Incredible story of hope!

The frightened girl was expected to wed a man nearly three times her age, and Lolosoli told her she didn't have to.

The man was Lolosoli's brother, but that didn't matter. Females come first in Umoja.

"You are a small girl. He is an old man," said Lolosoli, who offers haven to girls running from forced marriages. "Women don't have to put up with this nonsense any more."

Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umoja, which means "unity" in Swahili, on an unwanted field of dry grasslands. The women had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who claimed they had shamed their community.

Stung by the treatment, the charismatic and self-assured Lolosoli decided no men would be allowed to live in the circular village of mud-and-dung huts.

In an act of spite, the men of her tribe started their own village across the way, often monitoring activities in Umoja and spying on the females.

What started as a group of homeless women looking for a place of their own has become a successful and happy village in northern Kenya. About three dozen women live here and run a cultural centre and camping site for tourists visiting the adjacent Samburu National Reserve.

The men in the rival village also attempted to build a tourist and cultural centre, but were not very successful.

With the money they collected from their ventures, the women were able to eat well, send their children to school for the first time and reject male demands for their daughters' circumcision and marriage. They even hired men to haul firewood, traditionally women's work.

They became so respected that troubled women � some beaten, some trying to get divorced � started showing up in Umoja. Then, Lolosoli was invited by the United Nations to attend a recent world conference on gender empowerment in New York.

"That's when the very ugly jealous behaviours started," says Lolosoli, referring to threats she received from local men when they learned she was going to New York.

"They just said, frankly, that they wanted to kill me."

She laughs because she thinks the idea sounds overly dramatic.

Sebastian Lesinik, chief of the male village, also laughs when describing the clear division he sees between men and women.

"She's questioning our very culture," he says. "This seems to be the thing in these modern times: troublemaking ladies like Rebecca."

In a mix of gumption and the trickle of influences from the outside world, a version of feminism has grown progressively alongside extreme levels of sexual violence, the battle against HIV/AIDS and the aftermath of African wars � all of which have changed the role of African women in surprising ways.

A package of new laws has been presented to Kenya's parliament to give women unprecedented rights to refuse marriage proposals, fight sexual harassment in the workplace, reject genital mutilation and prosecute rape, an act so frequent that Kenyan leaders call it the nation's biggest human rights issue.

The most severe penalty would chemically castrate repeatedly convicted rapists and send them to prison for life.

In neighbouring Uganda, thousands of women have been rallying for the Domestic Relations Bill, which would give them specific legal rights if their husbands take a second wife, in part because of fear of HIV infection.

Eleven years after the genocide in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed, women in the country hold 49 per cent of the seats in the lower house of parliament. Many of them are war widows who have said they felt compelled to rise up in protest after male Hutu leaders presided over the 1994 slaughter of Tutsi tribal members and moderate Hutus.

Across the continent in West Africa, Nigerian women are lobbying strongly for the nomination of more women politicians, including a presidential candidate in 2007, saying that men have failed to run the country properly.

"We are at the start of something important for African women," says Margaret Auma Odhiambo, a leader of western Kenya's largest group for widows, all of whose husbands died of AIDS complications.

Even before she went to the U.N. conference, Lolosoli was going house to house in the nearby town of Archer's Post, telling women they had rights, such as to refuse to have sex with their husbands if they were being beaten or ill-treated.

But her effort to speak out for change in her patch of the continent shows the difficulties of changing the rhythm and power structure of village life.

"A woman is nothing in our community," says Lolosoli, referring to the members of her tribe, including the men in the village across the road.

"You aren't able to answer men or speak in front of them whether you are right or wrong. That has to change. Women have to demand rights, and then respect will come.

"But if you remain silent, no one thinks you have anything to say. Then again, I was not popular for what I was saying."

Lolosoli says she and women from around the world at the New York conference bonded as they watched an episode of Oprah that focused on women, verbal abuse and cheating husbands.

"You just cry and cry. Then again, I was really inspired to know that a lot of women face challenges of this nature and make it."

When she returned to Kenya, armed with ideas and training workbooks, she calmly stood her ground against those seeking to shut down the women's village.

"I would just ignore the men when they threw stones at me and ask, `Are you okay? Are your children okay? Are your cows okay?' "After everything, they weren't going to stop us."

Though Lolosoli is still battling her brother over his attempt to marry the 13-year-old girl, many residents of the men's village have been admitting defeat. They are no longer trying to attract tourists and some have moved away.

"She has been successful, it's true," sighs chief Lesinik, who'd always said that "the man is the head; the lady is the neck" and "a man cannot take ... `advice' from his neck."

Now, it seems he is changing his mind on that metaphor.

"Maybe we can learn from our necks," he shrugs. "Maybe just a little bit."