‘equal rights’ means equal rights in its terms

By BtM Correspondent

May 17, 2006: In the four years that I have known Shellomith, I have come to categorise amongst other ‘go-getter no nonsense women’ I know.  Shello, as we know her, is in her early twenties, bright, sassy, well-educated and well read to boot. I consider her pro-femme although Shullamith firestone, that firebrand feminist, would disagree. Most Africans that are pro-woman rights would agree she is feminist; she believes that the woman is equal to a man and has a special role to play in the society.

As the sexual offences bill drags through the motions of the Kenyan parliament amid great acrimony, women’s rights issues are the melting pot here. I would therefore have thought that Shellomith – a young lawyer, would have been lobbying me on what is in the bill for women. To the contrary, she was indifferent to the recent outrageous and insulting remarks made by some MPs prompting ten women MPs to storm out of parliament. She reservedly observed that men would be pigs and that was the end of it. I wondered for whom Njoki Ndungu, the nominated MP and the mover of the private members bill, was fighting for.

As I steered away from the abstract notions of false consciousness and patriarchal dominance, I could not help but seethe in anger at how helpless and ineffectual we felt. I goaded her lamenting that it was she who should have been picketing parliament. After all, I have the male genitalia and therefore am a beneficiary of status quo I smirked. Truth be told, I have always had an ulterior motive in championing women’s rights. While I truly believe in the mantra that no man is safe till all women are, it is not lost to me that only by compromising the patriarchal structures can we open up society and have an agenda for the LGBTI. It is clear to my mind that the women rights agenda must first be won; to open up society and check the hetero-ego- maniac male in his place. It is a shame that the ire of Kenyan women brews only when men are trivialising their life experiences. I am at a loss how any meaningful headway may be made while always on the defensive, never on the offensive.

A glimpse into the Kenyan political arena may explain why some MPs are so brazen as to publicly, at a recorded audience, oppose the bill for reasons such as an imagined accidental ‘pumping into a woman’s buttocks’. Alternatively, as did one MP, call women shy creatures who needed wooing, citing as experience his own ‘arduous courtship’. In addition, he lamented, any law that restrained an overtly amorous male would constrain the institution of marriage. He expressed his fear that the bill [as if by some magic in its very wording] will result in the death of the procreating social unit that is the family. While it is not unusual for Kenyan MPs to make callous and reckless statements, these are usually off the cuff. This unguarded affront on women has gained its intended purpose. It has cowed dissent. The lobbying groups are now advocating behind the scene machination advising that the ‘in your face’ activism that they had adopted at the beginning would be counter productive.

One of the culprit MPs is a university trained doctor with a bachelors degree in general medicine and surgery. Yet his rounds in trauma wards repairing countless torn privates have not tempered his chauvinism. To expect him to be so tempered is to be ignorant of his constituency. Many a woman MP has found it rough campaigning against men in the male dominated bars or local pubs. Where, come the next campaigns, our Dr. will be a hero for denigrating women and will quickly buy a second round of beer as an effective tool for campaigning.
It is therefore understandable that the fifty women or so, that were picketing, could hardly cow the MP neither am afraid, would fifty thousand women.  Not while tribe is the primordial factor to consider when aspiring to the halls of power. And it is tribe and not the ‘foreign gender’ politics that is the decisive factor for Doctor Bonny Khalwale whose community voted overwhelmingly against the draft constitution: for the sole reason that women could of right inherit their father’s, be they married or single. Then as now, women groups were silent and did not tell them that the draft constitution sought only to consolidate a situation that obtains at law today.

While I do not want to sound like the harbinger of doom, the writing on the wall is clear for the LGBTI agenda. Lobbying will help, but I see no MP championing our issue. That is why my safest bet is for constitutional change. Equal rights for all means exactly that in legal language. It might be easier to persuade a few unelected judges than MPs whose hips sway to the payers tune.

Nevertheless, it seems as though the sexual offences bill might see the light of day albeit at a cost. The compromise it seems will be the deletion of the clause criminalising marital rape. FGM will have to be dropped as a sexual offence and the coup for the rapist is that the burden to prove that the rape was not consensual is on the woman and the court can entertain claims of her past sexual conduct. Therefore, what has changed is very little. I hardly expect this to be the Stonewall of Kenyan sexual freedom rights. However, it is a step in the right direction. By slowly chipping away at the patriarchal structures, we may create space for manoeuvre. Maybe a courageous judge will, as it happened in England, one day concede to the fallacy of perpetual consent to sex by the magic of ‘I do’.  We can only hope that the judges will give the Sexual Offences Act an adventurous interpretation.