Focus on Africa

Reflections a year since floods in Derna

On the night of 10 September 2023, Storm Daniel unleashed torrential rain and fierce winds on Libya’s north-east region. Two dams burst near Derna, releasing a devastating flood wave that swept through the city centre, killing thousands of people and causing widespread destruction. A year on since the disaster - a survivor reflects on the day and life now in Derna.

Also, there is a new malaria vaccine that could protect pregnant women and their unborn children.

And how the recent killings of Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei in Kenya and Christiania Idowu in Nigeria sparked deliberations on the extent of misogyny and femicide in some african societies on social media.

Presenter: Audrey Brown Producers: Patrcia Whitehorn, Yvette Twagiramariya, Stefania Okereke and Blessing Aderogba Technical Producer: Jack Graysmark Senior Journalist: Karnie Sharp Editors: Alice Muthengi and Andre Lombard

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 11 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Hello and welcome to this podcast from the BBC World Service. Please let us know what you think and tell other people about us on social media. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my hundredth mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of CD-Tails. Hello, I'm Audrey Brown and today in Focus on Africa, a new malaria vaccine being trialed in Mali could help protect pregnant women and their unborn children. Imagine we can have a vaccine that can be used before being pregnant and even being pregnant. You have the choice to do this vaccine and you can have a protection for two years. And what are the factors driving the hatred and killing of women and girls? We actually build this mostly to a culture that doesn't respect the rights of women and it does not start with femicide. It starts with other forms of gender violence, Bible, financial, and the rest, right? And by the time it reaches femicide, it means that we've accepted violence in relationships. It's Wednesday, the 11th of September. First we go to Libya. A year ago, Libya faced one of its most devastating disasters, Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean hurricane-like system known as a "medican". It swept across the country with unprecedented force. The torrent of rain fell on the northeast coast. The amount of rain that fell in one 24-hour period was much more than the region would get in a month. No wonder then that the area was deluged. The port city of Derna bore the brunt of the storm. Let's start with the aftermath of those catastrophic floods in Libya. We've been focusing a lot on Derna, it's been very, very difficult for us to get accurate figures from Derna of the amount of people who have lost their lives there because you can see... Two crucial dams were overwhelmed and burst and several bridges were destroyed and entire neighborhoods disappeared into the sea as a huge tsunami-like torrent of water swept the city. Thousands of people were displaced from their homes. The United Nations figures say around 6,000 died in a city of 90,000 people. But those who are still picking up the pieces say the number of dead could go as high as 30,000. We'll hear more about this from a Libyan journalist in just a moment. But let's listen to the experience of one family and it's told by Mr Abdulaziz Awdali. That's how I woke up, trying to know what was happening. A huge wave came through, water filled up to floors in less than a second. The water was moving us around the house in the darkness. I spotted a network tower, so I clunked to it. I spent there around 10 minutes, water levels lowered. I found myself on a roof, the flood was still running. I lost my father and mother. May Allah have mercy on them. My nephews, who were spending the night at ours, died too. The house was destroyed. I only found the bodies of my nephews, but I didn't find those of my father and mother. It is very hard and that's what I keep praying for them. So what has been happening to those who survived Derna's worst ever humanitarian catastrophe? Joar Awdali is a journalist from Derna, now based in Istanbul, in Turkey. Joar left his family and most of his friends behind. Everyone he knows has been affected and he told me of one of them, who was with him in Istanbul now and had lost 17 members of his closest family, including his wife and child. Many of my friends lost their families, not just one or two, but a number of their families. In a friend that is displaced with me here in Istanbul, lost all of his family, including his wife and baby and father and mother and sister and brothers. Only his younger brother didn't leave us that night because he was in the scouts, so he was out of the house, preparing for the worst. So your friend who's living with you now who lost almost everyone except one brother? How is he doing now under the circumstances? Because he was also displaced, he can't go back to Derna, he can't even go back to the ruins of his house. His house was demolished because of the floods. He can't even print out papers or his lost family because he's afraid if he go back to the offices of Derna, he will be arrested. Even he told me lately that he had an issue with having his compensation because a number of families who lost their houses had compensation, he had difficulty in doing that because of the paperwork that was required from the bank because it is required for you to be there and he can't go back there and this is not exceptional. There are lots of people who are residents of Derna but left it lately because of the war and displacement and reasons like that. So on top of losing almost everyone that he loves and his neighbors and his house, now he's also losing out on the opportunity to get compensation for at least some of those losses. Why will he be arrested if he goes back? He's a journalist, he's just like me. Since we were young, we had issues in our city. Back then, Derna was under the control of several revolutionary measures because we documented several crimes that happened there, air bombings from international airplanes and such things when the Army, LNA Army controlled our city. We were forced to be displaced because this is our only chance to stay alive out of the prison. So that's why all of the freelance journalists in 2018 were forcibly leaving the city including me and that frame. So not just an accident of nature or tragedy but also the politics of Libya keeping you away from home. Do you know how the rebuilding of the city is going? Well, to be honest, there are efforts. There are things that are happening even in our days, just yesterday, a number of schools were flourished and reconstructed in a certain way and were reopened, even the hospital in the middle of the city which was minorly affected by the floods. So reconstruction efforts are happening but I don't think that they are happening on the base that people hoped. People just after five or six days after the floods were out on protest calling for international companies to overview the reconstruction efforts that will happen and that will reconstruct it in the best way possible. But sadly, the reconstruction efforts that are happening now are happening from local companies but I don't think that it is on the base and on the level that people hoped for. So you know how many people actually lost their lives, their estimated figure at the time was 5,000 but people did think that that was an underestimation. People estimate the numbers between 10,000 and people say even 30,000. Wow, that's a very, very broad difference. Exactly, but until now we don't have official numbers. Recently I was a part of local efforts from a local author who published a book talking about the flood that happened in Dern from individual effort. We reached a number of almost 4,000 people. We documented even their full names. This is an individual effort and we reached 4,000 people, 4,000 names. All of the bodies have got to be recovered, they've got to be identified. Why is the process taking so long? It's a year now. There is a huge number of people who were thrown out by the floods into the sea. So under the sea there is a huge number of people who are still there and even the bodies are not bodies right now, they are bones. Just two months after the floods people were recovering bones from the sea and giving them to the recent to do the DNA analysis and trying to figure out how many bodies they have found. And there is also the issue of people who went underground because there is a huge wreckage that were in the middle of the city in that day and they were floods filled with mud. So people were underground. No one can know for sure where is a dead body can be. Even the bodies that were recovered that were found until now most of the families don't know for sure what happened to their relatives, including my friend that I talked about earlier. He lost almost 17 of his close family and until now he didn't find even one dead body of them. It must make it very difficult for people to recover from such a huge big loss. Has anyone been found responsible in relation to the events in Derna? Has there been an investigation and enquiry into the events? Yes, almost one month or two months ago there was a sentence made over 12 people, including head of the Minnesota Council of Derna. The Minnesota Council was sentenced for 14 years in prison and some people find it enough. Some people find that there are more efforts of accountability should be made, especially that the people that were found accused are people in the lowest part of the hierarchy. Now your family are still there? What are they telling you? How are they doing? To be honest, they are surviving just even three days after the floods, even before the protest that happened in the city, my brother, no man, that's his name, was captured and he was arrested and until now he is in jail for nothing except going on TV and talking about the real situation and the whole chaos that is happening in the city after the floods. So people are still suffering. I told the story of my brother to just showcase a certain atmosphere that is still happening in the city even after what happened to it and the thousands of people that we have lost. Until now no one knows what is the percentage of the people who got compensation for their affection. I expect that it is a majority. In the reconstruction efforts, lots of houses were demolished, claiming that they were in future roads, a friend of mine lost his family and his family's house. So he lost two houses of them until now they had no compensation for them. It must be incredibly frustrating. Do people have a sort of recourse? Is there a complaints process, a redress process? Can they have a review? I don't know about that because lately I was contacted by a number of families saying that they were going to do a protest asking for their reconstruction and compensation, especially the people who lived in the old city neighborhood, which is the oldest neighborhood in the city, and it was affected by the war in 2018. And when the floods came, it took all of it to see. So they told me they wanted to do that because they are afraid of the security situation in the city, and they are afraid they go and protest and claim their rights. They are afraid that they will be arrested. Thank you very, very much. Thank you for following up this situation. And I hope that this situation next time when we talk about it will be better. That's the Libyan journalist, Joar Ali, now based in Istanbul in Turkey. Now to news that could be a huge breakthrough in the treatment and prevention of malaria. It's something that could save the lives of millions of children and babies from the biggest killer of African children because that is what malaria is. Eight out of ten of all malaria deaths on the continent are of children under the age of five. UNICEF says a child under the age of five dies of malaria every minute in Africa. Failure during pregnancy is an enormous problem. But there is hope on the horizon. A three-year clinical trial of a new malaria vaccine scenario, PFSPZ, could protect pregnant women and their unborn children. The study was carried out in southern Mali and involved 300 women who were thinking of getting pregnant. Dr. Halimatu Jawara works with the Malaria Research and Training Centre based in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and she was one of the lead investigators in the trial. Hello, Dr. Jawara. Hello. How are you? I'm good, Audrey, and you? I'm very well. Thank you. Are you in Bamako? Yes. I'm in Bamako. Is it hot and windy? And sort of... Bamako. You are lucky to have... we are having a big rain with days, so... Ah, okay. All right. So no desert dust. No. That's good. Thank you very much for agreeing to speak to us. So tell us about this trial. Why did you need to conduct it? The study is a malaria trial study, so it was about a vaccine against malaria. Why we did this study is to look at if the vaccine has an efficacy in women of type wearing potential in order to test it in pregnant women and to see if there is a protective efficacy in pregnant women also. Yeah, because children, if their mothers have malaria, are they also born with pen malaria? When pregnant women have malaria, the risk is... the first is to lose the pregnancy. So there is a risk of miscarriage, there is a risk of stillbirth, and also over-consecancies can be a low birth weight and overs. And yes, there is a risk of developing a placental malaria which can affect also babies. And of course we know that malaria has always been the biggest killer of children under the age of five, right? So we needed something like this. Exactly. Yes. So how did you recruit the women to take part in this trial and how many women were they? So we recruited 300 women and recruitment was done in Wollissiboo, where we have a community health center. So Wollissiboo and Sierra Rounding area, we just invite women attending the clinic and around to come for the recruitment. So recruitment was done at the community health center in Wollissiboo. So this is before women were pregnant or were they already pregnant? Before they become pregnant, we test the vaccine of women who want to become pregnant in a near future, about one year. But during the time of selection, we make sure that they are not pregnant, and then during the time of vaccination also, they have had to be under pregnancy prevention about one month, just the time for the vaccination. So these 300 women were not pregnant, they got the vaccination. What did you find? So just after the period of vaccination, women were free to remove their pregnancy prevention, and then they start to become pregnant. So among women who become pregnant, we follow them during pregnancies and after birth up to one year. So after analysis, you have seen that there is a big protection, more than half of protection against malaria and against Prazitania among those women who become pregnant and during a two years of follow up. And you have found that also, even women who don't become pregnant, there is a protection the first year, but a second year also where we didn't give any vaccination or drugs, the protective efficacy stay for two years. So this is the first time we have seen that the PFSPZ vaccine has an efficacy in pregnant women. It is reduced by more than half of malaria infection and malaria diseases. And also the vaccine has an efficacy for two years without giving a booster. So this PFSPZ vaccine is the one that you've tested, right? So what is different about it compared to other preventative medicines for malaria? What is different first is that it is the first vaccine where we are working now and that have been shown efficacy in women of child-bearing potential and in pregnant women. We have other vaccines that have been even recommended by WHO, R21 and RTSS, but with target children under five. So this is the first vaccine that have shown an efficacy in pregnant women and the vaccine is really in development targeting also when people are pregnant. This is an over phase we will do to vaccinate them. Spell out for us why this is so significant. Reducing malaria by half during pregnancy is huge. In 2021, there were an estimated more than 200 million of cases of malaria, especially in Africa, more than 90% of this case happened in Africa. And according again to WHO, malaria infection occurs in more than 32% pregnancies in moderate to high transmission area. So imagine we can reduce this load by half. So it's really important. Was this the first time that malaria vaccines were tested very specifically for how it would affect pregnant women? What considerations go into giving women who are about to become pregnant or want to become pregnant vaccine? We have not tested this vaccine yet in pregnant women, but this is our goal. So we test in women who want to become pregnant and we have seen for the first time this efficacy. And now we want to move then to test the vaccine because this have been our plan since we start with some area and LMIV to test in pregnant women at a different stage of pregnancy, first second and first trimester. So imagine we can have a vaccine that can be used before being pregnant and even being pregnant, you have the choice to do this vaccine and you can have a protection for two years. And we already have all the approvals and we should start in early next year on this target population. But you have to be very careful, aren't you? Because it's very difficult to test on pregnant women. Because there are so many dangers to the unborn child. Yes, what I have not mentioned is that the vaccine has shown to be very safe. So we have tested in adults before women of child bearing potential to see the safety. And the trial in women of child bearing potential has shown that there is no risk with it. And because we receive all the regulatory approvals in Mali and in the US, so this was based on some studies that have shown that the vaccine is very safe. So the vaccine have a very safe profile and can be used in pregnant women. So when can we expect a rollout? I hope soon. But we have to go through different phases. This is the phase two. We have to go through a phase three and test in pregnant women and have the approvals of overall regulatory countries and WHO. So I hope very soon. So you tested only in Mali. Are you going to, in other phases of the trial, go to other countries? Yes. We have work on a grant where we want to do a multi-centric study of the vaccine in women of child bearing potential in three different countries in addition to Mali. Good luck and thank you very much. This is good news. Thank you so much. I hope everything goes well. I hope so. Thank you, Dr. That's Dr. Halimatu Jawara from the Malaria Research and Training Centre in Mali. This is Focus in Africa from the BBC World Service. Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 95 low-cost time travel agent or maybe real estate sales on Mars, is your profession? It doesn't matter. 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When a security person offended a junior colleague and myself and when we reported him to our boss, the supervisor, he was made to apologize towards me. He apologized to my junior colleagues, I was a man properly and then to me, he packed me at my back and said, "Ah, okay, sorry sweetheart." And guess what? To make my house worse, the boss is our idea. My colleagues are our idea, laughed it off, nobody reprimanded him, nobody. I once wanted our source a job to a freelancer and he alrightly refused and told me, "Budlita, he doesn't want to work with me because I'm a woman." We are often tortured to be in countries, so there's no way you would want another person that should be a woman to want to be in country. But we're not just talking about individual attitudes though, when we talk about misogyny and sexism. The recent killings of Olympic athlete Rebecca Chapter Gay in Kenya and Christiana Ido in Nigeria have sparked conversations about how these attitudes make women vulnerable to abuse, assault and murder. A United Nations report from 2022 shows that Africa recorded the highest number of female intimate partner and family-related killings in the world. That's not to say it doesn't happen elsewhere, but we are focused on Africa. So let's discuss the issues that drive what can only be hatred, fear and contempt of women and girls based on the fact that they are female. Ololade Fanii is a feminist activist scholar and PhD student at Emory University. And Felix Kiprono is a Kenyan journalist and data analyst. They're both animated by these issues. Ololade, I'm going to start with you. We are looking at femicide, essentially act of violence and murder, specifically involving women being killed, especially by intimate partners. What do you think drives it? I think it starts from a definition of femicide. So femicide is the killing and in many cases the sexual abuse and the killing of women and girls because of the agenda. And it takes on multiple forms. We see it in intimate partner violence. We see it in family or naval violence. We see it in organized crime. We see it with keto, which is homophobic, corrective, rape, violence, targeted at queer women. We see it with police violence. And so it takes on multiple dimensions, but all of them are tied to the targeted sexual abuse and mother of women and girls because of the agenda. So you're talking about an environment that is essentially a world in which women and girls are just not safe because it happens at so very many different levels. Let's look at why that is the case. I'm a very big fan of what Latin American feminists are doing, rather than femicide, they called it femicide. And they were trying to point out how this details specifically, how the definition are given, but how it's encoded in state structures and judicial structures. So for instance, you'd see with Nigeria, there's no word to define what femicide is. I mean, the crime itself is generically assigned as violence against person. And so there is no specific spelling out of male violence against women because of the agenda. State structure is so encoded in judicial structures, this crime goes unnoticed, unpunished for so long and responsibility is taken from men, responsibility is taken away from the state and it's placed on invisible perpetrators. Felix, Kibrono, your thoughts, firstly, on what we just heard from Ololade about the fact that in some cultures, there isn't even a word to describe what is happening to women and girls. So that's right. In this part of the world, we don't have our own definition for femicide. Yes, some countries in Latin America have even special courts and special justice system for that crime, but here we do not have its matter as people. But I think it does help if we have our own definition because it helps us to make sure that we very much feel in how we deal with these cases, especially at the justice front. And what would we need to take into account then in order to situate it in a very specific context in Africa? I don't think we need our own definition, but rather we need to recognize it in our justice system. So it's not a question of defining it. I think it is clear how it's happening, it's happening in families, for instance, just reading from the data that we released earlier and they showed that over 80% of women are killed in a familiar setting. So someone who knows them, 70% of them are killed by either their husband or their boyfriend. So we've got to understand it within that context of relationship. So what I was asking is what do we need to take into account about the behavior in this very particular case of the partners that usually men doing this? Yeah. I mean, it's usually men and usually have a record of assault, whether sex for financial, verbal, it always starts before the femicide kicks in, it always starts with other forms of violence. So that's what we should be looking at in order to make sure that we don't end up that final stage of femicide, which to me, I would fight as the end stage of gender-based violence. What do you think drives gender-based violence towards women, and especially in intimate settings? Well, I think pretty much we would say that we attribute this mostly to a misogynistic culture, a culture that doesn't respect the rights of women, that culture has been passed down a long chain of generations. And it does not start with femicide. It starts with other forms of gender violence, verbal, financial, and the rest, right? And by the time it reaches femicide, it means that we've accepted or we have normalized violence in relationships and more so in romantic relationships. On a large day, there is a belief that women expressing themselves more freely, women demanding greater freedoms, women just going out to work and not necessarily being dependent on men is what is part of the reason behind this growing backlash against women. It's growing violence against women. What do you think? I think even before the rise of feminist, like expressive, explicit feminist movements in Nigeria or across Africa, there have always been instances and it kind of points to what Felix was saying as well about how the trigger for femicide exceeds beyond gender. I mean, the root cause is misogyny. The root cause is a culture that dismisses that disrespects women, but there are so many other factors that are influencing this. There is traditional structures, there is the question of sexuality, there's the question of the digital, how the digital has enabled a whole ecosystem of digital violence, there's the question of religion and silencing. And so especially there is a very sinister aspect of ritual femicide that is not often spoken about and there is no top bottom state structure to accommodate or even speak expressly to this. Here, several cases of femicide and when the perpetrator is being held out, they start saying something that is related, the reason for this is related to ritual murder. There are several cases of boyfriends, killing girlfriends, especially in Nigeria that is tied to this myth of women's bodies as somehow pathways to wealth. And so it's an intersection of so many factors that is triggering this. And I think it also points also to Felix's point about how the data tells you what is happening. I mean, there is the official data that often doesn't have the language of some of these new ones that I've pointed out to. There is the missing data that happens, but because of silencing, you know, we don't hear about it. And of course there is the cancer data and that's why I was so excited to read about Felix's work with Odef Pro, if I got that right, Odef, sorry, and organizations in Nigeria like Document Women or DOHKS that are trying to provide this counter narrative, counter data to say, this is what is missing in the national language, in the national data. This is what is missing. And this is what we need to talk about it. And there are a lot of individual research also going on, a lot of isolated research. I think a lot of these things are happening isolated and there needs to be a top-bottom way to express this explicitly that these are the factors triggering femicide. Do you know, I didn't know that ritual violence and ritual murder was part of what was actually going on with the killing of women. So it's, again, unsettling and disturbing thing to realize. But Felix, all of that was just naming some of the things that your data is showing you. So you obviously have seen some of that as well. What are the other features that you could shed light on for us? One of the things we found out from our data is that most of women that are getting killed are younger women. So between the ages of 15 and 34 constitute more than 65% of all women that are getting killed under the definition of femicide. That's definitely something that's surprising. Most of them are getting killed while arguing because of jealousy. Again, this takes us back to misogyny because we found that 55% of women while in the middle of an argument, that means men have normalized, settling calls by way of violence. Ololadek, what does it tell us that we know a lot more about the people who die at the hands of men, but we don't know a lot about the men? I think it ties to this culture that is inherently very dismissive and also this thing that we have as a people towards violence that is like a lot of people who are very curious want to know about the gruesome details like Felix said that happened to the victim, but somehow that thing protects the abuser or the perpetrator. And I think it also ties to this no justice pipeline that we often have because if you don't spotlight the abuser, if you don't spotlight the perpetrator, then the chances is that they're just going to ghost cut free. A lot of feminists are very intentional about plastering the names, the faces of the abuser all over the social media and drawing on their networks to amplify this. But even with spaces, plaster all over social media, we have heard so many cases where the perpetrator continues to go unpunished. Earlier, I pointed to femicide being encoded in state structures. It's so tied to our culture. So the state is so woven that's who on with it will require people who are dedicated to like on within every strand of femicide. So where do we start in disrupting this, the silence first, the lack of information around it? And also for me, an important point that women seem to talk about it more than men. And it seems to be a problem that women have, not a problem that men actually have or that society has. We need to spell it out. We need to spell out male violence against women. And I know that rouse a lot of people up because you get the counterarances of, oh, not all men. That saying not all men as a response to women legitimately calling out structures that are enabling the killing and mother of women is such a terrible response. And so what it does is creates a structure that is enabling abusers because how is the woman supposed to know out of the hundred men, these two are not going to kill me, you know, we need to spell out all the factors that are complicated in femicide. Like I had said before, there is the question of religion, there's a question of traditional structures, there's a question of sexuality and a big approach that would fill in this gap is data activism. And that's why I'm so excited about the organizations that are doing this as well and all the researchers and all the scholars that are doing this. And finally, we need to press your politicians. There is no top bottom structure for addressing femicide or gender-based violence. There's always this slap on the wrist approach. I mean, we had a minister of women affairs in Nigeria whose response to a woman who was experiencing gender-based violence was that women should shut up when their husbands are fighting with them and basically forcing or encouraging a woman to go back to abusive husbands. Felix, what does the data show us about what men say when women are killed? What we've seen often when there's a high-profile femicide case, we see some toxic debates online where women are getting blamed, there's a lot of victim blaming and that victim blaming mostly comes from men. And that goes a long way in hatching and even hindering the cause of justice in a big way because these women are watching how they are getting blamed. So next time they have a case in their home, they wouldn't go and report. They wouldn't talk about it because they fear they would be blamed for whatever happens. So men have got every role to play because in anything they are the ones who are perpetuating this culture. So the man needs to speak out, even have these discussions in social settings, in families, in weddings, in religious institutions. That is where we need to take this conversation. In Kenya this year we saw men going to the streets when we had a boot of femicide at the start of the year. A lot of men went to the streets in Saapoch for women and we saw some good things coming out of there. So men have got every role to play in adding this huge problem. Do you think a man can be a feminist? I think feminism takes different definitions to people. I believe men should stand for women's rights. African feminist activists, scholar and PhD student in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University, Ololade Faniye and also Felix Kiprono, a Kenyan journalist and data analyst, discussing the issues of misogyny and violence against women. Do look out for last Thursday's edition of Focus on Africa, which discusses the death of Rebecca Chaptige to hear what it's like being a woman in the field of athletics. Sometimes in Africa was compiled by Patricia Whitehorn, Yvette Togiramaria and Stefaniye Okareke here in London. Blessing Adirokba was hard at work from Lagos. Carney Sharp is the senior journalist in charge. Jack Graysbach was our technical producer. André Lombard and Alice Medangi are our editors. I'm Audrey Brown and we'll talk again next time. Good taste is easy to spot, but hard to pin down. You know it when you see it. And in today's culture, there's no greater signifier of taste than the car you drive. You want something sophisticated, but not stodgy, daring yet classic, approachable, but with an air of opulence. That's where the Range Rover Evoke comes in. 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