 |
| Ndege ya Tanzania |
If Kethi Kilonzo and Gladys Shollei were men, would the Kenyan media and public have hung them out to
dry as they have been doing? Would the minutest details about their temperament and character have been the subject of discussion?
Would they have been tried, judged, and sentenced by the public before any evidence is presented? I seriously doubt it.
Similarly,
if Nancy Baraza had been male and had pinched a female nose, would she
have lost her job as Deputy Chief Justice? Maybe not. Because in Kenya
powerful men can get away with murder, rape, sexual harassment, lying,
and stealing, but if there is the faintest whiff of impropriety on the
part of a woman, all hell breaks loose.
I am not saying
that women are not capable of committing crimes or that they should not
be reprimanded or punished for breaking the law; I am saying that the
treatment meted out to women is very different from that meted out to
men.
Kilonzo and Shollei are just two among many women
who have learnt the hard way that there is nothing a Kenyan male fears
more than a powerful woman. Last week, the social media was abuzz with
news that Nairobi County Senator Mike Sonko had insulted radio presenter
Caroline Mutoko on live radio.
This shocking news was
followed by a video of Nairobi County Governor Evans Kidero slapping
Nairobi Women’s Representative Rachel Shebesh outside his office.
Although
Kidero quickly apologised for his actions, stating in his defence that
the slap was a reaction to an assault on his lower abdomen, the fact
remains that a man who represents four million Nairobians was seen
hitting a woman.
Shortly after that episode, during
an online discussion about the infamous slap and what it says to Kenyan
women, a well-known hate-mongering individual, who ironically claims to
have high regard for women, referred to me as “someone who thinks with
her genitals”.
It seems misogyny in Kenya has reached unprecedented levels and cuts across all ethnic groups and classes.
Recently I wrote about a report that showed that
levels of gang rape and murder of women and girls in Nairobi’s slums
have reached epidemic proportions and virtually constitute a “femicide”.
Misogyny, of course, is not a particularly Kenyan phenomenon; it exists
in all societies where partriarchy prevails and where men fear the
power of women.
The difference, I believe, is that in
Kenya, misogyny has become normalised. The women’s movement (if we ever
had one) is long dead. Women have been co-opted into the very
male-centric patriarchal system that diminishes and destroys women.
Those
women who still believe that if they work hard and prove their mettle,
they will naturally rise to the top should just look at Kilonzo’s and
Shollei’s cases and prepare for the day when they too will be judged and
vilified by men who cannot bear the thought of women holding any kind
of power or influence.
Dr Wambui Mwangi argues in a
thought-provoking essay titled “Silence is a Woman”, published recently
in The New Inquiry, that the domination of all Kenyan women by all
Kenyan men is a post-colonial social contract that reinforces the
patriarchal and ethnicist order.
This order states
that if you are a woman, you are dispensable, that you do not really
matter. Which is why there has been more outrage about the men who were
killed or maimed in the 2007/8 post-election violence than about the
women and girls who were brutally gang-raped.
Yet
Kenyan women have in the past used the very bodies that Kenyan men
despise to register political dissent. The Kenyan mothers of political
prisoners who stripped in a section of Uhuru Park (now re-named Freedom
Corner) used their bodies to make a political statement.
The
late Wangari Maathai, who in my opinion was the only true feminist this
country has known, suffered police beatings when she joined these
mothers and when she tried to save Nairobi’s green spaces. She became a
heroine abroad, but for all her efforts, was only appointed assistant
minister by the Mwai Kibaki administration, an insult she bore with
dignity.
 |
| TEMBO |
No comments:
Post a Comment