Remembering the women of Kenya’s political history

Every year on July 7, Kenyans commemorate Saba Saba Day, a day of remembrance of important political events that occurred on this day in 1990. Though Kenya wouldn’t have its first free election for more than a decade, on July 7, 1990, protestors famously faced violence in order to stand up against the single-party democracy system in place; those in power were terrorizing Kenyan citizens, and there were no opposition parties to check their power.

Now Kenyans commemorate the day by protesting ongoing issues such as corruption, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence. We also take the day to remind younger Kenyans of a time when exercising rights such as freedom of speech and expression could land one in torture chambers, lest we slip into the hands of dictatorship once again. 

As I watched the mainstream media cover this day this year, I noticed that hardly any mentioned the female leaders of the 1990 protest. Some name-checked Wangari Maathai, who was a political and environmental justice activist who went on to become the first female African Nobel Peace Prize laureate, for her activism at the time, but Maathai was hardly the only woman who actively fought for multi-party politics. Charity Ngilu, who become Kenya’s first female presidential candidate in Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 1997, was involved in the fight. So was Martha Karua, a fierce politician and former justice minister. With the help of Wangari Maathai, Monica Wamwere of the Release Political Prisoners Group and 51 other women  camped at Freedom Corner and All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi for months, protesting for the release of their husbands and sons, who were being held by the state as political prisoners. These women even held nude protests in a bid to prevent police officers from arresting them, drawing from the traditional African belief that young men who see an older woman nude become cursed. 

This erasure made me realize how little we acknowledge the work that women did — and still do — in political protest movements. Even the women who didn’t stand alongside men in the streets during these protests contributed to these efforts in indirect, yet still crucial, ways. During the struggle for multi-party democracy, women made space in their homes for secret political meetings and catered to the participants. Myriad women also single-handedly took care of their families for years while their husbands were in political detention after protesting. Yet this labor has not been and is still not acknowledged because our society sees this work as expected of women. This type of “care work” is still not considered important enough to be “actual work” on a broader scale, and so the care work that went into the struggle for multi-party democracy is not celebrated.

This erasure also paints the false picture that women have not struggled for the freedoms we currently enjoy and are not as capable of being political leaders as are men. Kenya has the lowest representation of women in parliament in East Africa at 20 percent, which is especially low compared to Rwanda’s 68 percent and Ethiopia’s 40 percent. Our nation did attempt to counter this disparity: Our 2010 constitution mandates that no more than two-thirds of our parliament can identify as the same gender and included the provision of seats to increase the number of female legislators, as well as those living with disabilities and other marginalized groups. However, many Kenyan voters assume that women who are nominated to these seats are only there because of the patronage of men in positions of political power rather than their own merit or popular support. A Rift Valley Institute study found that Kenyan voters base this assumption on the idea that women and men act in an equal political playing field, although of course women still face gendered barriers like violence, harassment, and sexism while campaigning and less access to funding for their campaigns. 

Thankfully, a number of Kenyan women are not taking this erasure lying down. For instance, in July 2018, Laura Ekumbo, Aleya Kassam, and Anne Moraa wrote a play called “Too Early For Birds: Tha Brazen Edition,” which, in Anne Moraa’s words, aims to “uninvisibilize invisible women. The play retells the age-old stories of bold Kenyan women in a manner that made them, their names, and their work visible.

Kenyan women need to tell our stories and record our victories and achievements and ultimately refuse to be written out of history. Ideally, Kenyan women in mainstream media, too, should take it upon themselves to influence how historical accounts are told.