If African women do not tell their own narratives, no one else will

It is sad, but hardly surprising, that the narrative about [Kenya’s"> post-election violence is once again being dominated by male voices.

Whether as alleged perpetrators of the violence or seekers of justice for the victims of the atrocities committed in 2007/8, the story about what happened, who did what to whom, and under whose command, is being told and interpreted mainly by men.

And as male politicians devise new ways to play the blame-game in light of the impending trials at the International Criminal Court, the voices of women victims of the violence have almost completely faded away.

As Patricia Nyaundi, the executive director of Fida-Kenya, noted in the recently-released documentary, ’The Burden of Peace’, all we hear about is the more than a thousand people who were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, but no one is counting how many women were raped during that period, or what impact the rapes had on them.

Produced and directed by Kwamchetsi Makokha, in association with the Fahamu Trust, the film tells the story of the countless victims of gang-rape during the post-election violence, who have not enjoyed a single day of peace since neighbours, paramilitary police, militia and police officers sexually violated them.

It tells the stories of women like Maureen, who was raped “in revenge for the Kiambaa church killings” by two men who not only impregnated her, but infected her with HIV.

For months, Maureen wished she would die. When her baby boy was born, she says, she even thought of throwing him away. The film tells other harrowing tales, including that of a bed-ridden woman who was gang-raped and left for dead, of a woman in Kibera who was raped by police officers in front of her son, and of women who were reduced to becoming beggars or prostitutes in IDP camps.

But the film is also about survival and resistance — about women picking up the shattered pieces of their lives in order to provide for their families and to support fellow survivors.

Such stories have also been captured in ’African Women Writing Resistance’ — a new anthology published this year by Pambazuka Press in association with the University of Wisconsin, which brings together the writings of 31 women from 13 African countries who explore a wide range of issues, including the violence experienced by women in their homes and communities and during conflict.

In this book, you will meet China Keitetsi, a former child soldier in Uganda’s National Resistance Army, who was told “to get love from a gun”, and that “guns were our mothers, our friends, our whole world, and we must rather lose ourselves than our gun”.

Keitetsi, who now lives in Denmark, is the first former African girl soldier to have written about her experiences. You will also meet the Kenyan poet and lawyer, Ann Kithaka, who, in a poem about female genital mutilation, implores her clansmen to tell her where they have disposed of “the severed bit of my despised anatomy after the unkind cut”.

Did they, she wonders, “fling it into some mysterious African pot to concoct that rejuvenating soup, consumed so gleefully by the rika?”

Domestic violence is a dominant theme in many of the women’s stories, poems and essays. US-based Nigerian activist and performer, Zindzi Bedu, recalls the incest committed by her father, “the preacher man...who prays with the authority of raging fire”.

In a note, she explains that writing about her painful past is “an act of mediation” that gives her “the tools to reassess an old wound”. The contributors to the anthology do not feel the need — as many non-Western writers do — to disguise, tone down or even “exoticise” their experiences and stories for the benefit of a Western readership.

The editors, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho and Anne Serafin, have allowed the women writers to speak as honestly and as truthfully about their experiences as they can.

As Abena P. A. Busia explains in the introductory poem, “If we don’t tell our stories who will speak out for us, when we claim our bodies for ourselves and weep no more... If we don’t tell our stories, hailstones will continue to fall on our heads.”

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in The Nation.
* Rasna Warah is a writer and journalist based in Nairobi.
* ’The Burden of Peace’ is produced and directed by Kwamchetsi Makokha, in association with Fahamu Trust (ISBN-10 1-906387-77-X).
* ’African Women Writing Resistance’ is published by Pambazuka Press and the University of Wisconsin Press (ISBN-10 0-85749-020-6).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.