A t 6, Betty Makoni was raped. She was a child labourer, selling candles in her village. A neighbour invited her and nine other girls into his house, locked them in a room and sexually violated each one.

That was her introduction to life as a female in Zimbabwe.

At 7, she asked her mother why women never spoke out when men brutalized them. "Sh!" her mother warned. "These things are private."

At 9, after one particularly vicious episode of domestic abuse, she lost her mother.

"I grew up with questions and anger," she said. "But I was a clever girl. I started to fight."

She fought her way through school. She fought to protect her siblings. She fought to become self-supporting.

At 24, with two university degrees, she got a job as a teacher. "I felt strongly that one day I would break the silence about rape."

The chance came sooner than she expected. Barely had she settled into the classroom when the girls started dropping out. Over the school year, two-thirds stopped coming. They'd been raped, infected with AIDS, turned into outcasts.

So Makoni started a club where girls could talk about their lives and learn to defend themselves. Ten girls attended the first meeting. But word spread quickly. Before long, girls' clubs were popping up in schools across Zimbabwe.

By 1999, there were so many clubs that Makoni gave up her teaching job to run the Girl Child Network. There are now 689 clubs and three "empowerment villages" where survivors of rape can seek refuge and rehabilitation.

The network has helped more than 60,000 girls and women in its nine-year history. The youngest was a 1-day-old baby. The oldest was 94.

"As I speak now, I know a woman is getting killed in Zimbabwe," Makoni said this week at briefing hosted by the Stephen Lewis Foundation. "There's a silent genocide going on."

The Girl Child Network is one of more than 100 grassroots organizations supported by the foundation Lewis established five years ago. The former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa was so devastated by what he saw and so frustrated by the world's lethargic response, that he decided to pour his passion and eloquence into raising money for groups on the front lines in Africa.

Lewis describes Makoni as "a powerful and leading figure in her country." She describes herself as a victim who became a leader because no one else would help Zimbabwe's girls.

She has been jailed. She receives death threats constantly. Her husband, an engineer, worries about her safety.

In an interview, Makoni shared a letter she had just received from one of her supporters. "Please don't come back (to Zimbabwe)," it says. "Things are worse. People are being beaten to death."

She will go back, after a conference organized by the Stephen Lewis Foundation to raise global awareness of "sexual terrorism" in Africa. It will bring together doctors and trauma counsellors and aid experts.

Makoni will speak as a victim, a survivor, a teacher and a mother.

But she is more than that. She has changed attitudes in Zimbabwe in a way that no one thought possible. Girls who attend her clubs know how to say no to boys who demand sex. They don't retreat into the kitchen or lower their gaze in the presence of men. Their body language is confident and assertive. If necessary, they can fight aggressively.

They compete vigorously with boys in school. So many have gone on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers and community leaders that fathers now urge their daughters to join the network.

"We are challenging the whole patriarchal structure," Makoni says.

She remembers the nine girls with whom she was raped 31 years ago. None lived to tell the story.

She visits her mother's grave whenever she can. "I always tell her: `There was nothing you could have done. But I can.'"

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And she thinks she hears her mother say: "Go girl."





Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.



