The evening celebration attracted more than 100 people, all supporters of women’s empowerment and defenders of their right to pursue a career in what remains a very patriarchal society.
WIMSAL has 80 members working in print, radio, or television, either in Freetown or in the provinces. Their emancipation is a step toward SL’s achievement of gender equality, one of the much hyped Millennium Development Goals.
Harriett Turay, president of the 50/50 Group, a local NGO collaborating with the Ministry of Social Welfare’s Gender Desk to increase opportunities for women across the country, was a guest speaker at the event. She told the women of WIMSAL that they would be tomorrow's role-models, and that their names would be written down in history.
Her counterpart at the Gender Desk, a feisty woman by the name of Susan Sesay, deplored the fact that the candidates for next week’s election of the SL Association of Journalists (SLAJ) executive committee are all men. She encouraged WIMSAL members to run for a position next election, in two years. Repeating the ministry’s official slogan, she told the audience: “Men of quality do not fear women equality.”
Today, I am giving a workshop on the 2007 Gender Acts with a representative of the International Rescue Committee, an NGO that played a major role in drafting the new laws. One of the young journalists who attended the WIMSAL party said she would put her name up for SLAJ's vice-president position next time. When I asked why she wasn't considering the top job, she said that tradition dictates that a man should lead. Another student added that he thought women should get involved in SLAJ... in 10 years.
Back at the official ceremony, the next one to address the audience was Bernadette Cole, president of the Independent Media Commission. An authoritarian and opinionated woman, Mrs. Cole is also the head of Fourah Bay College’s Mass Communication Department. She complimented WIMSAL for having merged with the country’s other association of women journalists to create a single, unified body.
Established as a result of a workshop organized and funded by the Iranian Embassy, WIMSAL is hoping to recruit new members, and to continue advocating for better employment conditions and increased responsibilities for women within newsrooms. The event Chair, Sylvia Lynden, is the only woman owner of a newspaper. She says she started Awareness Times because she wanted to improve the quality of print reporting. But she is a controversial figure whose paper, like most others, often ignores basic rules of media ethics.
In the near future, her competition will come from familiar faces.
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