|
| |
News and Letters January-February 1998
Women of Kenya speak, 1955 to today
By Olga Domansky
Charity Ngilu, who attempted to become the first woman president in sub-Sahara Africa by running against Daniel arap Moi in the recent Kenyan elections, did not win that election with the 469,807 votes attributed to her, against the 2,444,801 given to Moi. There was nothing new in the election: It was rife with corruption and confusion and Moi won as he has in the last four elections since 1978. But Charity Ngilu, who was urged to run for president by working women in her neighborhood after she raised money for clean water and clinics for the poor, is no mere footnote to history.
Far from trying to "break with tradition," as the press described it, her campaign resonated with the crucial and distinctive role women have played throughout Kenya's history. Though a very different kind of story, it brought to mind Mbiyu Koinange's story of the Kenyan people's bitter struggle after World War II for independence from Britain, written as it was ongoing and published in 1955 as PEOPLE OF KENYA SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES, which was dedicated to a woman named Njeri.
Out of the struggle to control their own lives, this illiterate woman had organized a powerful African Women's League and been thrown into a Kenyan prison camp, where she remained with 9,000 other women at the moment the book was published. To rally support for these women and the thousands of other Kenyans being "liquidated" (Mbiyu Koinange's blunt phrase), Koinange sought help internationally to tell their story.
Njeri's story began in 1940 when she heard in the market about the "Kenya Teachers College" which Koinange had initiated to further the independent African schools Kenyans had organized because government schools were not preparing African students for the modern world. When Njeri came to see the college, she discovered the boys living in a stone building, but all the girls had was a mud hut. She returned three weeks later with 25 other women, each one representing a different district, who informed Koinange that they were going to build a suitable girls dormitory.
The story of how they collected the money to buy the stones, hire the workmen and build a modern dormitory, a dining hall, a reception hall and kitchen facilities is the story of hundreds of women walking 30-50 miles day to bring a few pennies to a meeting to discuss the work and participate in the building. Like Njeri, most of these women were illiterate. What they did at Kenya Teachers College was duplicated at schools in districts throughout Kenya and the African Women's League grew to 10,000.
Three decades later, the story of Njeri could not help but come to mind again in another form when the UN Decade for Women Conference was held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. There, while the 10,000 women present at the non-governmental meetings were far more representative of the problems of women around the world than the 3,000 who took part in the official meetings, the most serious meetings sprang up spontaneously on the lawn, where women who had just heard the conference was going on stopped and joined the discussion.
One such woman was Elizabeth Wanjara, who heard about it on a transistor radio in her hometown 450 miles from Nairobi and told others, who sold honey and knitted sweaters to buy her a bus ticket. That she, too, was illiterate, but came so she could "go back to all the women in my place and tell them the stories on all the happenings here.. how we can be ourselves and no longer just have babies and have babies dying," only underlined the power that is exerted by the very idea of freedom and the need to find out how to achieve it.
That is what Marxist-Humanists had felt was so important about Mbiyu Koinange's story that when we could not find an established publisher to bring it to the world, we undertook that task ourselves, circulating his manuscript and collecting funds. The first issue of N&L, June 24, 1955, reproduced the picture of Njeri and connected her story to that of Harriet Tubman in the Civil War.
What rings powerfully today, when you read PEOPLE OF KENYA and think of Charity Ngilu's very different campaign, is the way Ngilu targeted the ethnic appeals of all the other candidates, fighting passionately against the lethal divisions among the Kikuyi, Luo and other tribes that Moi has exploited. PEOPLE OF KENYA, too, stressed that "Kenyan Africans want to be a part of the world, not separate from it. It is the officials who have encouraged separation, racialism as well as tribalism."
At a moment when ethnic divisions have become more deadly than ever, whether we are looking at Africa or the Balkans or right at home, it is with pride that we can look at PEOPLE OF KENYA as an important part of the history not only of Kenya but of News and Letters Committees.
CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS
|
Contact News & Letters on the internet: WWW.NEWSANDLETTERS.ORG
E-Mail: arise@newsandletters.org
PHONE: (312) 236 0799
Mail: News & Letters 36 S. Wabash, Room 1440 Chicago IL 60603 USA
|
