When Franciska Issaka visited Stanford University in 1980 after moving to the U.S. from Ghana, she was impressed with the amenities available to the town.

She decided then that she wanted to bring such amenities from this village back to her own village, amenities such as electricity, running water, roads and telephones.

It was years later -- after she received her degree from Denver University and went on to a prestigious human rights and government career -- that she started to make that dream a reality.

In 1993, she moved back to her village, Kantia, to advocate for human rights and empower the people in her community to a better future.

Wednesday, she spoke at the University of Oklahoma about "Realizing Women's Rights in Africa: the Interface Between Cultural and Universal Rights." She said her heart was never far from her village.

"When I go back home I feel alive," she said.

Issaka, the chief executive of the Centre for Sustainable Development Initiative, said her visit to OU came at just the right time. She said she has spent so much time and energy in her home village that she had been in danger of losing her global perspective. She thanked the Women's and Gender Studies and African and African American Studies programs at OU for bringing her to campus this week, saying it gave her a better perspective and allowed her to formalize her practices into words in order to communicate her work.

She wore a brightly colored batik dress Wednesday and displayed a bright personality as well. She started off her address to a room full of students by teaching them a song in her native language, Frafra. Loosely translated, it meant "lift OU up high" and included a fist pump at just the right moment.

Issaka's joyful attitude is important in her line of work. She told difficult stories of the oppression of women in Africa, and Ghana specifically. She balanced them, however, with stories of victories that she had personally seen in protecting women and empowering them with rights they would not otherwise have had.

The effect she's had in her village is evident in a story she told. She said she and her sister attended a funeral recently where one man, who did not know them personally, was publicly criticizing their work. He said it was a shame that now no man could beat his wife in the village. If he did, she would run to the Issaka sisters and they would get him arrested.

When the man was told that the Issaka sisters were standing right there, he left without saying anything else.

Issaka has learned a lot in her years as an activist and human rights advocate. She shared what she learned with those in attendance Wednesday.

She said African culture has many practices that are harmful to women. Despite international organizations establishing women's rights since 1948, many women throughout Africa are still subject to these harmful practices, Issaka said.

"Even though we have all those documents, ... African women are still being discriminated against on a daily basis," she said.

Such practices include prohibitions against women owning property, expensive marriage rituals that lead to men believing they own their wives and treat them however they like, and women being cast out of society because they are suspected of being witches merely because they are prospering.

Issaka said in Ghana, laws have been passed to protect women's rights. However, the pluralistic lawmakers created laws that were intended not to step on the native culture. The result is an ambiguous law that protects women on the one hand while providing easy loopholes for women to continue to be oppressed, Issaka said.

"(The law) applies, as I said, concurrently, and it makes it very confusing," she said.

For example, if a women gets married based on cultural rights as well as modern legalities, but then wants a divorce, she is at a loss. The modern laws say she can ask for a divorce, but lawmakers will point to her cultural marriage ceremony and say she must abide by cultural laws of divorce as well. In those cultural traditions, women have absolutely no recourse to divorce.

These harmful traditions and practices stem from a social issue, Issaka said.

"There's a societal mindset that says women and girls are inferior, men and boys and superior," she said.

However, Issaka pointed out that not everything in African culture is bad. She said the traditions of respecting one's elders and the emphasis on community were good things that should be honored.

What is more, Issaka said if one looks at the history of the harmful cultural practices against women, they often started out with good intentions. The traditions surrounding widows -- which now serve to strip widows of their husbands' property -- were originally put in place to protect widows.

"The intention of all cultural practices in Africa is to provide legal and social protection to all human beings," Issaka said.

That's a key realization, she said. Both modern human rights and cultural practices were designed with the same end in mind: protecting human beings. That convergence can be used to change harmful practices against women, Issaka said.

In practice, Issaka said she urges the people she interacts with in Ghana to examine their cultural practices and see how they have diverged from the original intention. However, she said she still works in the short term to counter the harmful practices until they can be completely overturned.

She works to intervene in situations where women are being injured or oppressed throughout her region.

"So while we are doing the interface (of culture and universal rights), we are fighting on the streets, in the trenches," she said.

Issaka's visit was part of the Women's and Gender Studies' Activist-in-Residence program as well as Jill Irvine's Presidential Dream Course, "Women and World Politics."

Irvine said she has taught the class for several years, but this is the first semester it has the additional funding that comes with being a Dream Course. It allows her to bring women activists to campus throughout the semester to speak to students and the public. Irvine said she thought it would be especially advantageous for her students to hear about the struggles and successes of women around the world from the mouths of activists themselves.

Julianna Parker Jones 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com



The Presidential Dream Course, "Women and World Politics," will have several more public lectures and events throughout the semester. They are:

· "Generation Facebook: How Young People and Women are Changing Religion and Politics in the Middle East," by Mona Eltahawy, award-winning syndicated columnist, blogger and international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues, will be 7 p.m. Oct. 12 in the Kerr Auditorium of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

· A film screening of "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," a film about the women's peace movement in Liberia, will be presented 7 p.m. Oct. 22 in Gaylord Hall room 1140 by Gini Reticker, an Emmy-winning, Academy-Award nominated documentary film maker.

· Charlotte Bunch, director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, will present "Women's Global Activism, Women's Rights as Human Rights" 4:30 p.m. Nov. 19 in Beaird Lounge of the Oklahoma Memorial Union.

· "Marina Nawabi, human rights activist and election monitor in Afghanistan, will present "Women's Rights in Afghanistan: Where do we go from here?" 7 p.m. Dec. 2 in the Regents and Associates Rooms of the Oklahoma Memorial Union.