International Women's Day 2020: The women who made Kenya
The image of motherland is often fondly used to refer to our homes, and especially to our countries. Yet, quite often, they seem to be motherlands with anonymous mothers, or without mothers. Even in the very best of circumstances, our mothers have been confined to the shadows of the fathers that begat us – even as whole nations.
In Kenya, we love to speak of “the founding fathers” of our republic. These are the men who participated in the political making of our country. We especially think about them as the people who fathered our independence. They are variously the men who were involved with the Lancaster House Constitutional talks of 1960-62 and those who engaged in various forms of resistance against colonial rule. There are also those who were active political actors in the early years of independence.
We have rarely heard of such people as “the founding mothers.” As a continental population, the peoples of Africa also commonly employ the trope of “Mother Africa.” Yet few of the mothers are ever mentioned. Are we trapped in the oxymoron of motherhood without mothers? Who are the mothers in whose womb the Kenyan nation has been incubated and delivered?
Even at a purely literal level, who are the women who bore and reared such towering figures as Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Masinde Muliro? We don’t hear much of Tom Mboya’s mother, or the mother to former powerful leaders like JM Kariuki, Charles Njonjo, Nicholas Biwott, Hezekiah Oyugi, or Simeon Nyachae.
Who were the women who shaped the characters of these people? If it is true that behind every successful man there is a woman, could this be the woman who nurtured the stripling into a great life? If there are such persons as “makers of Kenya’s history,” who are the women who have made Kenya?
As we trace them back into history, way before independence, some of their stories begin bordering on the mythical. This will, indeed, be the case for great tales that have not been properly recorded. Their character will keep shifting, now taking on some new aspect, then the other. This is a factor of some new aspect being added to the narrative in its oral rendition; or some other aspect being dropped – or otherwise forgotten.
In Gikuyu oral tradition as history, they speak of an epoch in which the women were the rulers, before men conspired to overthrow them. It is a narrative that will be found in varying incarnations elsewhere in Africa. And so, the story goes, that these female rulers were very powerful. But they were also oppressive. So oppressive were they in fact, that the men began plotting a coup against them.
The opportunity to execute the coup came when the women went to war. They left the men behind, to look after the homes, the children and the animals. After a long tough war bravely fought, the women came home hungry for love. The men took advantage of this lascivious thirst. They made the entire army pregnant, all at the same time! It was in this season of being physically burdened that the men executed their devious mission. They took over.
The mythical tradition begins giving way to true women of valour, who in their times ruled their spaces. “They were real men, renowned for their power, giving wise counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies;” such as the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastics (Chapter 44) has said of famous men. These women “were wise and eloquent in their instructions.”
Wangu wa Makeri lived in Murang’a in the pre-colonial age. She is easily the only Gikuyu female chief whose story seems to be remembered. Those who have carried her story to us render it with a level of patriarch mischief. Makeri Wa Mbogo was her husband. Her story casts her in the salacious mould. She is supposed to have entered into a secret romantic relationship with Chief Karuri Wa Gakure. When the matter came in the open, the chief offered to compensate the injured husband by making him a community headman. He declined, however, and the position went to his wife Wangu, instead.
Men admired the beautiful Wangu for her bodily beauty. And, from time to time, she selected some of the more handsome and stronger warriors for herself. She would do the occasional dance with them, leaving them all breathless and wordless. Carried to the extreme, someday, she is supposed to have danced herself naked, in the male only Gikuyu dance called kibata. She was reported to have resigned, as a result of this indiscretion. Wangu lived between 1856 and 1915.
Her memory contributes to the collective consciousness of the tradition of the woman as a critical player in the making of Kenya. Her story is full of apocryphal anecdotes that should sometimes be taken as stretchers. She is sometimes depicted as a rather severe agent of British “colonial authorities” in an age even before the colony itself was established. What is useful about her memory, however, are not the stretchers about her, but the narrative of the power of a woman.
A revered Akamba prophetess
If the famous men and valiant fathers that begat us in Ecclesiastics declared prophesies, there lived in the 1800s Syokimau, a revered Akamba prophetess. She was to the Akamba what the seer Mugo Wa Kabiro was to the Kikuyu. Both are reputed to have foretold the coming of Europeans and of the railway line and the train. Both Syokimau and Kabiro prepared their people for migration from the traditional age to changed times that presaged the age we live in today.
The changing times would bring them in contact with “white people, like meat, traveling in a metal snake. The snake would itself belch out smoke, while the people carried fire in their pockets.” But the times would also make the Akamba people the bridge between the peoples separated by two giant water bodies, traversed by the metal snake – inference to the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. Syokimau heralded the new Kenyan country in which the nation would be defined from the Coastal lowlands to the Lake Basin in the west. It would traverse the eastern plains and Nyika through the central highlands, all the way to the semi-arid north. It would be a nation with new roles for the women and men alike. So who would be the principal women in the making of this new nation?
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