Former child bride hopes to tell a happy tale one day

There is nothing about 63-year-old Anne Njeri’s brilliant smile that even hints at the decades of pain, heartache and desperation that she has endured .

“I was born of a Luhya father and a Kikuyu mother and was forcibly married off to a Maasai man,” she begins with a thick Maa accent.

She was eight years old at the time.

“My mother and her friend forcibly took us from home in Makuyu, where we used to live with our father, and took us to Maasailand. She gagged us using pieces of cloth in our mouths so we could not shout for help,” she says.

After getting to their destination, together with her sister, now deceased, they were ushered into herding cattle for a Maasai family until some few years later when her mother decided to relocate to Kisamis, in Kajiado County. 

Their new role in Maasailand was to herd cattle.

“My mother later moved with us to Kisamis, in Kajiado County, where she enrolled us in school but it would not be long before my sister, who is long dead now, and I would be married off,” she says.

She was in Standard Two when she was married off, in the guise of going to work as househelps.

“Some men came and took us away from school and that was the start of my problems,” she says amid sobs.

HUMILIATION, PUNISHMENT

It was in 1960 and at only eight years, she was already somebody’s "wife". However, it is the humiliation and punishment that she had to endure every day because she had become a "property" of the husband that pains her the most. 

“I would be forced to go look after the cattle. I could not understand why everybody was referring to me as a wife. My heart would ache so much whenever I would come across him and I cannot remember any day of joy during my childhood,” she adds.

She alleges that she would be beaten repeatedly especially after losing track of the cattle. Despite her young age, the husband would demand sex from her but she would escape from him every time.

It did not last for long, though.

It was in 1971, a year she vividly remembers. There was famine in the region and she was tasked with looking for pasture for the cattle accompanied by the man she had learnt to hate.

“We walked for a long time heading to the Kajiado region, I grew so tired and needed to rest but my husband would hear none of that. He attacked me, strangled and raped me after which he left me to die inside a ravine he threw me into after executing his plan,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes.

She fell unconscious for several hours and when she regained consciousness it was at dusk. She began to walk towards an unknown direction despite her bleeding from the assault.

When she finally got to Rongai the following day, a group of children noticed her after she fell. She went unconscious for a second time.

“The children ran and returned with their mother. She took me to the hospital and later to her house, where she took care of me. She helped me very much,” she said.

She became part of the family but as fate would be, she was "kidnapped" yet again by her aggressor, who had learnt that she survived the ordeal and was living in Rongai.

He called police officers, who arrested her and for one week she would stay inside a police cell, “They whipped me and made marks all over my body, I still have them to date,” she said.

She was 19 at the time.

She was taken "home" and was forced to accept that she was a married woman based on the dowry her mother received from her aggressor.

FAMILY WOULD NOT HELP

“One day, I tried explaining to his family that I was being assaulted but they could not help me. They told me that the man was my husband and he had every right to do anything he wanted to me because I was his property and that they did not care if I died or survived,” she recounted.

As she tells her story, she reveals to this writer marks from the whips she received from her husband.

Not once or twice, she claims that she would be beaten severely to the point of losing consciousness. And every time she tells or retells her story, she blames her mother, who she says "sold" her.

The man married two other wives, but at least they were of age and they never used to be beaten as she was.

FOUND AGAIN

She ran away from home after several years of suffering in the hands of the person she was supposed to live by for the rest of her life.

Just like before, he found her, only this time the punishment was more cruel, the consequences of which she lives with to date.

“He punched me in my right eye and because of the blow I lost it. My back developed complications, I could neither stand nor sit. He ran away after realising his mistake,” she said and added that every time she would receive such beatings, she would be treated using herbal medicine.

Because of the beatings, she became a shadow of herself. Her in-laws, after witnessing how much she had suffered already, gave her some little money to go back home, even though she was not entirely sure which direction home was.

One early morning in 1973, when she was only 21 and having been married for 13 years, she escaped through Ngong Forest, and she remembers wishing that wild animals would maul her to death so she would end her suffering, but she reached Isinya safely and boarded the first vehicle that she saw.

She had wrapped her face so that no one would notice her injuries but a keen conductor did.

“He thought I had been mauled by a wild animal and actually did not ask for any bus fare from me.”

The conductor and the driver, on hearing her predicament, took her to a Maasai woman they knew at the OTC bus station.

“She took me in. She was living in Majengo and after realising how injured I was, she took me to the hospital. After intensive treatment I recovered, but the doctor intimated to me that I may never give birth to any children because of the massive injuries,” she says.

But the well-wisher, mother too, offered to support her. She looked for an expert, who treated her until she regained her ability to bear children.

She started life afresh despite the scars and the pain, a constant reminder of what she had gone through.

After she left home, she got involved in a relationship and bore her first son.

“I bore my first-born son in 1978 and I took care of him by working as a waitress in a hotel. I bore three other children afterwards. Unfortunately, they were taken away from me,” she says.

Anne feels betrayed and utterly crushed. After working so hard to raise her children single-handedly, her mother, who had learnt that her daughter had run away from her matrimonial home and was staying in Nairobi, gave them away to her aggressor.

Apparently, the man needed to be compensated for the dowry he paid for her and so he went looking for her mother.

“She told him I had begotten children and that they could replace the dowry he paid for me because she did not have another daughter or cattle to give back to him. He took my children away while I was working, nevertheless I swore to never go back to him,” she said.

After her four children were taken away from her around 1988, she felt she had nothing left to live for. She decided to escape from the hurt, the pain and frustration by travelling to the Coast, where she started a small business making and selling beaded items like necklaces and wrist bands.

She also became a dancer where she would entertain tourists visiting the Coast, together with a group of women she had joined.

But her problems were far from over, though she hoped that they would just end. In 2004, her firstborn son had a wedding.

He needed her at the ceremony and so he went out looking for her with the purpose of bringing her home. What was supposed to be a happy ceremony, however, turned out to be a nightmare as  her co-wife would not let her hold his hand to walk him down the aisle.

“She assaulted me, I fell unconscious and only woke up when they were cutting the cake. I expected my son to defend me but he did not, besides the fact that he failed to even buy for me a dress to wear during his wedding.”

She alleges that her aggressor turned her children against her. After the wedding, she went back to the Coast, but in year 2011, after suffering a prolonged illness, she learnt that she was HIV-positive.

Her children were informed that she was ill and so they went for her but would soon turn against her, “My agony increased after they learnt my status, word had spread in the whole village and I did not have any peace of mind.

“My children look down upon me, they see me as a condemned case fit to be dead, they hate me, and they have abandoned me. They even prevent their children from coming near me lest I infect them.”

Through some interventions by community elders, she was given a piece of land by her long-time assailant to settle in Ngong. She put up a structure to live in and after sometime, a well-wisher, through a support group she had joined after learning of her status, constructed a permanent house for her.

However, the house was also taken away from her by one of her sons after he was incited by his "father", she alleges. She decided to rent a structure in the Mathare slums, in the outskirts of Ngong’ town.

But the structure was swept away in the recent floods and she has relocated to another place, “I do not know what I did to my children to deserve this treatment. Maybe they feel that way because of my status.”

Despite all she has been through, Anne’s smile remains firmly in place as she holds on to the hope that she will tell a happy story one day.