To be Frank, I don't get this!

My attention was drawn yesterday by Andrea Bohnstedt and Stephen Partington to an article published by the Business Daily, a publication of the Nation Media Group, on 28 May 2013. In the day's advice column, a woman who had been abused in her teenage years by a relative and kept the abuse secret was wondering whether to finally now speak out. She's since got married and has children. We shall call her Wanjiku. 

Dr. Frank Njenga's response to her predicament seems to start well. You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Good, so far. Well done, Doc. Then he proceeds to quote the Biblical account of a woman who was caught in adultery. 'Let him who has no sin be the first to cast a stone', Jesus told her all-male authority-figure accusers. I like the direction Frank Njenga is going. Then he does a very unexpected and surprising thing. He turns the story on its head and offers the advice that perhaps, perhaps Wanjiku should not speak out because her motives for doing so may not be pure after all. Maybe she only wants to speak out only to hurt her abuser, who is now a respected elder.

It is difficult to figure out which angle to approach this from: there are so many of them! Let's start with the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the Biblical account. Wanjiku was abused. Her dignity was forcibly violated. Wanjiku is hurting, and has been carrying pain all these years. On top of all this she gets to be compared to an adulterous woman. Help me, somebody.  

Frank Njenga blazes on and implies that Wanjiku should stay silent in order to protect the reputation of the now-elder then-abuser; maybe still-abuser. The truth shall not set you free because it could hurt your children, your family, and your husband. Be a strong woman; think only of how everyone else may benefit from telling the truth. Truth can be a very inconvenient thing. It can have some unintended consequences.

It is interesting to note that Jesus doesn't condemn the woman. In contrast, the word guilt appears at least thrice in Njenga's response. The word hurt (yourself, the abuser, your family) appears thrice as well. You are suffering from guilt, guilt, guilt Wanjiku. And you will hurt, hurt, hurt others.Speaking out is a bad, bad, bad thing.

The icing on the cake comes when Njenga implies that Wanjiku's abuse could be a false recollection. Maybe a delusion. Nice one, Doc; gosh, how many delusional women we have! We have whole hospitals dedicated to treating women and girls who have delusions of having been raped and nearly killed! Heck, we even have an Act of Parliament meant to protect women who might be delusional. Because, you know, sexual abuse is such a wonderful thing to fantasize about; what a good way to lift your mood if you are having a bad day! You can become so good at it the difference between reality and fairyland disappears.

Find a way, Wanjiku, to deal with this in a 'healthy' manner. 

I don't know what is more pathetic between Njenga's 'advice' and the Nation Media Group publishing it. What I do know is that Kenya will remain an unsafe place for women and abusive men will continue to prowl in freedom as long as authority figures and media houses continue to be so blasé.

Things and concrete

On the morning of Sunday 26 May I took a flight from Nairobi's Wilson airport. Overflying the waking Nairobi bathed in soft light, I was faced with two realities. One is the beauty of the Nairobi National Park, and juxtaposed against it the housing estates of South C and South B. All bathed in the morning's sleepy light. The plane quickly changes direction and flies over the Industrial Area and the cornucopia of infrastructure. One moment, an industrial plant, next, a slum with neat rows of rusty  mabati roofs crammed together, next, a middle-class housing estate, next, a quarry. On and on until we left the City perimeter and got to agricultural land interspersed with deep and dangerous quarries. Our love affair with infrastructure is undeniable. A road here, a bridge there, a school, laptops -- the manifestos must have been manufactured in the same factory. Read the Machakos County Manifesto, and you realise that for an area so often ravaged by drought and famine, little is said about environmental regeneration and green technologies. The manifesto mentions the word environment exactly twice, once in relation to sand harvesting (yes, sand harvesting), and the other in relation to market infrastructure. Give us another concrete edifice, please. 

The Jubilee Manifesto does a little better. In a 70-page document, the environment is given two pages. Specific initiatives to encourage citizen participation and education in energy and waste management, and recycling are visibly absent. The plastic bag menace and public health implications of our open-air garbage disposal stink very loudly. Also highly desirable are land use policies that maximize what we have. How sustainable are projects such as Tatu City and other mushrooming lifestyle developments that uproot coffee and plant buildings? All the while, we are investing dollars in researching coffee varieties that can grow in dry areas.



Visions cast in concrete

We need roads,
we shall build roads.
The Park is in the way of the highway.
Move the Park
We need to move goods,
trade is important.
Development is at stake.

Where will our children play? 
Play? We shall give them laptops. 
Where will the women get together? 
We shall give them shopping malls. 
Where shall we grow our onions?
We shall make this a 24hr economy
strengthen construction and tourism,
grow the GDP so you can afford 
things in cans and fried and cured.

Silence, woman.
I have a manifesto to fulfill.
Sleep on, sleep in the city's beautiful lights
The city never slumbers.  
You don't need to be vigilant.

Sleep to the sweet jingle of progress
Sleep, sleep, the day is young,
and our vision is fresh. 

Let the dream embrace you.
You can lean on it -- 
it's as sure as concrete.