5 - Women and War: A Kenyan Experience

Summary

Introduction Kenya has suffered, and still suffers, violent conflicts of differing magnitudes: for example, the Mau Mau rebellion, resulting in Kenya's independence in 1963; cattle-raiding conflicts that frequently arise among neighboring communities; and the conflict that arose after the 2007 presidential election. Women played important roles in these conflicts, and it is important to record this fact as this chapter sets out to do. Andrea Cornwall, writing in 2005, notes that over the last thirty years an extensive literature has emerged on sub-Saharan African women. However, “studies of African nationalist movements,” according to Gloria Chuku, “seldom give evidence of any active participation by women. They tend to concentrate on the activities of men, while the roles played by women are, by and large, relegated to the background.” Robert Young reinforces the point Chuku makes, observing that

just as colonial history is dominated by men, the generals, the admirals, the viceroys, the governors, the district officers and so forth, anti-colonial history of the liberation struggles is also dominated by the political theorists, communist activists, national party leaders, who were all largely (though by no means exclusively) male.

However, Young then notes the “two landmark works [that] initiated the feminist response to the absence of women in colonial and anti-colonial histories,” namely, Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986), and Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid's Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (1989).

Waruhiu Itote's “Mau Mau” General is thus all the more remarkable, as he acknowledges the exemplary achievement of women fighters in the forest camps during the Mau Mau uprising. Writing in 1967, Waruhiu states: “Over and over again, during the Emergency, I noticed that a woman could keep a secret much better than a man; even under interrogation, relatively few[er] women than men would break down and reveal information.” Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo, in 1977, also acknowledge the achievement of women, in the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. They depict a woman character quite undaunted by the murderous white soldier she runs into on her way to supply the Mau Mau fighters with arms. She easily deceives him into not searching her entire basket.