As a range of interest groups clamour for amendments to Kenya’s draft constitution on the basis of claims that it ‘legalises abortion’, Mary Wandia asks them to consider the ‘sobering facts on abortion, women’s rights and the status of women’. Voluntary abortion ‘happens irrespective of whether laws making it legal or illegal exist’, writes Wandia, and Kenya’s current legislation simply ‘makes safe abortion “illegal” and unsafe abortion “legal”, sentencing poor women and girls to unnecessary and preventable suffering and death.’

The recent murder of Eugene Terreblanche, founder of the white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement, should have focused the attention of the world on the exploitative, oppressive and de-humanising conditions of the landless peasants and farm workers in South Africa, writes Mphutlane wa Bofelo. But it’s easier for the country’s elites to blame racism alone for the incident than to acknowledge the historic links between race and class dynamics and to tackle the disparities that these have created, he concludes.

As 36 imprisoned Saharawi activists continue a hunger strike from seven Moroccan jails, Konstantina Isidoros writes of the 'groundswell of international condemnation of Morocco's behaviour'. Protesting against Morocco's longstanding occupation of Western Sahara and the human rights abuses suffered by the indigenous Saharawi population, the hunger strikers' action represents the latest peaceful challenge to the Moroccan state's illegal claims on Western Sahara, stresses Isidoros, from individuals widely recognised as 'prisoners of conscience'.