Tag: Kenya

The tragedy we found in Tuesday’s trash

It’s another pretty day in Ngong with clear skies and chirping birds. Jackie, the newest member of my circle of parenthood help, has just returned home from fetching my son Shaka, who is three months away from turning five. As I open the gate, she says to me: “Mama Shaka, kitu kimefanyika!” Something has happened.

Tuesday is rubbish collection day in our town, which is located in the Great Rift Valley near Nairobi. My family has lived in Ngong for over 20 years, and no municipal or county rubbish removal initiatives have existed during this time. So local entrepreneurs came up with their own trash collection initiative, a service that we use at the moment. On this warm, summer’s day we put our trash out as usual for the truck to collect.

Jackie lives about 50 metres from my childhood home, and just 10 meters from the pile of trash at the end of our street. At 30 she is no shrinking violet, but she doesn’t say much. Today, however, she is more excited than usual. She tells me that a little baby boy has been found on top of the pile of rubbish. I don’t understand. Where is the child’s family, I ask? How do you tell a child to sit on a pile of rubbish? Jackie says she doesn’t know. No one knows. All they know is that the little baby was wrapped in a curtain and left there. A curtain. Now it makes sense. The little baby was aborted and dumped along with Tuesday’s trash.

While rummaging through the rubbish, a street child had found the aborted baby. It was a baby, not a foetus, because this abortion was carried out very late into the pregnancy. Jackie tells me that the child had all its parts – all it had to do was grow. She reckons it was five months or older. She laughs as she relates this to me, but her laughter is not out of malice or insensitivity. Like many others, she just didn’t know what else to say or do.

I ask Jackie why no one called the police. She says someone has to go to the police station and write a statement before they would come and collect the body. I want to do this – but with the law enforcement system here, there’s a chance that I would be questioned, and even suspected of the backstreet abortion. I’m a single mother, with no important surnames that can offer me any kind of protection, and no husband to come vouch for my moral worthiness. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong police officer would get me into trouble.

I go to cover the body. It is placed at the side of the road where children pass by on their way home from school. They do not need to see that. Worse still, they do not need to hear the conversations vilifying the woman or girl that had aborted the baby, and shaming the faceless and nameless doer of this ‘evil’. Someone ventures that they know whose curtain the baby is wrapped in – but fortunately a witch-hunt is not called for. In places like Ngong with slow justice systems and even slower delivery of public services like police protection, the people’s thirst for due process comes fast and furiously.

Abortions in Kenya
Kenya has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Over 460 000 abortions were carried out in 2012 alone, according to research by the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC). The majority of these were due to unwanted pregnancies. Another survey revealed that more than 2 500 Kenyan women die annually from complications arising from unsafe abortions carried out by unqualified medical practitioners. Kenya relaxed its abortion laws in the new Constitution that passed in 2010. Before this, abortion was illegal unless except to save a woman’s life – and in this case, three doctors would have to approve a woman’s request for one. The new Constitution gives healthcare practitioners more latitude to determine when an abortion can be carried out. But as you can imagine, if the decision to grant a woman or girl an abortion lies in the hands of a healthcare professional, this leaves a lot to chance. Many Kenyans are still largely conservative when it comes to discourses on abortion, and chances that a nurse in a rural village will grant a 15-year-old with an unplanned pregnancy a requested abortion are very slim. Commenting on the APHRC report, researcher Dr Elizabeth Kimani said that there is still a lot of stigma in Kenya around access to abortion as a reproductive health right for women. The government is dragging its feet in upgrading not only the facilities to carry out abortions, but also initiatives to sensitise health care professionals on why there’s a critical need for conversations about abortion in the country.

(Pic: Flickr / Damien du Toit)

Ten years ago, when I was in high school, I was subjected to a mandatory pregnancy test after what the school authorities found what they suspected was an aborted foetus in one of the dormitory bathrooms. The test was not a pee-on-a-stick type test. The school nurse carried out a vaginal exam, pressed down on my abdomen, and squeezed my nipples – to check for milk production, I guess. It was humiliating to say the least, and all the girls – nearly 1000 of us – had to undergo this. I could not imagine how or with what a fellow student could have carried out that suspected abortion. According to 2012 report by Kenya’s human rights commission, women take overdoses of anti-malaria medication or insert sharp objects like knitting needles and sticks into their bodies.

Back in Ngong, I dared to think about the woman that had just aborted this baby. She wasn’t a statistic in a report far away – she lived in my neighbourhood, she was close enough for me to have maybe met her or even spoken to her. Was she okay? Was she alone? Did she have help? Was she slowly bleeding to death in a little flat somewhere? Had she been raped? Was it an unplanned pregnancy? Maybe it was a case of incest, or maybe it wasn’t. To attempt a backstreet abortion this far into a pregnancy was an act of despair and desperation. The young woman or girl who did this really had no other choice. She didn’t. The people gathered by the side of the road did not ask these questions – all they saw was an aborted child, dumped on top of Tuesday’s trash.

I am unapologetically pro-choice. Restrictive laws and harsh social systems leave women and girls with such few options and virtually no bodily autonomy. And this goes beyond just the right to have safe abortions – it begins with a woman’s or a girl’s right to decide what happens to her body. A lot of underage sex is coerced and transactional. Many unplanned pregnancies are unwanted, even in marriage and in situations of perceived social stability. There’s no safety anywhere as far as women’s and girl’s bodies are concerned.

While society, religious organisations and indeed governments attempt to put their best moral foot forward, the reproductive and health rights of women and girls continue to suffer. And this suffering is not left to the women and girls alone – society suffers too. Women, men and children had to see an aborted child dumped on the side of the road, and the traumatic effects that witnessing such a sight can have on them goes ignored. As a passionate advocate for the right of women to choose, it was a humbling moment when I realised that these ‘issues’ are not happening ‘out there’ – they are happening right outside my front door, right on top of Tuesday’s trash.

*This post was edited to correct the number of abortions carried out in Kenya in 2012.

Sheena Gimase is a Kenyan-born and Africa-raised critical feminist writer, blogger, researcher and thought provocateur. She’s lived and loved in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Sheena strongly believes in the power of the written word to transform people, cultures and communities. Read her blog and connect with her on Twitter.

11 years ago

The idiot’s guide to misogyny: East and South African edition

Every two years – during the Africa Cup of Nations and the soccer World Cup, to be precise – I change my citizenship to my four self-assigned West African citizenships: Ghanaian, Nigerian, Malian and Ivorian. If you are a soccer fan, you will understand the necessity of this symbolic migration. East and Southern Africa have many things going for them. Soccer is not one of them, save for occasional flashes of hope from the Angolans. But in March this year, I found it necessary to symbolically emigrate from East and South Africa, for less sporty reasons: I could not handle the toxic gender politics in these two regions, in March. In an inadvertent collaboration, East and South Africa embodied the idiot’s guide to misogyny in March and, as they say, I just couldn’t deal.

On March 24, Kenyans received an apology from Dr Susan Mboya-Kidero, the wife of the Governor of Nairobi County. You see, her husband, Dr Evans Kudero, had been spotted in public wearing a torn sock. A local daily had found this so newsworthy that they published the governor’s foot with the torn sock. This photo apparently prompted the good senator’s wife to apologise to Kenyans for this ‘lapse’ in her responsibilities as a wife, and promise all offended Kenyans that she will “put stricter measures in place” to ensure this doesn’t happen again in future.

Eight years ago, another prominent politician’s wife apologised to Kenyans for a similar ‘lapse’ in vigilance over her husband’s feet. Apparently Kenyans take serious offence to these lapses in wifely duty by their politicians’ spouses. These wives’ failures in managing their husbands’ wardrobes have serious implications for service delivery in the city of Nairobi, the commercial engine of East and Central Africa.

So, Dr Mboya-Kidero told Kenyans she “takes full responsibility for this serious mistake” in her husband’s dressing. In her defence, she cited the notorious Nairobi traffic, which forces him to leave home at 5.30am, before she has a chance to ‘approve’ his dressing. Of course the good Nairobians will accept her apology, and will in fact forgive the little fact that the person who should be speaking to them is the good governor himself; and not about his torn socks, but about his plans to unblock Nairobi’s legendary traffic jams. In fact, they might also forgive the not-so-small fact that this same governor of torn socks allegedly slapped a woman politician in a public altercation a few months ago, sparking public uproar, a court case, and finally a court order that they reconcile.

But I digress. One of the beautiful things about South Africa for feminists is that you get to mark women’s month twice: in March, along with International Women’s Day, and in August, the national women’s month. March holds a special spot in my heart as the month when I formally encountered the language of feminist thought as a young undergraduate student, thanks to a group of politicised friends in university. Together, the four of us started marking International Women’s Day with themed public lectures and feminist marches on campus, much to the amusement of fellow students and some university staff members. But this March was a hard one to be a politicised woman tuned into East and South African public discourse.

Reflecting on it, I can’t help but note the ways in which women’s bodies occupied centre space in March in East and South Africa in very troubling ways. Of course women wrote brilliant books this month (the fantastic South Africa scholar and novelist, Zoe Wicomb, launched her new novel October); they won Oscars (Kenyan Lupita Nyong’o); and countless other ordinary women engaged in various acts of excellence, heroism, generosity and courage. But how were women figured in public discourse?

Reeva Steenkamp and Thuli Madonsela
During this month, two South African women dominated the public space, for very different reasons, with different responses: the murdered South African model Reeva Steenkamp occupied centre stage as her boyfriend and killer, Oscar Pistorius, stood trial to prove his case – that he didn’t kill her in moment of rage, but actually mistook her for ‘an intruder’, whom he presumably intended to kill. That this high-profile case’s defence essentially hangs on the assumed appropriateness of pumping bullets into an intruder – code for young black criminal – is a whole other conversation.

The second woman to occupy South African public discourse is Public Protector Advocate Thuli Madonsela, who delivered her report on the so-called Nkandlagate scandal relating to the opulent expenditure on the president’s security, which included a state-of-the-art chicken run.

What was curious for me was the spectrum of responses these two women attracted: distress over Reeva Steenkamp’s killing, with murmurs of a possible case of an abusive relationship; and the mixture of celebration and vilification of Advocate Thuli Madonsela for her findings on Nkandla. Significantly, despite attempts to frame these two cases differently – blue collar and white collar crime in South Africa – ultimately, the two women’s gender continued to haunt them; in the shape of a possibly emotionally abusive relationship that spilled over into tragic violence; and an equally tragic attack on the public protector’s person and looks, for daring to speak out against massive misuse of public funds.

Meantime, on the side strips of these high profile cases, two other largely unrelated stories unfolded: a man in Limpopo province offered to launch a series of awards to reward young girls for maintaining their virginity. He neglected to offer men a similar incentive. Apparently there is no premium on male virginity, nor for that matter is it necessary to incentivise them not to pressure young girls into sex.

Back in East Africa a few weeks earlier, the Museveni government arrived at the ‘scientific’ conclusion that homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, and therefore, decided to formally legislate against it. If we remember the ways in which homosexual men are often feminised in public discourse and how the abhorrent phenomenon of ‘corrective rape’ targeted at lesbian women has become a plague in South Africa, it is not hard to see that the common denominator in these two moments is anxieties about policing the female body and female sexuality. This push for female virginity is just one face of patriarchy via female sexual purity. The other face patriarchy wears is homophobia, precisely because same-sex love makes lesbian women symbolically unavailable to male sexual pleasure, hence the need to ‘correct’ them through rape. Gay men on the other hand sabotage patriarchy by deviating from the script of heterosexual consumption of women’s bodies and through their feminisation, which further threatens the ‘approved’ template of manhood by blurring the assumed rigid boundaries between masculinity and femininity.

It has been a long month, March. So, I mentally exiled myself to West Africa. But I know my other countries will disappoint at one point or another. In the meantime, I’ll hope for a better April. Being my birthday month, my biggest wish is a misogyny-free month for all women. Hopefully the universe and my ancestors are both listening.

Grace A. Musila is a Kenyan who studied in South Africa.

11 years ago

Kenya to use drones to fight poachers

Kenya plans to deploy surveillance drones to help fight elephant and rhino poachers and has introduced stiffer penalties for offenders, officials said on Tuesday.

Poaching has risen in recent years across sub-Saharan Africa where well-armed criminal gangs have killed elephants for tusks and rhinos for horns that are often shipped to Asia for use in ornaments and medicines.

“We will start piloting the use of drones in the Tsavo National Park ecosystem, one of the largest national parks in the world,” said Patrick Omondi, deputy director for wildlife conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Omondi said the surveillance aircraft would be imported, but did not give details of how many or at what cost.

Tsavo National Park in the southeast is Kenya’s largest, with sweeping plains and occasional water holes dotted with wildlife, including elephants.

“We attribute the problem of poaching in Kenya and other African states to growing demand and high prices offered for rhino horn and elephant ivory in the Far East countries,” William Kiprono, Kenya Wildlife Service’s acting director general told a news conference in Nairobi.

Kiprono said Kenya had lost 18 rhinos and 51 elephants to poachers so far this year. Last year, 59 rhinos and 302 elephants were killed, compared with 30 rhinos and 384 elephants in 2012.

Kenya Wildlife Service officials display recovered elephants tusks and illegally held firearms taken from poachers. (Pic: Reuters)

Kenyan officers seized 13.5 tonnes of ivory at the port city of Mombasa last year, mostly originating from other countries in the region. At least 249 suspects have so far been arrested this year and prosecuted for various wildlife offences.

In January, a Kenyan court convicted a Chinese man of smuggling ivory and ordered him to pay a 20-million-shillings ($233 000) fine or serve seven years in jail in the first sentence handed out since Kenya introduced a new anti-poaching law.

Conservationists hope the new law, which allows for longer jail terms and bigger fines, will deter criminal networks.

Kenya has emerged as a major transit route for ivory destined for Asian markets from eastern and central Africa.

The government says poaching is harming tourism, a major foreign exchange earner.

11 years ago

Kenya’s Parliament passes polygamy Bill

(Pic: AFP)

Kenya’s Parliament has passed a Bill allowing men to marry as many women as they want, prompting a furious backlash from female lawmakers who stormed out, reports said on Friday.

The Bill, which amended existing marriage legislation, was passed late last Thursday to formalise customary law about marrying more than one person.

The proposed Bill had initially given a wife the right to veto the husband’s choice, but male members of Parliament overcame party divisions to push through a text that dropped this clause.

“When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way, and a third wife… this is Africa,” MP Junet Mohammed told the house, according to Nairobi’s Capital FM.

As in many parts of Africa, polygamy is common among traditional communities in Kenya, as well as among the country’s Muslim community, which accounts for up to a fifth of the population.

“Any time a man comes home with a woman, that would be assumed to be a second or third wife,” said Samuel Chepkong’a, chair of the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee, the Daily Nation newspaper reported.

“Under customary law, women or wives you have married do not need to be told when you’re coming home with a second or third wife. Any lady you bring home is your wife,” he added.

Female MPs stormed out of the late-night session in fury after a heated debate.

“We know that men are afraid of women’s tongues more than anything else,” female legislator Soipan Tuya told fellow MPs, according to Capital FM.

“But at the end of the day, if you are the man of the house, and you choose to bring on another party – and they may be two or three – I think it behoves you to be man enough to agree that your wife and family should know,” she added.

A clause in which a partner who had promised marriage but then backed out of the wedding could face financial damages was also dropped, as male MPs argued it could have been used to extort cash.

They also argued that marriage should be based on love, and not have a financial cost placed upon it.

Parliamentary majority leader Aden Duale, a Muslim, said that men marrying more than one woman was part of the Islamic faith, but also highlighted Biblical stories to justify Christians not asking their wife before taking another.

“I want my Christian brothers to read the Old Testament – King David and King Solomon never consulted anybody to marry a second wife,” Duale told the house.

Women are not allowed to marry more than one man in Kenya.

The Bill must now pass before the president to be signed before becoming law.

11 years ago

Kenya: Cervical cancer vaccine offers hope but challenges persist

Life is rough for women with cervical cancer in Kenya. Some of those attending the country’s only public treatment facility sleep on benches and concrete floors outside the hospital to save money for their treatment. Others never make it to the capital for assistance because they cannot afford the bus journey. Now, a vaccination programme has been rolled out, offering hope for future generations.

“Cervical cancer vaccine now available for girls in primary school free of charge!” reads the turquoise poster outside the office of Christina Mavindu, senior nursing officer at the Kitui district hospital. Mavindu is two-thirds of the way through implementing Kenya’s first public cervical cancer vaccination campaign in Kitui county. The third and final jabs will be administered in the next few weeks.

The campaign has been challenging. The number of children wanting the vaccine has exceeded the doses available and, at a cost of more than $50 per vaccine, many people have been unable to pay for it privately. “It should be for everybody,” says Mavindu. Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) supported the trial to enable Kenya to demonstrate that it has the necessary infrastructure and capacity to vaccinate nine- to 13-year-olds on a national scale.

Vaccination is needed urgently; cervical cancer is a growing cause of morbidity among women in Africa, and a rising concern. The disease is nearly six times more prevalent in Kenya than in western Europe, according to WHO data. It is also the cancer that kills most women in Kenya, whose neighbour Rwanda became the first low-income African country to achieve nationwide access to the vaccine.

The treatment for cervical cancer is inadequate: nearly half of the women who were being treated in Kenya “disappeared” from their programmes, according to the results of a recent survey published in the journal Plos One of patients at the only public cancer treatment centre. “Most likely they could not afford treatment,” says Dr Ian Hampson, head of gynaecological oncology at the University of Manchester, who oversaw the research. Just 7% of women received “optimal treatment”, while 41% dropped out.

(Pic: Reuters)

From screening to diagnosis and treatment, best practice in Kenya is impeded at every stage. Beatrice Ngomo, a nurse in Kitui district hospital’s maternal and child health clinic, has a hard time persuading women to get screened. Many cannot afford medical care so do not want to know if they are ill, she explains. Others do not like invasive procedures, she says, and are scared.

Even when a woman starts experiencing symptoms, she will often not seek treatment, Ngomo explains. Some women think cervical cancer is a result of witchcraft so they prefer to see traditional medical practitioners. “They lose a lot of time while they’re doing that,” Ngomo says. Or they go to witchdoctors because they are more affordable than modern medical care. As a result, 80% of cases at the hospital are late stage cancer, according to doctors’ estimates.

Ngomo has diagnosed two women with cervical cancer this year. She recalls that at first the women assumed that the cancer would kill them. Ngomo told them that treatment was poshsible and referred them to the Kenyatta national hospital in Nairobi. “But there the problems really start,” she says. In Kitui, most people are farmers and the average daily wage is less than $2. Women cannot afford to travel to the capital, let alone buy high-cost drugs, she adds. Sometimes they reappear at the hospital in Kitui months after referral, having never made it to Nairobi.

The next problem is that the waiting time for a first appointment at Kenyatta national hospital can be up to six months, according to Dr Orora Maranga, who conducted the Manchester research and is now practising in Kenya. “The cancer is not waiting,” he says. In six months, it can grow from stage two to stage four, drastically reducing the chance of survival.

Once patients receive an appointment, they are faced with the costs of treatment. Elizabeth Mumbua Njeru, 35, sits on a step outside the casualty ward hugging her handbag to her chest. Njeru has a cancerous tumour in her cervix and is two months into a course of radiation and chemotherapy. Njeru, from Embu, 120km to the north, is unable to afford accommodation in the capital. She has been a resident of the casualty ward for two months and is sometimes forced to sleep on this outside. But she is determined not to become another women who “disappears”.

Her malnourished body is struggling to cope with the treatment regime. Her nails have turned brown, she suffers from nausea and diarrhoea, and her immune system has been severely compromised by daily injections of cytotoxins. Njeru knows the emergency department is no place for her; it is a hub of infectious diseases which she might catch at any moment. But she has no option.

Maranga’s study found that just 7% of patients at Kenyatta national hospital were receiving optimum treatment. But it is not just the cost that prevents them getting the correct treatment. The hospital lacks one crucial piece of equipment: the brachytherapy machine.

As Njeru sits in the hospital canteen enjoying a rare plate of fried chicken, she is joined by her friend, Rhonda Waeni Ndundua, who also has cervical cancer. Ndundua has also spent two months sleeping rough in the hospital grounds. Rhonda has received good news – she has been discharged. Scribbled on her patient records was one word: “brachytherapy”. Rhonda is free to go home, but has to return to see the doctor in two months. Then, she will be told that she needs to have brachytherapy, radiotherapy delivered internally, in order to receive the recommended treatment.

Hampson describes Kenyatta national hospital’s brachytherapy unit as having been “in a state of disrepair for several years”. Patients like Ndundua must travel to either Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, or to Kampala in Uganda. There, they pay 30 000 Kenyan shillings ($360) for the brachytherapy; food, accommodation and transport are additional.

This may go some way towards explaining why just 7% of women in the Manchester study received optimal treatment. Hampson suggests there is no money, and therefore no political will from the government to repair the brachytherapy machine.