I.
Public Object #1: Kenya Constitution 2010
Last Saturday night, I met some women at a birthday dinner
in my friends’ flower-scented garden. I
made a note of this event after it was past, a reminder to remember it. There were men there too and the friend whose
birthday it was is a man, but I remember the women present most clearly because three of
them performed impromptu readings from two very different texts. The cold and dark of the evening had gathered
us around a fire burning in a free standing clay hearth. The hearths have long-necked chimneys, tall slender funnels that send twirling threads of smoke reaching for the
sky. Between the line of ‘neck’ above and the spindly metal legs of the
stand below, the clay hearth swells out into rounded belly with an open mouth,
a hungry cavern at the center where the wood burns. Tall clay women with fire in their wombs
drawing bodies and thoughts closer, forging a ‘we.’
Eventually.
The hearth crackled and leaped with flame but only after the
wood had spent the first hour or so sulking in glowing embers that refused to
catch, like a lesson, or a social movement, smoldering without flame. First-time meetings can be like that, too,
waiting for the ice to melt so that you can really
meet. Sitting around a fire quickens
this process and intensifies proximities and affects, I find, and keeps the
memories of the event warm for days afterwards.
I can still clearly see the woman who read the first text. I remember that she leaned her body forwards
and angled the book in her hands towards the fire’s light. It was the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, and
it was my copy.
It lives in my handbag,
next to my diary.
The woman was sitting across the fire from me. Before she
could read from the Constitution it had to be handed from person to person,
touched by all our hands and passed on around the fire until it got to her.
This is the bit that she read:
“Chapter Six: Leadership and
Integrity
Responsibilities of leadership
Article
73 (1) Authority assigned to a State officer --
(a) is
a public trust to be exercised in a manner that --
(i)
is consistent with the purposes and objects of
this Constitution;
(ii)
demonstrates respect for the people;
(iii)
brings honour to the nation and dignity to the
office; and
(iv)
promotes public confidence in the integrity of
the office; and
(b) vests
in the State office the responsibility to serve the people, rather than the
power to rule them.”
She stopped, leaving the words reverberating in our
skulls.
And then she turned to the rest of us and said “You see? That’s what it
says!”
The rest of us nodded. Something had been clarified, a point
driven home. Yes, men behave much, much worse, but that is what the constitution says.
We had been talking about a meeting between women. We had
been talking about Rebecca Kerubo and Nancy Baraza,two former strangers who met at the Village Market a
little while ago. We do not know exactly what happened at this encounter. We do
not know exactly who said what to whom or exactly what happened next. We do not know whether or not there was a gun,
or whether or not a nose had been touched inappropriately.
We do know that this encounter was not pleasant or
harmonious for either one of them. We
know that Rebecca Kerubo works as a security guard at Village Market and that
Nancy Baraza works as the Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Kenya. And we know that the 2010
Constitution of Kenya applies to both of them because many brave women and men
of good will struggled to ensure that our 2010 Constitution would secure
women’s opportunities for high office. These brave women and men of good will ensured also that it would addresses the
structures of inequality (often gendered) that distort the social and deny
justice to those for whom gendered positions and locations are a frame of violence. The constitution’s nobler principles are only small
smoldering embers in our social imagination.
They need the breath of passion and expanded vision to fan them into
burning fires. (Precisely why, alas, Article 45(2) fails the Constitution's own standards of social justice)
When women meet, the angle of encounter is important. “And yet, quite often, there is a pretense to
a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in
fact exist,” writes Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider.
Differences are important.
In Kenya differences of class are critical. Much of the energy poured into ethnic baiting
by the elite political class is for the purpose of obscuring this knowledge or for
distracting the people from contemplating its implications.
So there is this fact: these two women met. One of
the things that can happen between women when they meet is whatever happened
between these two women that day at Village Market.
[Weaving with Phyllis Muthoni "Caterpillars" & Sitawa Namwalie "Inflamed Words"]
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