Silence Is a Woman

“Silence is a Woman” is dedicated to the reverberating voices of Gladwell Otieno and Zahid Rajan, and to all the women in all the bus and matatu stops in Kenya.“The general term for a woman is ‘mutumia,’ meaning ‘one whose lips are sealed’”
—Gikuyu Architecture

“Your silence will not protect you”
—Audre Lorde

1. Of Public Bodies, Bodies in Public & the Body Politic

In 1922, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru led a group of women that stormed a police station in Nairobi, Kenya, to demand the release of the nationalist leader Harry Thuku who had been arrested and detained by the colonial government. The colonial forces had guns and the men who had come with Nyanjiru and the other women were afraid. Nyanjiru denounced these men as cowards, stripped naked to shame them, and walked into the police bayonets. She was among the first to die in the ensuing bloodbath, but her bravery roused her people into active resistance.

In 1992, Wangari Maathai led a group of women that occupied “Freedom Corner” in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, demanding the release of political prisoners arrested and detained by the Moi regime. The government sent armed police to evict the women, who stripped naked in protest and defiance. Wangari Maathai was beaten unconscious and hospitalized, but the women of Freedom Corner eventually won.

Kenyan women have been laying their bodies on the line for years. A group of women stripping naked in public is one of our most potent political practices. Women’s bodies work as a potential and latent public space in Kenyan modernity because they usually appear in public only under cover: a frightening secret weapon everyone knows about. In many African communities, there is no stronger curse or taboo upon men than seeing “the mothers naked.” There is no stronger way for women acting together to register political dissent. Deployed in this way, women’s bodies have the power to make (something) public, to create “a public” around this action, and thus to produce both public-ness and publicity from the ground of their own corporeal materiality.

As political action, this is not only a public mode of power and a specific form of public voice. It is also a critical public voice of dissent against the all-encompassing patriarchy.

These women’s bodies are subversive bodies. Women’s power deployed in this way can only be oppositional, always a challenge, always-already embodying and performing the power to refuse. Yet, women’s bodies do not have to be unclothed for significant utterance. A woman’s daily clothing is already a mode of speech about her life and about her relationship to the situation of her embodiment. In contemporary Kenya, even the banality of women’s everyday clothing appears to pose a threat to masculinist domination.

The Kenyan post-colonial social contract is not a political agreement between allegedly neutral individual citizens but a patriarchal and ethnicist order based on the domination of all Kenyan women by all Kenyan men. The seemingly unsayable political problem in Kenya is the post-colonial dominance of the patriarchal ethnic Gikuyu elites, whilst the ethnic virulence of Kenya’s patriarchal politics threatens our constitutional democratic opening. The bodies of women speaking from different horizons of political possibility create generative conditions of dissent and democratic renewal. It is very much to my purpose to pay homage to the lineage of Gikuyu women’s political protest, in which I include the historical acts of Muthoni Nyanjiru and Wangari Maathai and of contemporary women who continue to use their bodies powerfully.

In 2008 Kenya’s Post-Election Violence, Rachel Kungu, protected only by her commitment to the work of social repair, walked up to barricades of burning tires erected by angry, armed, and violent young men, to negotiate for peace. In May 2013, Muthoni Njogu wrote a poem the day after she participated in a demonstration outside Kenya’s Parliament:

yesterday, i was hit.
yesterday, my heart, hurt.

right now.
there is a swelling at the back of my right leg,
beneath the ankle,
i cannot sleep.

nothing prepares one to be on the receiving end
of a riot police baton.

nothing prepares one to sludge through itchy
eyes, coughing phlegm
& seemingly random state of confusion hours
after the violent dispersion.

nothing prepares for the experience of running
solo
while a band of armed, club welding, tear canister
holding men run after you shouting for you to
stop.

I oppose the exclusionary and false Gikuyu-centric narrative and the ideological erasure of the many other ethnic communities in the Kenyan story as told by Gikuyu men. Here, I also want to insist on the strong tradition within Gikuyu women’s culture of resisting tyranny, oppression, domination, and hubristic upumbafuness by the men. The multi-generational trajectory of Gikuyu women’s political embodiment and ethical public action contradicts the version of Gikuyu culture enforced by misogynist male interpreters and patriarchal narratives.

I use layered juxtapositions of “bodies” and “publics” and the metaphorical sutures between corporeal bodies and “the body politic” to look at how public space has been marked and defined, which bodies impose their forms on the public, and which other bodies are denied a public presence. These questions are not only theoretical concerns. Having endorsed Majubaolu Olufunke Okome that “as a woman, there are conditions under which one is legitimately able to exercise power,” I also mark the violent masculinism acting in the name of public “decency” which has launched a pedagogy of violence and terror against Kenyan women using women’s bodies as its teaching instrument.

These “lessons” are administered through public media showing public spectacles enacted in public spaces and fueled by public commentary. Kenyan public spaces are defined and punctuated by monumental forms of homage to powerful men while by contrast an imaginary symbolic woman without a body who used to represent social justice is now said to be dead. A suggestive resonance links Kenyan forms of masculinism to the spaces and artifacts of Kenya’s patriarchal domination by ethnic political elites.