It was a traditional practice for the bridegroom to pay some dowry to the parents of the girl. This boosted the parents’ income and could help pay for the education of the boys in the family. In other circumstances, the girl child was in danger of being married off at an early age, sometimes as early as 10 years old. The child bride, more often than not, was married off to an old man five or six times her age. If this happened, then it meant the girl was joining a polygamous marriage. The planning and the decision for such marriages was done by the male members of the girl’s family without any consultation with the girl.
Once married, the role of the woman was to give birth to children, rear them and take care of household matters. As no family planning existed, most women had very many children. It was not uncommon to find one woman with as many as 15 children. In addition to their role as mothers, they were also expected to grow subsistence crops. The women worked very hard and for long hours every day while the men spent their time in beer halls discussing how to discipline their wives. If the women complained of maltreatment by the men, they were beaten.
There were also certain foods that women were forbidden to eat even though they were the cooks for the men. Among the Luo ethnic group, for example, foods like mutton, chicken and eggs were strictly for men and their sons. The wives and daughters were fed on less nutritious foods. Moreover, women were exposed to certain health hazards. Due to poor nutrition, hard labor, and lack of proper medical care, many of them died of complications during childbirth and other poverty-related diseases. The average life expectancy for women was only 40 years. This was the world in which my great-grandmother and grandmother lived.
With the coming of Christianity those traditional beliefs that were considered harmful were discarded. However, some customs that discriminated against women are still being practiced today. Most men would like to retain their traditional way of life as much as possible but they have to accept certain realities. Recently, in 1963, the constitution was changed to make life easier for the Kenyan woman. Dowry, child marriages, and wife beating were banned. Free education at the primary level for all children was introduced. Consequently, today the ratio of girls to boys in primary level school enrollment is 2:3. There are also more girls attending secondary school than there were 30 years ago. In the universities, the proportion of female students is only about 10% but is steadily rising.
The traditional way of marriage is also dying slowly. Modern parents rarely accept dowry from their son-in-law. Furthermore, as more and more girls attend school, the age at marriage is also increasing, and now they can choose their partners.
However, there are still other problems that face women. Kenya’s birthrate is 4% per year. This is quite high by any standard. Family planning is practiced by only 30% of Kenyan women. There are high maternal and infant mortality rates. The root cause of these problems can be traced to poverty. In fact, poverty makes it more difficult for Kenyan women to acquire educational skills needed to get more desirable and highly paid occupations so that they can improve the standard of living of their families. There is also continued marginalization of women. Women and men are not evenly represented in every consequential aspect of national life. For example, no woman has ever been appointed to a ministerial position since our national independence. Women are kept away from national politics by a tradition that regards them as docile, submissive, and inward-looking human beings. The woman has no business breaking the past. If she does, she is branded a dissident. Society views with suspicion women who contradict traditional expectations.
Hopefully, it is not too late for Kenyan women to be held back by backward beliefs. They need to work very hard for their rights. In the future, our society should make a conscious effort to involve women in development projects, especially in the areas of agriculture, environment, education and health. This should be done through a reduction of disparities in access to educational levels for both men and women. Positive gender roles should be portrayed and women should be allowed equal access to information and decision-making bodies. Family planning should target men who by virtue of tradition have greater influence on family affairs. Men should not see women as a threat but as equal partners in development.
It is pathetic that women all over the world are being discriminated against. But there is hope. If the United Nations can recognize this as a human rights violation, take it seriously, and debate the issues, then all women, including Kenyan women, can hope to live in a better world in the near future.
9. Ochiko
Once, my father saved my life. Twice, my daddy nearly killed me. I was to blame the first time, at Uchumi supermarket in Lang’ata, when the palm of his right hand landed heavily on my left cheek once, then again and again and again and again and again and again and again. In a dimly lit room with nary an air vent in sight, his flesh slapped against mine, each strike a hailstone landing on soft ground, one after the other, and the other, and the other, and the other, and the other, and the other and the other. A fluorescent-strip light fixture dangled from the ceiling, directly above a metal table. Two black walkie-talkies on the otherwise barren table were the only clue that a security control room was the setting for this raging storm.
A framed portrait of Jesus, red fabric draped over his shoulder, brown beard complementing his pink skin, hung near the door, to the right of a slightly larger portrait of President Moi. Rumor had it, the president had the eyes of a goat. Rumor had it that nearly a decade earlier, in 1982, the year after I was born, he survived the betrayal of soldiers who swarmed Eastleigh Air Base in a failed coup attempt because of his horizontal pupils. He could spot danger lurking on the periphery. My eyes were shut as the final slap brought the right side of my head in contact with the table’s edge. The taste of iron overwhelmed my mouth as I hit the floor. My outstretched arm had failed to break my fall. I moved the swollen tip of my trembling tongue across my gums and teeth, pushing into fleshy meat and uneven enamel edges. A loose molar buckled under pressure, sending shooting pains to the roof of my mouth full of blood. I grimaced. Eyes shut, still, I placed my right hand on my forehead as other sounds in the room floated into my ringing ears: The quiet sobs of my pregnant, swollen-footed mother who sat lopsided on a metal chair in the corner of the sparsely furnished room, her neck grazing the collar of a blue muumuu; the loud raspy voices of the two men who had trailed me around the store, the stealthy starving cats who had watched me slip a small bottle of nail polish into the pocket of my school uniform, then pounced. The shorter man, the one with a protruding belly the size of a large watermelon, had kind eyes. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me now, prey sprawled on the tiled floor of a badly lit room. I wondered if he recognized my uniform, a pink gingham dress paired with a persimmon orange V-neck wool sweater. I wondered if he recognized me.
I whizzed past the supermarket in Lang’ata daily on my way to and from school. Uchumi was my favorite place to be, despite its misnomer of a name, given that little there was “economical” for the average Kenyan. “Unachotaka”—what you want—would have been a more apt moniker; everything in the store stoked desire. My leisurely trips to Uchumi occurred monthly. On the first day of each month, Daddy and Mommy would pick up her salary, then pick up “the kids”—my sisters and me—from school. The crammed car would then barrel down Ngong Road until Uchumi was on the horizon. Our parents’ laughter in the car foreshadowed a good afternoon. How much laughter indicated how good of an afternoon we would have. Boisterous laughter meant Daddy would be home the next morning before Sister and I left the house to board a matatu to Wilson Airport, then a bus to Kenyatta Market, before embarking on a longish walk on an unpaved road, where, as we approached St. Nicholas Primary School, racing cars blew ginger-colored dust onto our onyx-black hair. Silence was a warning sign: We were to be well-behaved while patiently waiting in the car until Daddy and Mommy rejoined us, Mommy carrying white plastic shopping bags. Sister and I played our version of a guessing game in the car to bide time and kill boredom:
“Knock, knock. Hodi. What’s there?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing what?”
“Nothing you want!”
Giggles erupted from our cores. Between gasps for air, we guessed what we could afford to not buy this month. Sister was usually right. Homeward bound, we would drop Daddy off at the strip of bars in Nairobi West. There was a ritual: Mommy would pull a wad of banknotes out of the white envelope kept concealed in the zippered pocket of her black purse. She would hand it to Daddy, who would slip the money into the left front pocket of his pants. Then, Daddy would disappear. Once his back was swallowed by the buzzed and buzzing crowd of Nairobians, Mommy would drive off, her shoulders dropping as the distance between him and us increased.
Uchumi was enthralling. Exhilaration surged through my veins as I ran my fingers across items stacked neatly on shelves, touching the promise of rebirth. A wondrous new existence awaited me in the sweets aisle by the Cadbury Bournville Old Jamaica and Dairy Milk chocolates. There, I could transform into Princess Diana, plucked from obscurity by a dashing future king with rose pink skin. In the meat aisle, beside the freezer stocked with packages of Farmer’s Choice sausage, I could be a benevolent dictator’s daughter swept off my feet by the derring-do of my beloved, or the captive of a handsome rebel soldier trapped in a castle in Luxembourg. I could live my grandest life in the makeup and nail polish aisle, reincarnated as a pop singer, a Mariah Carey, a brown-haired chanteuse with flesh the color of light pink fish. I could stand in the middle of the aisle and belt out a love song for an admiring audience under bright lights on an elevated stage while my music producer paramour, a mzungu like Tommy Mottola—ponytailed, wealthy, and white—stared adoringly as I crooned.
What scenarios would my dissociative dreams consist of now that an evening at my sanctuary was concluding with the imprint of Daddy’s right hand on my left cheek and stubborn blood spots on my uniform? I had never imagined a protruding-bellied man in Uchumi placing his cigar-length fingers on Daddy’s shoulder, telling him sternly to stop.
We made a solemn exit out of the supermarket as the sun set. Before our departure, Daddy and the man with the watermelon stomach reached an agreement: To atone, I would spend a day in prison with my kind: sinners.
“It was my idea, of course!” Daddy roared a week later. Uncle listened intently, perched on the golden velvet couch occupying most of the living room in the two-story Rubia Estate house. The brothers were thick as thieves. Uncle frequently disappeared for weeks. Whenever he reappeared, as he had done today, Daddy’s guttural growl would echo in every room. “She’s a thief!” he barked. By my count, his proclamation bounced around the house three times: She’s a thief! She’s a thief! She’s a thief!
Uncle called for me, tapping the soft cushion to his left when I appeared at the living room door. I nodded, plopping close enough for his body to emanate heat that warmed my cold thighs, and finding comfort in the familiar mélange of Brut cologne, floral-scented perfume, and old tobacco that mingled close to his chest.
“Nyandere, you did a bad thing,” Uncle chastised.
“Yes, I know, Uncle,” I said, head hung low.
“You must be punished. When you are bad, you must be punished.”
“Yes, I know, Uncle.”
Satisfied by my contrition, Uncle patted my thigh, signaling that it was time for me to stand, then told me to go upstairs to the bedroom I shared with fourteen-year-old Sister. I obeyed his command. I left the sitting room with my chin stuck to my chest, walked past the sapphire-blue wall, then up the two sets of cement stairs that connected the first and second floors, wiggling my loose molar the whole way. I did not want the tears to cascade down my face. I wanted the punishment I had earned.
Daddy had ordered me to be spiffily dressed the next morning before the first rooster crowed. Years later, I would remember this as the Day of Reckoning. What he would do, he told Uncle as they exited the house headed for Nairobi West, was drop me off at the front office of The Prison.
The countdown to the neighbor’s fat rooster’s morning cry began as soon as the cold heels of my bare feet touched Sister’s warm toes. Her right palm pressed into my stomach, quieting its shrieks. “What do you think it’s like in there?” Sister whispered into my ear. I pretended like I didn’t hear her, like her words did not send high-voltage electrical currents through my sacral nerves, like the wetness spreading in the mattress did not matter.
The cock’s crow found Daddy and me seated in Rabbit, the baby blue Daihatsu Charade that he and Mommy had bought from a Japanese expat, a former soldier who had retired from the outskirts of Tokyo to a custom-built two-story house in Lavington with a garden full of red, white, and pink carnations that invited thoughts of Eden. The lop-eared Japanese man had stuck a white flower in my hair as Daddy charmed him with tales of his time in the Kenya Defense Forces. Daddy eventually bargained down the Daihatsu’s sale price to a few hundred shillings less than Mommy had placed in a white envelope with his name on it. Today, Daddy sat in the Daihatsu’s driver’s seat, the pants of his pinstriped suit hiked up slightly at the knee, making it easier for his left foot to reach the clutch. He had placed his jacket neatly on the passenger side, and from time to time, glanced at the rearview mirror. I avoided his glowering looks, keeping my chin to my chest and my mouth closed for the duration of the ride. My skin, the color of a ripe plum, glistened in the rising Nairobi sun.
That morning, I had used my index finger to scoop and slather scented Vaseline on my round face as Sister simultaneously rubbed the thick, gooey substance onto my bamboo legs. She saved a smidge of the “petroleum jelly” made to smell like a newborn baby’s bottom for the surface of my black Bata shoes, which she helped me slip onto my feet. She had ironed and starched the pink dress with white stripes that I wore only on special occasions. The dressmaker, a slim tailor, asked my age when he took my measurements. He lingered as he wrapped a tape measure around my chest and grazed my grape-sized nipples. “Ten,” I replied. His eyes enlarged. “You look much younger,” he said, his tongue stroking the scaly dry skin on his lower lip.
I would not leave The Prison alive if the place was anything like I had heard through the rumor mill. This was the truth I could not share with Sister as she held my stomach during the night, or that morning, combed my hair, taming it into a ponytail the size of an acorn. I was going to meet death. This was not conjecture. My teacher, Mrs. Mwangi, knew someone who knew someone who knew someone’s husband who had a friend whose cousin patrolled the grounds at The Prison. On the occasions when Mrs. Mwangi observed questionable behavior in the classroom, she would suck her teeth, then remind us that bad children were sent to The Prison to be killed. A veil of terror would fall over the silent class. I would imagine shit-smelling muscular men with sharpened teeth and tattered clothes clanging metal bars while menacing guards paraded up and down narrow hallways. They would kill me at The Prison; I knew this with certainty. But death at a prisoner’s hands seemed to be a less painful, less shameful demise than the one certain to arrive if my principal, Mrs. Njuguna, discovered that I was a thief. And she would, most certainly, find out because for the second time this term, I would be marked absent from school today. Mrs. Njuguna would notice, if only because this time, my school fees were paid.
Rabbit flew by the open-air market outside Kenyatta National Hospital, where young women with old eyes and old women with dead eyes carried in their callused hands guavas, mangoes, onions, and tomatoes for sale; and where the eyes of starving teenagers with skin leathered by the unforgiving sun beckoned, promising that for the right price, you could purchase more than fruits and vegetables. I craned my neck as we passed All Saints Cathedral church where, weeks prior, I had peered into a polished cherry wood casket carrying the body of my dead classmate, Brenda. Until the day she died, Brenda, too, had perfect attendance. So, I intuited that something was awry when her seat was empty on a Friday morning a few weeks ago. At Morning Assembly the next Monday, Mrs. Njuguna announced that Brenda had died, then led us in reciting the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Before Rabbit bolted past the church, it had not dawned on me that Brenda may also have met death at The Prison. I wondered if they would remember her at The Prison. I wondered about my own funeral, too. Would I lie in a velvet-lined casket while my father and mother eulogized me? Would Daddy tell everyone I was a thief?
The Prison’s parking lot teemed with life. There were scores of prisoners there, most of whom would likely find themselves fighting diarrhea, tuberculosis, scabies, or worse while serving time for armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, murder, or any such violent crimes. I wondered about the men tending the grounds as Daddy drove the Daihatsu through the metal gates, halting at the spot closest to the main door. What lives had the prisoners lost? What pasts were they were forced to confront while rotting in the place they now called home? My abdomen cramped. My throat tightened. My heart rate endeavored to catch up to my increasingly rapid breathing as Daddy and I walked into the front office. I bargained with God’s son in song:
I will trust and obeyfor there’s no other way
to be happy in Jesus
but to trust and obey.
The nondescript interior of the front office at The Prison resembled that of the front office at St. Nicholas: There was a large wooden desk in one corner of the room, by the windows with rusty metal bars. Standing beside the desk with a stack of papers in his hand was a tall man dressed in a brown suit that matched the brown frames of his glasses. He touched the forest-green tie on his neck as Daddy and I approached the desk. Daddy spoke, and as he explained the purpose for our presence at The Prison, the look of confusion on the man’s peanut-butter-brown face intensified. Then, he shook his head vigorously, released a sigh, and said, “Owada, awuoro. You cannot just leave this girl here.”
Daddy appeared startled, dismayed. He pressed the tip of his right index finger into the middle of my oily forehead. “Osiepa, she’s a thief! Nyako ni is a thief!”
The warden peered over his glasses. Moments of silence elapsed. Then, he pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “ok.”
Daddy smiled broadly, shook the warden’s hand, then turned to leave the office. Warm liquid trickled down my inner thighs and collected in my shoes as I watched him walk out and disappear into the parking lot. Once the Daihatsu was out of sight, the warden sighed again, and cleared his throat.
“Come here,” he commanded, his deep baritone booming. My heart raced even faster. Had the odor from my wet panties wafted into his wide nostrils?
“Come,” he repeated, his voice softer.
I obeyed, my pee-filled shoes squishing as I put one foot in front of the other trepidatiously. “Here,” the warden whispered, as he reached into his pocket and handed me a half-eaten Cadbury Fudge Bar. “You will be my assistant for the day. Now, sit there,” he said, pointing to a metal chair behind the desk. I obeyed, chin grazing the collar of my dress.
Daddy returned to The Prison at dusk. That night, after supper, I collapsed onto my twin-sized bed. I had shut the door before falling onto the lumpy mattress. Sister lay across from me in a similar bed. She kept her back turned toward me. I launched into a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer loudly enough for Daddy and Mommy to hear as they fell asleep in the adjacent room. Palms clasped and eyes facing the ceiling, I prayed fervently, asking God to forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Sister had been silent since I’d arrived home from The Prison. I didn’t know why. Maybe she can smell my susu, I thought. No. Maybe she’s angry with me. Are you angry with me? I wanted to ask. I didn’t confess. I didn’t betray you. I didn’t tell, I wanted to whisper. I didn’t tell Daddy it was your idea. I kept your secret. I keep your secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep our secrets. I keep . . . our secrets.