Woman, be very afraid: Misogyny is reaching dangerous levels in Kenya

If Kethi Kilonzo and Gladys Shollei were men, would the Kenyan media and public have hung them out to dry as they have been doing? Would the minutest details about their temperament and character have been the subject of discussion?

Would they have been tried, judged, and sentenced by the public before any evidence is presented? I seriously doubt it.

Similarly, if Nancy Baraza had been male and had pinched a female nose, would she have lost her job as Deputy Chief Justice? Maybe not. Because in Kenya powerful men can get away with murder, rape, sexual harassment, lying, and stealing, but if there is the faintest whiff of impropriety on the part of a woman, all hell breaks loose.

I am not saying that women are not capable of committing crimes or that they should not be reprimanded or punished for breaking the law; I am saying that the treatment meted out to women is very different from that meted out to men.

Kilonzo and Shollei are just two among many women who have learnt the hard way that there is nothing a Kenyan male fears more than a powerful woman. Last week, the social media was abuzz with news that Nairobi County Senator Mike Sonko had insulted radio presenter Caroline Mutoko on live radio.

This shocking news was followed by a video of Nairobi County Governor Evans Kidero slapping Nairobi Women’s Representative Rachel Shebesh outside his office.

Although Kidero quickly apologised for his actions, stating in his defence that the slap was a reaction to an assault on his lower abdomen, the fact remains that a man who represents four million Nairobians was seen hitting a woman.

Shortly after that episode, during an online discussion about the infamous slap and what it says to Kenyan women, a well-known hate-mongering individual, who ironically claims to have high regard for women, referred to me as “someone who thinks with her genitals”.

It seems misogyny in Kenya has reached unprecedented levels and cuts across all ethnic groups and classes.

Recently I wrote about a report that showed that levels of gang rape and murder of women and girls in Nairobi’s slums have reached epidemic proportions and virtually constitute a “femicide”. Misogyny, of course, is not a particularly Kenyan phenomenon; it exists in all societies where partriarchy prevails and where men fear the power of women.

The difference, I believe, is that in Kenya, misogyny has become normalised. The women’s movement (if we ever had one) is long dead. Women have been co-opted into the very male-centric patriarchal system that diminishes and destroys women.

Those women who still believe that if they work hard and prove their mettle, they will naturally rise to the top should just look at Kilonzo’s and Shollei’s cases and prepare for the day when they too will be judged and vilified by men who cannot bear the thought of women holding any kind of power or influence.

Dr Wambui Mwangi argues in a thought-provoking essay titled “Silence is a Woman”, published recently in The New Inquiry, that the domination of all Kenyan women by all Kenyan men is a post-colonial social contract that reinforces the patriarchal and ethnicist order.

This order states that if you are a woman, you are dispensable, that you do not really matter. Which is why there has been more outrage about the men who were killed or maimed in the 2007/8 post-election violence than about the women and girls who were brutally gang-raped.

Yet Kenyan women have in the past used the very bodies that Kenyan men despise to register political dissent. The Kenyan mothers of political prisoners who stripped in a section of Uhuru Park (now re-named Freedom Corner) used their bodies to make a political statement.

The late Wangari Maathai, who in my opinion was the only true feminist this country has known, suffered police beatings when she joined these mothers and when she tried to save Nairobi’s green spaces. She became a heroine abroad, but for all her efforts, was only appointed assistant minister by the Mwai Kibaki administration, an insult she bore with dignity.

When will this woman-hating stop?

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