Following the contested result of the 2007 elections, tens of thousands of Kenyans were sexually and physically assaulted, driven from their homes and communities, and in some cases murdered by their fellow Kenyans and state security forces. Although this violence was unprecedented in scale, intercommunal and state violence has accompanied all of Kenya’s post-independence elections. In addition, Kenyan women have been dealing with interpersonal violence and institutional failures of security and other state institutions for decades before the 2007 elections. I argue here that the catastrophic 2007 election violence needs to be understood within the context of the high levels of normalised interpersonal and institutional violence that many Kenyan women contend with throughout their lives.

Outside the election cycle, interviews I conducted with women in Bar Ober and Butere (60km north-west of Kisumu) illustrate the challenges women routinely face in dealing with intimate partner violence, theft, police corruption and denial of basic health care. These discussions present these women’s own assessment of the utility of the strategies available to them to address these significant and ongoing challenges. I then examine the ways in which women’s experiences of post-election violence are represented by the Kenyan national human rights sector and assess the utility of the recommendations made by these organisations. Although local human rights advocates and organisations are aware of the fundamental limitations of law enforcement, primary health care and other social welfare services, they continue to recommend that women employ strategies that the women themselves understand to be ineffective at best and which, at worst, may create new risks to the women’s physical safety. By tracing the threat of violence in peacetime through to the violence experienced in times of national crisis, we can see that the memories, strategies and expectations of peacetime violence are imbricated in the violence of the crisis. This analysis also examines the aims and outcomes of the liberal peacebuilding process, which reinforce rather than problematise institutional and cultural power imbalances, including ethno-patriarchal and neocolonial power structures and constricting gender roles, as we have seen in previous chapters.

This chapter begins with the return to multiparty democracy in 1992 and an overview of the elections in the late-modern period (1992, 1997 and 2002), focusing on the treatment of women candidates and the minimal representation women achieved at these elections.

Following the 2007 post-election violence, this chapter examines the effects one of the important products of the transitional justice process, the (albeit protracted) promulgation of the 2010 Constitution and its extensive Bill of Rights; and the reception and effects of the constitutionally enshrined Two-Thirds Gender Principle at the 2013 elections, the first to be held under the new dispensation. As we have seen, the 2010 Constitution is heir to Kenyan political and cultural memory steeped in decades of resistance to autocracy, and multiple movements for constitutional reform. The history of demands from Kenyan civil society for constitutional reform is inextricably linked to demands for a return to pluralist politics, and for tangible improvements in service delivery and social justice outcomes. The drafting of this Constitution was the latest moment in the dominant, cyclical narrative of Kenya’s always imminent democratic rebirth.

The persistent post-independence calls for a new constitution encompass demands relating not only to the primacy and integrity of the text of the Constitution itself, but also to the realisation of constitutionalism, a system of values that includes the separation of powers, the rule of law, the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms, and the promotion and protection of institutions that support democracy. Indeed, Murunga, Okello and Sjögren characterise the postcolonial struggle as one driven by a rejection of the ‘African experience of diluted constitutionalism … justified and practised by … African leadership as a trade-off between democracy and development’. As previous constitutional renewal processes in Kenya have shown, however, the mere fact of constitutional reform alone is not sufficient to guarantee governance reform. Although it inherited the work of years of local activism around constitutional reform throughout the late colonial, and postcolonial periods, the 2010 Constitution was primarily developed and deployed as a direct response to the 2007 post-election violence and is, consequently, a product and keystone of the liberal peacebuilding project in Kenya – a process, as I argued in Chapter 4, that privileges security and state stability over building an organic and vernacular positive peace.

The explicit focus of the new Bill of Rights on gender and minority rights sits incongruously beside the local history of politically expedient colonial and post-independence constitutional reform detailed in Chapter 2.

Through this account of the sociopolitical rights of African women in Kenya, from the late colony through to the contemporary period, we have witnessed the establishment and entrenchment of colonial ethno-patriarchal politics and its insidious reproduction in the postcolonial republic. Violence against women – especially violence adjacent to and during elections – has drawn the world’s attention but, as we have seen, rather than an extraordinary deviation from an otherwise peaceful life, electoral violence is symptomatic of a wider sphere of pervasive institutional and everyday violence.

With the embodied trauma of the 2007 elections still hanging in the air, for Kenyans the 2013 elections served as a painful reminder. Friends in low voices explained to me the burnt-out shopfronts as we passed – ‘that one was a Kikuyu business’, ‘that was a Luo shop’ – or why the markets outside Valley Arcade were so makeshift – the structures of a more established market were destroyed in the 2007 violence and never rebuilt. Talk of voting in 2013 prompted stories of terror from 2007 – ‘this is how I fled’, ‘these are who were chasing me’. As much as the 2010 Constitution and the success of the 2013 elections signalled important and long overdue reform, the key power structures, cultural biases and modes of endemic corruption remained untouched. Although far from perfect, a kind of collective relief took hold in the aftermath of the 2013 elections. The fact that they were relatively peaceful, and comparatively transparent, was combined with a profound exhaustion across Kenya – the stress of remembered trauma, the skyrocketing price of necessities including cabbage, clean water, cooking oil, kerosene, charcoal and transport, and lost days of work as everyone sheltered in place until the threat of violence had passed.

The good example set by the 2013 elections was not repeated in 2017. At an estimated cost of almost US$500 million to administer, the 2017 General Elections in Kenya were the most expensive elections per capita ever to have taken place on the African continent, and the second-most expensive in the world.

One of the most enduring myths about Kenyan women is that they have a long tradition of gendered organising to achieve agreed goals. This myth is predominantly derived from the existence of age-set initiation rites in the precolonial period, when girls and boys were initiated into adulthood through a combination of cultural training, seclusion and (depending on the community) gendered circumcision ceremonies. Groups that passed through initiation rites at the same ceremony were given a name to delineate their age-set from others. These culturally generated groups were organised to achieve community goals, and they often supported each other as they progressed through life mile-stones at similar times. Substantial work by historians and anthropolo-gists has foregrounded the communal life of East African ethnic groups and their gendered social and political organisation. Fundamentally, these groups were generated through intergenerational cultural practices and worked to support and perpetuate the structures and values of ethnic communities.

The British colonial regime actively sought to remake this African tradition of gendered organisation to better suit the regulatory and labour needs of the colony. This process created new forms of gendered organisation that responded to the onerous demands of the regime. Latterly, two modern discourses – international human rights policy and members of the postcolonial African academy – have sought, in different ways, to claim the gendered organisation of women as a structure that is integral to African communal life.

I argue here that the motivations of women joining late-modern women’s organisations and community groups in Kenya are much more closely related to economic imperatives and poverty than to ‘traditional’ modes of women’s organisations. Further, drawing on interviews I conducted with Kenyan women, I interrogate key assumptions of both African women’s history and human rights policy literature that women have always collectively organised, that women naturally turn to each other for support and guidance, that Kenyan women all want the same rights and are working towards the realisation of these rights as a united group, and that women will be able to access their rights once they are educated about them. The expectations of modern women’s organisations are grounded in the colonial past, but they carry modern burdens.

The histories of the peoples of East Africa and, latterly, those who were geographically contained within the territory that is now the Republic of Kenya, extend centuries before the Portuguese built the critical trading port of Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593. Indeed, ancient Greek documents date trade from Greece and Rome with Lamu and Zanzibar islands as early as AD 100. Despite the length and complexity of this precolonial history, it is the short but cataclysmic period from contact with British trading interests in the 1880s to independence in December 1963 that continues to significantly influence Kenya’s modern identity. It is this period that will be examined here, so that the beginnings of the gendered nation can be understood in their historical context, and we can trace the legacies of that history through the postcolonial period.

Motivated by a combination of tantalising trading opportunities and increasing missionary interest in ‘civilising’ the East African coast, the British established a presence in parts of East Africa in the 1880s. The Imperial British East Africa Association (IBEAA) began its economic exploration of the territories of East Africa in 1884, although it initially failed to secure backing from the British government. The IBEAA was reformed as the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) and was granted a royal charter in 1888, at least partly in response to the increasing German domination of the East African coast. Although the IBEAC was in control of Kenya and Uganda, the Company quickly realised that it could not meet its administrative costs. Nor was it able to pursue its goals of eradicating the slave trade in East Africa, opening the territory to a laissez-faire economic system and taking advantage of the economic opportunities for trade that were thought to exist in the interior. Persuaded to keep the territories out of the hands of the Imperial German Government, the Foreign Office took over responsibility for Uganda in 1893 and East Africa in 1895, renaming it the British East Africa Protectorate. By an Order in Council dated 11 June 1920, the East Africa Protectorate was annexed to the British Dominions under the name of the Colony of Kenya.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission

The KHRC is a non-government organisation working on several key areas of human rights advocacy, including civil and political rights, and gender and the rights of people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression (SOGIE). The KHRC is actively engaged with twenty-one community-based human rights networks (HuRiNets) in five key regions of Kenya, and prioritises timely human rights monitoring, documentation and reporting.

The KHRC was established in 1991 and registered in Washington, USA, named the ‘Kenya Human Rights Commission’ to draw attention to the fact that the Moi government had no care for the human rights of Kenyans, and had not established a national commission (the statutory body, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) was established by Moi’s successor Mwai Kibaki in 2002). Since its establishment the KHRC has increasingly focused on strategies aimed at enhancing community driven human rights advocacy, through building the capacity of citizens to deal with their immediate human rights concerns as well as engaging in strategic actions to transform structures responsible for human rights violations.

The Commission’s focus on human rights monitoring and reporting and commitment to community engagement and human rights education continue to build their strong community connections across Kenya. Working with the Commission for several months allowed me to build relationships of trust within the human rights sector in Nairobi and to become known to and establish trust in local communities in Nairobi.

Focus groups

Over the two trips I conducted semi-structured focus groups and interviews in the following locations. I visited those locations in bold type on both trips:

• 1. Central County Nairobi (Kibera slum, and Kangemi, low-income areas)

• 2. Kisumu and Siaya Counties Bumala, Bar Ober, Butere, Ugunja, Ahero, Aweyo Canteen, and Nyando villages in the province of Nyanza, around Lake Victoria

• 3. Taita-Taveta County Taveta town

I conducted semi-structured focus group interviews, with between five and twenty participants at each focus group, about 120 women in total. The women I interviewed in these focus groups were women from two particular groups – those who were peer-to-peer human rights educators or otherwise volunteered with local right promotion groups and/ or who belonged to grassroots, voluntary women’s advocacy organisations (for instance, the KHRC’s HuRiNet partners).

In 2014, when I was working in Nairobi at the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), The Nairobi Law Monthly published an article entitled ‘Female judicial officers fry in their hot temper’. The article went on to explain that ‘science indicates that some women might, due to hormonal activities, be temperamental’, a fact which needed ‘to be accommodated by the vetting board’. In Kenyan public life, women’s bodies always need to be accounted for. The Kenyan public is constantly reminded that the experiential reality of living in a woman’s body is something that would (and even should) often limit one’s career prospects, and the reach of one’s authority. For women in public office, or aspiring to public office, assumptions of the ‘natural’ weaknesses and limitations of womanhood need to be constantly refuted.

Although most women in Kenya are not lawyers, and do not aspire to public office, we know that Kenyan women as a group across the socioeconomic spectrum face serious challenges to their health, wellbeing and access to justice. In 1994, the prominent Kenyan women’s rights advocate and scholar Maria Nzomo lamented the failure of the postcolonial era to provide women with improved access to their human rights. She argued that the twin forces of ‘autocratic African governments’ and ‘underdeveloped economies built upon highly patriarchal societies’ had contributed to generations of women with high rates of illiteracy and ‘extremely low levels of gender, civil and legal rights awareness’. Further, she argued, ‘the trend in the status of women’s human rights in Africa is increasingly one of violation rather than promotion of those rights’. The experiences of Kenyan women have not significantly improved in the intervening years.

Although recent national data sets are difficult to come by, the Kenyan Government’s Second Voluntary National Review on the Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals offers a collation of the available key statistical markers. The number of people living in absolute poverty has increased over the decade 2009–2019, and maternal mortality is still high. In the reporting period 2009–2014, almost 40 per cent of women and girls fifteen years and older had experienced physical violence from a current or former intimate partner, while almost half of all Kenyan women and girls aged over fifteen years reported experiencing physical, sexual or emotional/psychological abuse in the previous twelve months.

Throughout the colonial period, both indigenous communities and the colonial authorities fought for control of the bodies of African women and girls in Kenya, as women’s bodies were (and remain) primary sites of cultural identity formation and expression. Indeed, the level of control over women’s reproductive potential, labour, migration, hygiene, health and clothing became indicators of the success of the British civilising mission. Both the ritual and the results of body modification have served as conscious markers of difference not only between Kenyans and colonialists, but also within and between indigenous Kenyan ethnic groups. Given the unrelenting focus on women’s bodies, the regulation and attempted eradication of female genital cutting (FGC) is, unsurprisingly, a recurring theme in the history of colonial Kenya and was at the centre of existential struggles between the colonial regime and the ethnic communities that practise it. In the Kenyan context, resistance to FGC and the promotion and perpetuation of the practice have been interpreted as the two halves of a dichotomy. However, Kenyan women’s motivations are much more complex than merely supporting either colonial or cultural authority.

Here, I examine three instances in which female genital cutting was a central issue in political contests during the colonial period, focusing on how women’s public, political statements relied upon their sexed bodies and gendered identities. These alternative accounts trouble earlier histories which interpreted these acts as statements of proto-feminist autonomous action, directed towards the liberation of African women from the compound patriarchal burdens of both the colonial regime and their own ethnic communities.