A long way to go to equality

SALOME MBUGUA (36), from Kenya, has been living in Ireland for the last 13 years. Salome is the director of AkiDwA (the African Women’s Network Ireland) an organisation aiming to empower African women living in Ireland.
Salome talks to ELLA O’DWYER about the motivations behind her work, the discrimination she’s encountered in Ireland and her hope that the racism currently at work in Irish society will abate.

You’re from Kenya. Why did you come to Ireland from Africa?
I came to Ireland 13 years ago, in 1994. I came because it’s a land of many opportunities and not just economically because I also found my husband in Ireland – an Irishman – we met in college.
We live in Portarlington, with our two daughters. I came here to upgrade my studies. In 1994 there were few people of colour here and I was looked on as a kind of novelty – in a nice way. People would come up to me and touch my skin. I felt at home. I even learned Irish dancing.

But all that changed?
Over the years I noticed that things changed. From being a novelty I became a threat and therefore a victim. I put that down to racism. The Irish started to see me and people like me as a threat.
I was actually a victim of verbal and physical racism. I was attacked only two years ago.

What happened?
I was out with an African friend of mine who’d come to visit me. When she came to my town I said, ‘I’ll take you out to see my town,’ because I was very proud of the town where I lived in Ireland. In all the years I’d lived there I’d never seen what I saw happen that night.
We were attacked by two Irish girls and they started with verbal abuse: ‘Where did we get money from to go out?’ The assumption was that everybody black should have no means. My friend wore extensions and the girls tore her hair. The bouncer actually came down and put the two girls out and called the gardaí.
At this stage there were three more boys along with the two girls and they were all abusive: ‘You don’t even have food in your own country and now you’re here.’ One girl started to kick me all along my side. I didn’t do anything because I’m not an aggressive person but I was glad the gardaí were called.
To make a long story short, the girls were brought to Portarlington Court and sentenced to community service.

You have a working background in the area of equality.
I’d qualified as a social worker in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. I worked in the slums of Nairobi doing social work and my actual role was to look after younger girls who’d ended up living on the streets basically because their parents don’t have the means to get them schooling.
They came from very disadvantaged families. They were from between the ages of five and 16. They were all black and had gone on the streets to beg because they were poor and their families couldn’t support them.

So you’ve always been interested in helping people?
Yes. When I was young my grandfather had an accident and ended up paralysed so my parents let me go to help him and my grandmother to keep them company. We had home help and we were comfortable enough. They lived outside Nairobi. But I always believed in equality, partly out of my experience of those young girls on the street.
I also campaigned on the streets of Nairobi against domestic violence. Women don’t fare very well in Kenya and domestic violence is prevalent. But nowadays the issue of equality is out there, especially in terms of the funding bodies. For instance, Irish Aid funds projects around the equality issue but Kenya doesn’t get it because we are not part of the Irish aid programme in Africa.

What is Kenya like?
It’s a beautiful country. Many people go there for safaris – it’s a good holiday destination. There’s wealth and beauty and then there’s poverty too. Every government has some level of corruption and the Kenyan Government is no different. But Kenya has wonderful potential. 

So you continued your studies when you came to Ireland?
Yes. I’ve just done my Masters in Equality Studies in UCD.  Again I wanted to continue to work with people and I don’t want people to just empathise with me or with other victims of discrimination. I want people to do something.
I would like to see the Government do more in relation to racism because we should have education and training. And also we have governmental policies that are discriminatory. The Irish Government has not allowed asylum seekers to work and therefore contribute to this country. The perception is that they are here to grab off the Social Welfare. In actual fact they live on the basics – shared accommodation, food they don’t choose for themselves and less than €20 a week.
There is a lot of prejudice here in Ireland. When I was pregnant with my daughter someone shouted at me; “Don’t bring another nigger into this country!” I actually used to try to hide my pregnancy.
These kinds of experiences motivated me to try to do something about the discrimination facing women living here. I believe in equality and a better Ireland and I don’t want my children to go through what I went through.

You’re the director and a founding member of AkiDwA, the African Women’s Network Ireland.
A group of us women decided to look at what was happening to us as migrant women and to see if we could do something to help ourselves so in 1999 I called the first meeting.
We had a couple of other meetings but things didn’t really get moving until I got a group of women from different African countries. When we met I said I wanted to set up a support network as a survival strategy for ourselves. In 2001, we launched AkiDwA as an organisation that aims to address the needs of African women in Ireland.
I was appointed onto the Equality Board recently. It is an effective group. I hope that my voice will be heard, that I will change people’s perceptions and not only that but, through the likes of the Equality Board, change policy.

What do you think of Sinn Féin and indeed this country in general?
Sinn Féin is very good on the issue of racism. I’m just learning about Sinn Féin and all the political parties here. I asked my husband what Sinn Féin is all about and he said it’s like the Mau Mau in Kenya, the group which fought for freedom from Britain. So I said who am I not to support Sinn Féin?
I’ve seen three faces of Ireland. I’ve seen the face where I’m a novelty, a victim and then I reached a point where I saw the face of growing awareness.
In fact an example of what can happen is an organisation called Athlone Families Together, set up to get two Nigerian women who had been deported back into Ireland. The group consisted mainly of Irish families. They didn’t succeed in getting the two women back but it showed that there is also goodwill towards migrants out there.
And then of course there was the case of the autistic boy, Great Agbonlahor, who, along with his twin sister Melissa and mother Olivia, was deported from Ireland earlier this year. That family was badly treated. The interests of the children should be put first. They never got back here to Ireland despite the huge support they got from the Irish community they lived amongst.

So though you’ve experienced racism here, you’ve also witnessed its opposite amongst the Irish?
Yes. I love Ireland.
I identify myself also as a person of colour, a black African woman. That’s my identity and that’s who I am but when I go to conferences to speak on discrimination I don’t just go as a Kenyan. I go also as an Irish person.  We still have a long way to go but we’re getting there.