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ISSUE 049, October 16 - 31, 2011
Unfiltered, uninhibited…just the gruesome truth
Mourning Kenya’s trailblazers By WILFRED MUCHIRE In less than three months Kenya has lost two heroines in the academia. The first woman professor of Mathematics in the country, Cecilia Wangechi Mwathi died on August 17 after a long illness. The Mathematics professor was born in Kaigonde Village near Gichira in Tetu District, Nyeri County. Coincidentally, this is the same district and county where 2004 Noble laureate, the late Wangari Maathai hailed from. Their homes are separated by about four ridges. Mwathi and Maathai were the trailblazers in their academic fields of Mathematics and Biology. Although Prof Mwathi was not as widely known as Maathai, she remained a force to reckon with in the academic world. This is especially because she excelled in Mathematics, an area of study that has long been considered a preserve of men. Apart from academics, the two also had another thing in common; they had aspired to represent Tetu constituents in Parliament.
Tetu seat
In 2002, when Maathai captured the Tetu parliamentary seat, Mwathi had also attempted but gave up after losing in the nominations. She had, however, vowed to be in the ballot papers for the same position during the 2012 General Elections but this was not to be. Mwathi died about nine months after she hosted a colourful homecoming party in her home after she was crowned the first woman professor of Mathematics in the country. The family did not disclose what killed the mathematics professor who was buried in her Juja farm on August 25, exactly a month before Maathai met her death. The party, held on December 4, last year
was attended by scores of top scholars from various parts of the country. It also included a motivation talk at her former primary school. In her informative schooling days at Kaigonde and Gichira primary schools in Tetu District, Nyeri County, she endured walking for about five kilometres while barefoot and at times without taking breakfast. After completing her primary education, Mwathi was admitted to Mugoiri Girls’ High School in Murang’a where she sat for her OLevel examinations and later at Chania School (now Chania Boys’ High School) for her Form Five and Six studies. Thereafter, she went to Kenyatta University, then University of Nairobi College where she studied Mathematics and Physical Education (PE). Mwathi dropped PE due to its teacher bias towards girls. After graduating she was posted to Garissa Secondary School before being transferred to Kenya High School. Later she stopped teaching and decided to ‘explore the world of Mathematics’. Her moment of joy came 12 years ago when she was honoured with a doctorate in Mathematics in Zimbabwe by the country’s president, Dr Robert Mugabe. This is a day that was still fresh in her mind as she described it during the party: “Friday the tenth of July, 1998 was a very special day for me and a lot of other people. It was a fulfilment of a dream I had since those days when words like logarithm and algebra were ‘exotic’ to me. Little did I know that those words and a host of their relatives would be the vehicle to the realisation of my dream.” As of last year, there were seven women holding doctorate degrees in Mathematics but she is the only one who was elevated to the status of a professor after over 18 years teaching at
The departed trailblazers Professors Wangari Maathai and Cecilia Wangechi Mwathi. Pictures: Reject correspondent and Wilfred Muchire. Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology (JKUAT). Until her death, she was teaching the same subject at JKUAT in Juja and some of its constituent colleges among them Kimathi University College in Nyeri. “There is nothing which so difficult that cannot be handled by either gender, so long as one has the willing power to counter it.” These were Mwathi’s words during the motivation talks she conducted in various parts of the country. Mwathi was the fifth born in a family of eight and left behind five children.
Professor Maathai
Nobel laureate Maathai was in the limelight for most of her life. This is especially because of her persistent fight to conserve the environment that put her at loggerheads with the former President Moi’s regime. She almost single-handedly fought Moi’s government bid to build a 60-storey skyscraper at Uhuru Park. She also fought the encroachment on Karura Forest. In 2004, Professor Maathai won the Nobel Prize for peace. This further enhanced her visibility locally and internationally. Through working with grassroots women, Maathai spearheaded a tree planting campaign through her
organisation the Greenbelt Movement. Maathai was the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On the eve of her final journey, the African continent was again honoured when Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and her compatriot Leymah Gbowee together with Yemeni Tawakkul Karman were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize, almost a decade after Maathai. Professor Maathai was the first woman to earn a PhD in East and Central Africa. She was also the first woman chair of a university department and the first woman professor in the country. Maathai’s role in the fight for the release for political prisoners is well chronicled where she led a group of women, mothers of political prisoners in an almost year –long campaign agitating for the release of their sons. Despite the torture Maathai kept a low profile when her ill health became a challenge, according to some family sources. This explains her marked absence from the public gaze during the referendum campaigns. Maathai left the country on the eve of August 4 to seek medical attention in the US. As the nation mourns, residents of Nyeri County mourn two of their illustrious daughters lost in a span of a few weeks.
Where are our heroines? By WANJIKU MWAURA
The recent unveiling of a statue in honour of post-independence firebrand politician Tom Mboya has raised questions on the absence of women freedom fighters in Kenya’s ‘hall of fame’. The death of Wambui Otieno, one of the women freedom fighters, reignited the debate. “In her typically non-conformist nature, Wambui left home at 16 and joined the Mau Mau in Nairobi during the emergency period,” says Njoki Wamai, a peace and security scholar at the African Leadership Centre in King’s College, London. Yet, Wambui’s name may never be engraved at the Heroes Corner at Uhuru Park. Wamai and others argue that there has been a long conspiracy to keep the role of women out of the history of the fight for independence.
National
“The historical narrative is so bad that women in other parts of the country are non-existent in the struggle for independence. The truth is women from the Coast to the plains and to the lake contributed to the struggle,” says Cyrus Koloshe, a history teacher. That notwithstanding, there is little recognition of the role women played in the fight for freedom. Few streets if any are named after women heroines. For example, Giriama heroine Mekatilili wa Menza could only be afforded a back alley. The country is littered with buildings, streets or stadia named after male freedom fighters but none is named after a woman. Writer Muthoni Likimani, who has been among those challenging the skewed freedom struggle narrative, was once quoted saying: “What upsets me is that of all the books written about the movement, as much as women were
involved, no one has ever written about the extent of their involvement. To me, women were unsung warriors. They were the fighters that no one talks about. They went to the forest with men. They were seeing that the people in the forest were fed, that the sick were taken care of. Women raised money, stole guns and medicine, transported all kinds of goods into the forest, they were even shooting. I know of one of the women, Field Marshall Muthoni, who was trapping wildlife to cook. She went to fight alongside famous warriors of the forest like Dedan Kimathi Waciuri. In fact, this woman was one of the last to surrender from the forest upon independence, she was not sure to surrender until she saw the African flag.” Likimani who is a writer of several fiction and non-fiction books on the social history of Kenyan women, including Passbook Number F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya and What Does a Man Want? hopes women can be recognised for their role in the fight for freedom. She goes on to say: “While many died fighting for independence, it must be acknowledged that one of the first people to be killed by the colonialists in freedom fighting in Kenya was Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru during the Harry Thuku uprising in 1922. Why is it that there is no street named after her today?” The author concedes that women have had a very raw deal in the historiography of Mau Mau. “This is precisely the reason I call the women who fought the unsung warriors. People say, ‘Oh, they cooked food’. Yes they did, but they did so much more. Without them, men would not have managed. Women were involved in all the activities of freedom fighting.” Historians say one reason for lack of research on women’s nationalism is that scholars followed the line taken by the colonial government. “Even today, we still read the history that
the colonisers wanted us to. It is sad that after over 40 years of independence, we have not corrected the wrong history,” says Claude Mwenda of Kenyatta University. “The only accessible history in books is wrong. I fear that our children will have no proper sense of where we have come from,” he observes. “It is no wonder widows of many freedom fighters are poor and get no recognition. In this country, there is no belief in the saying that ‘behind every successful man there is a woman’,” says Rhoda Awino who is studying gender and development in an American University.
Courage
“I think the story of courage and determination of the women who fought for freedom was deliberately ‘blacked out’ to keep Kenyan women oppressed for ever. Imagine if we had the whole account about the struggle for freedom?” Awino poses. On the issue of not honouring women freedom fighters, University of Nairobi lecturer Tom Odhiambo observes: “Who comes up with the criteria of who should be honoured? For example, why did it take so long to honour Mboya?” Youth leader Janet Mbiuki observes: “Look around and see, there is no place that honours women.” Even history books have scanty details on the role of women in the fight for independence. Sadly, this may never change unless history is interrogated. “I think the problem is the way the Kenyan history has been written. Those who fought for independence were classified by the colonialists as resistors and those who did not oppose were collaborators and only good things were written about them. Sadly, we inherited the same history and have never felt the need to ques-
tion it. How is fighting for your freedom a bad thing?” poses Macharia Kamau, who studied history at Kenyatta University. Muthoni says: “We played valiantly, sacrificially, against the opposing team. We sweated. We gave our lives. Then, at the end of the match, when we had won, the spectators ran away with the trophy.” Even those who one way or the other participated in the second liberation are rarely recognised. “Look at the history of Saba Saba and you will see women are barely recognised. We continue distorting history,” says Kamau. It is hoped that the establishment of the proposed Kenya Human Rights and Gender Commission will be one of the ways to correct the ‘wrongs’ on the missing history on women’s role in independence struggle. Some historians say civil society organisations should start a petition to put our history in order. They say, perhaps, the historical perspective can help women make a stronger claim when the gender ratio is not observed.