs on the walls of houses, restaurants and shops. It also hovered over the swivelling leather chair of parliament speaker Rose Mukantabana as she opened a session late last week.
Since the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days of organised violence that included the systematic rape of Tutsi women, Kagame, a Tutsi, has enforced a kind of zealous social engineering.
With a population that was about 70 per cent female after the genocide, Kagame's new government adopted ambitious policies to help women economically and politically, including a new constitution in 2003 requiring that at least 30 per cent of all parliamentary and cabinet seats go to women.
The remaining 26 per cent of the women in parliament were indirectly elected.
"This was a broken society after the genocide," says Aloisea Inyumba, Kagame's former gender and social affairs minister, who was also a prominent official in his ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front when it was still a rebel group fighting the country's genocidal government. "We made a decision that if Rwanda is going to survive, we have to have a change of heart as a society. Equality and reconciliation are the only options."
While many African legislatures have adopted quotas reserving seats for females, none has done so as ambitiously as Rwanda. The country's overall attitude towards gender puts it at odds with its neighbours.
Just next door, an epidemic of sexual violence has ravaged eastern Congo, where law and order have almost completely broken down. In the run-up to Kenyan elections last year, several female candidates were beaten and threatened with sexual violence. One was murdered. Out of 222 lawmakers, 21 are women.
In this hilly and green capital city, meanwhile, women successfully lobbied for the removal of a statue in a central roundabout that depicted a woman holding a jug of water on her head and a baby on her hip.
In its place came a more neutral one: a smiling woman free of the jug, holding the hand of a little boy walking alongside her.
Not far away is the parliament building, where rows of women took their seats last Thursday, and listened to the finance minister present the midterm budget.
Afterwards came questions from women such as Ignacienne Nyirarukundo (39), who went to work for Rwanda's national reconciliation commission after surviving the genocide. She then worked on children's welfare issues, and decided to run for office this year, campaigning on a platform of eradicating poverty through reduced birth rates.
"I felt I could do better helping to build my country in parliament," she says. - ( LA Times-Washington Postservice)