7 foetuses recovered in plastic bags in Huruma
Visited 331 times, 1 so far today
This is a sad story from the Times of South Africa.
Now for my rant. Although abortion is illegal in Kenya, it continues to happen with impunity. According to data from the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, 250,000 abortions are carried out each year in Kenya.
Kenya has one of the most restrictive abortion laws even as the rest of the world relaxes those laws yet abortion rates are increasing and becoming more dangerous as women take greater risks to complete their abortions. A visit to ward 1D in Kenya where women end after botched abortions is a sobering evidence of this. I’m sure that there are legitmate reasons for restricting abortion. The thing I don’t understand is the hypocrisy by the government on this issue given these sobering statistics. Did you know that a person found helping to complete an abortion in Kenya can be subject to capital punishment?What about the men who forcibly rape young girls, relatives and mentally retarded women all over the country? As an african man, I know for a fact that men have it the easiest in this issue.
I once witnessed a sad situation many years ago just to illustrate this point.We were on our way home from a party early one morning many years ago in Nairobi. When we got to the bus stop to catch our bus home, we met a well-built man holding a woman hostage. He was waiting for public transport as well. The woman had a terrified look on her face. She was grabbing on to the signpost for fear of being dragged further.
The man had grabbed and twisted her dress so tight that it tore in some parts and her breasts were bare. He would not let go.There was a traffic light just a few meters away. So at times, traffic would back up to the bus stop.
A bus full of drunken party goers and night shift workers stopped in front of us when the light turned red and someone inside the bus asked, “iko nini mzee?” (”what’s happening sir?”) , as if on queue, the man narrated his story and what brought him to this point;“Kusema kweli, wanainchi, huyu mwanamke, nilimkuta kwa ile bar tukasikilizana ati tutakula na tutakunywa kidogo halafu tutaenda kwa hoteli. Basi nilimnunulia chakula na pombe. Haya, wakati ika fika ya kuenda nyumbani nikamwambia wacha niende kwa choo halafu ndio tuende. Kurudi, nilimpata kama amebeba kibeti na yuko mlangoni anatoroka. Sasa nikamfuata na nikamleta hapa na taka kumpeleka nyumbani.” (”To tell the truth, my fellow citizens, I met this woman in that bar over there. We agreed on a price and decided to eat dinner and drink a bit before heading to a hotel room. I bought dinner and beer and when we were done, I decided to use the restroom before leaving the bar. On my way back, I found her at the main door on her way out and she was even carrying her purse. I ran after her and caught her. That is why we are at this point and now I want to take her to my place.”)
“Aaaaai bwana, hiyo kweli ni haki yako,” (Man, honestly, that is your right) replied the person from the bus and the mumble from everyone else in the bus seem to support that sentiment.
Moments after the bus sped off, the man frantically waved at an army truck that was wheezing by. It stopped a few metres away from us and then reversed. It turns out this man was a soldier, hence the muscular body and clean cut. I guess upon seeing the army truck heading his direction he now decided to return to his base with the woman instead of going to having his way with the woman in the hotel room.
As the other soldiers lowered the tailgate of the army truck and threw the climbing rope down to the man and woman, the woman started screaming and even tried to remove herself from the man’s clutch but instead her dress kept tearing and more parts of her body were now becoming visible to the curious crowd that was now gathering at the busstop as daylight was breaking. She had no chance. With the help of the other soldiers, she was quickly whisked into the back of the truck and they took off.
Stunned, my friends and I all knew what that meant; we knew that “difficult” women were always lured back to the base and “taught a lesson.” The point I’m trying to illustrate with this story is that there is a culture of sexual dominance where women are treated like property or objects in Kenya. Ironically, sex is often used as a weapon to “teach” women who refuse to submit to a man’s sexual desires or dares to question this authority in the form of rape and even gang-rape.
In these situations, a woman has nowhere to turn to for justice because of shame, the people in authority are usually men who generally have the same belief system towards women and fear of being ostracized from her community so many keep quiet while totally broken inside.
I will argue that it is men who need to be re-educated on how they view and treat women. This is not going to fix the problem we have in Kenya with abortions, but is going to address a very large part of it.The laws in Kenya make no sense at all when you consider that the perpetrators almost always go free while the women are left to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, risking their lives as they navigate a heartless law deliberated on and written mostly by men.
