African Woman and Child Feature Service

The Chinese Proverb which says; As fire refines gold so suffering refines virtues can be used to describe the life of Dekha Ibrahim. Despite the odds and numerous incidences of violence she saw in her rural Wajir home, Dekha rose to become the world’s peace icon.

An unapologetically rural Kenyan-Somali woman, Dekha touched the world through peace work which saw her travel extensively locally and internationally. This earned her a special name among the local communities in Wajir who would refer to her as Dekha Nabad which means Dekha, Mother of Peace.

As we mourn her demise and pay tribute to the gracious life that she lived, many recall how she taught the world her comprehensive methodology which combines grassroots activism, a soft but uncompromising leadership, and a spiritual motivation drawing on the teachings of Islam.

“Coming from the same area with me, Dekha who used to call me aunty showed us how the diverse ethnic, cultural and religious differences can be reconciled. Even after a violent conflict, these were knitted together through a cooperative process that leads to peace and development,” says Rukia Subow, chairperson Maendeleo ya Wanawake.

The late Dekha passed on last month in a tragic road accident that also claimed the lives of her husband and their driver. She was well known by local communities in Wajir from the time when she was the headmistress of Wajir Primary School.

Sacrifice

Many times she put aside her administration job and mobilised other women to her home to discuss how they could bring together two warring communities of Ajuran and Degodia to stop the large scale violence that engulfed the district.

Born in Wajir in 1964, Dekha’s wish was to see peace becoming a reality in her community. As captured in an article published in the mainstream media, what gave her the resolve to make a difference was her mother’s voice that would constantly let out a loud sigh and exclamation: “When will all this come to an end?”

The older woman was then voicing the exact thoughts of the younger one who at that point wanted guarantees of a better life for her daughter.

As a young mother, Dekha used her home as an office and meeting place where women from the two fighting communities would join hands with professional women to brainstorm on intervention tactics that they could use to bring peace. This was happening at a time when women were only allowed to stay at home and take care of their families as model housewives.

The women came up with a strategy where each of them would go back to their communities
and convince the men to lay down arms and negotiate with enemy community. The women further warned elders and men that they will strip naked if the armed young men did not lay down arms, despite opposition from the traditional clan leaders.

Mobilised support

These threats made elders and other conflict players to think twice about fighting each other. More and more women joined in the campaign and pressure became so huge that it turned into a wave that swept across Wajir. The young men voluntarily surrendered their arms without seeking orders from their tribal commanders and joined the women led by Dekha in denouncing the violence.

Dekha saw potential in women bringing change in society and she mobilised support from donor communities in training women from the entire North Eastern Province including Wajir, Mandera and Garissa on peace building. She assisted women’s groups in setting up peace building associations that are now present in all the districts.

Elders and other conservative community leaders sensed danger and sent a delegation to the Dekha led women’s group saying they were ready to negotiate with rival communities. This was the beginning of a dialogue and from here Dekha found herself moving between community elders and leaders. Her brief was to check on the grievances and what was the cause of the deadly clashes.

Dekha’s efforts bore fruit as the two communities signed a peace agreement under the Al- Fatah Declaration. This stopped the fighting and all issues that caused the clashes were addressed.

Since the signing of the agreement, Wajir has never experienced conflict. Women peace builders led by Dekha were able to bring calm to Mandera and Garissa. Since then she never looked back.

Feted

Between 1996-1997, Dekha was team leader for the community development training programme of the Arid Lands Resource Management Project in Kenya. She wrote extensively and was the organizing board member of Nomadic and Pastoralists Development Initiative, a Kenyan rural development initiative.

Soon her peace work was noticed by the international community and in 2007, Dekha was the recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award which was established by Sweden’s Jakob von Uexkull. This award is presented annually to honour those “working on practical and exemplary solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the world today”.

According to a report by Right Livelihood who feted Dekha for her peace work, the model developed in Wajir, which Dekha describes as “a peace and development committee — a structure for responding to conflict at a local level”, informs her philosophy of inter-religious co-operation and subsequent peace work.

Over the years this model has been used by various organisations both locally and internationally. In 1998, when the Christian community in Wajir was experiencing some violence, Dekha assisted in the formation of a disaster committee of Muslim women to assist and make amends with the Christians.

Meeting

They held prayer meetings with Muslim and Christian women, in which both groups shared their experience and thereby strengthened their relationship. Subsequently the Wajir Peace Committee began to include Christian women, leading to the formation of an inter-faith committee for peace which has undertaken further activities to intervene in religious conflicts.

Dekha’s work spread beyond her birthplace to embrace the flash-points in Kenya and the East African sub-region. She worked as a consultant to the Kenya government and civil society organisations. During the early days of her work, she became the coordinator for a mobile primary health care project for nomadic people and was elected as Secretary of the peace committee hence undertaking dual roles.

In 1997, she became a founding member of the regional Coalition of Peace in Africa (COPA). As the East African regional coordinator, she was involved in the Linking Peace Practice to Policy (LPP) programme of the COPA, funded by Comic Relief in the UK. The LPP seeks to support and link communities in volatile areas in conflict prevention and peacebuilding work.

Conflict resolution

Dekha also became in 1998 Training and Learning Co-ordinator of Responding to Conflict (RTC) which engages in conflict transformation: planning, organizing and facilitating a range of conflict resolution training programmes.

She was also a board member of Co-existence International, an initiative committed to strengthening the field of policymakers, practitioners, researchers, advocates, organisations and networks promoting co-existence.

Dekha was the founding member of a Global Peace Practitioners Network ACTION for conflict transformation. She was also a member of a consortium of African and international conflict transformation specialists working together on development of a series of intensive, participatory workshops the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA).

Since 2002, Dekha became a patron of the London-based NGO Peace Direct where she worked towards inter-religious/ethnic co-operation in this capacity through co-facilitating a project which aimed to provide a platform for young Muslims from all UK backgrounds, after the London bombings, to explore issues and challenges around being a Muslim and British in the current UK society. She was also a member of the international advisory board of the University of Ulster, INCORE London-Derry, North Ireland and also served on the Board of the Berghof Centre in Germany.

“Dekha meant a lot to women and society at large here in Wajir and northern Kenya. It was evident how the community sent thousands of condolences through a radio call in programme that was broadcast by Star FM when the news of her death was announced,” says Abjata Khalif, Chair of the Kenya Pastoralists Journalists Network (PAJAN).

He adds: “It is a great blow to the community and just like a butterfly that glides among people, Dekha, the icon of peace has glided through her community having touched thousands of people in urban and rural areas of northern Kenya.”

Dekha had no boundary or clan nor class. Everybody was her sister or brother and she strived to have a free society built on social justice and without violence.

Eulogizing the great peace-maker, Florence Mpaayei Executive Director Nairobi Peace Initiative Africa (NPI) said: “One memorable observation that Dekha made at a meeting convened to reflect on the Kenya mediation process following the post-election violence was how as Kenyans we knew how to debate but not to dialogue.”

Mpaayei adds: “According to Dekha, in dialogue one listens and seeks to create understanding, build relationships and together explore the best possibilities or alternatives for everyone.”

Betty Kaaria Murungi, a founder and a board member of Urgent Action Fund Africa (UAF), remembers how Dekha was instrumental in the thinking behind UAF-Africa’s early work on rapid response teams. “She was a mentor to me and the entire UAF team as we navigated the perilous conflict terrain across Africa. She taught us so much,” says Murungi.

Role model

Njoki Wamai of the Africa Leadership Centre/ Conflict, Security and Development Group King’s College in London says “She insisted that dialogue should not only be limited to those spaces at the national level in full view of cameras but to all levels from the national to the local.”

According to Wamai, this model got the attention of Graca Machel, who asked Dekha to write a concept on the ‘Need for Dialogue and not Debates in Reconciliation’.

For Selline Korir, the Team Leader of Rural Women Peace Link, Dekha taught her the peace work. “At a time when we did not know where to look to for support at the height of post-election violence 2007-2008, Dekha in collaboration with NPI-Africa gave the Rural Women Peace Link the first KSh100,000 that enabled us to start mediating between the women IDPs at the Eldoret showground and those who had remained with the community in Kesses and Burnt Forest region.

As the country and the world at large mourn the death of Dekha, her wish was to start a peace institute. She had plans to establish the first peace institute in the East African region. Maybe the best way to honour Dekha and her exemplary work is to build Dekha Peace Institute.

Additional information by Abjata Khalif

This story originally appeared in the Reject Online Issue 45 - download your pdf copy