By Foster Benjamin:

She calls herself “the neglected” and “the forgotten.” Or “the outcast.”

“I’m a living example of neglect, deprivation and discrimination,” says Shemile Lackson, a 38-year-old, paralysed on her left side, from polio.

This is what Lackson is telling a network of women and girls with disabilities visiting her at her home in Ntcheu District.

It is a tiny home—a mud, thatched hut—precariously perched on a bleak, windswept terrain in Kasale Village, on the edge of Ntcheu Boma.

Like many women with disabilities, Lackson pours out a long list of grievances. Chief among them is a lack of access to farming land.

“Food is scarce, and I go hungry, most of the times. It’s all because I don’t have any piece of land to cultivate crops,” she says.

In fact, she doesn’t see her disability negatively.

“I’m not like those disabled people who often want to be pitied, considered to be deserving of charity. If given land, I can till it well, using my right arm,” says Lackson, a mother of three.

Eight years ago, she recalls, she used to hoe in her father’s garden back in his neighbouring home village. But things became nasty when Lackson’s father died, prompting relatives to kick Lackson, her brothers and their ailing mother out of the village.

“They told us ‘Since your pillar has fallen, you should go back to Kasale, and you’ll be farming there,’” she remembers bitterly, “Arriving in Kasale, I was shocked as things turned nastier for me. I wasn’t apportioned any piece of land, because of my status. When I confronted mkulu wa limana [head of the clan] he told me in the face: ‘You’re disabled, therefore you cannot farm.’ It really hurt me. It’s sad that we’re still being spoken to in a dismissive manner. But, to be honest with you, I seriously needed land, and I still need it, to grow crops and become self-sustaining.”

The mkulu wa limana’s cold response didn’t deter Lackson from her fight for land. She went to Group Village Headwoman (GVH) Kasale to intervene in her crisis.

She claims GVH Kasale’s response was apparently frosty, saying “we chiefs don’t overtake mkulu wa limana (head of the clan) in settling land issues among clans.”

This claim is supported by Esther Mbite, chairperson for Network of Girls and Women with Disabilities in Malawi (NEGWDM).

She is among the team visiting Lackson’s home.

When asked by this reporter, GVH Kasale admitted to be “wrongly dismissing complaints of land lodged by women with disabilities because we didn’t know that they, too, have rights and potential to cultivate.”

“I must confess that we, unknowingly, were wrong discriminating our disabled relatives in the allocation of land to grow crops,” Kasale says.

“For instance, when they approached us, for a