Nyaminwa

No one would ever call her pretty. She is too strong, too urgent, too passionate for that. No one would ever deny, however, that she is exceedingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.

Sitting under a maroon Java House umbrella, I watch as she talks. She listens as if attempting to mine a hidden heart of meaning, her eyes searching, probing, glued on your face. She does not look away from problems, and she does not back down, either.

Her name is Jane Anyango, and she is the eloquent leader of Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness. This means that she thought up and organized this growing and increasingly vocal collective—spoke it into being, fought it into shape, coddled it into cooperation, still inhales and exhales its breaths. Jane Anyango is a fighter, which is why she is a peace-builder in Kibera.

The women meet under a tree in a field to discuss issues of relevance to themselves and other Kibera women, like burned-down homes and missing husbands, gang rapes and hungry children. They also meet to laugh, and sing, and exchange news and gossip and strength. Jane Anyango speaks of them with affectionate respect: her heroes, her neighbours, her friends.

We are sitting in Adams Arcade, a no-man’s-land shopping strip claimed by both impoverished Kibera and comfortable Woodley, and sometimes even upper-caste Karengata. I look around and remember when a bakery here sold the world’s best queen cakes. Now the arcade is pulling the shreds of its dignity around it, bedraggled as they are, pretending not to notice the upstart glitter and flash of Nairobi’s contentiously jump-started economy all around.

Adams Arcade will always be circa 1976 and fading. But Jane Anyango is glowing with the pressing urgency of now. The problems women in Kibera have, now. The distribution of relief resources, now. The cessation of violence and destruction, now. The empowerment of women, now.

We had planned to meet in Kibera near Jane’s small secretarial bureau and her two-room home, shared with two of her children and her husband, Barnaba. Her two eldest, Bob and Anne Clair, are away at boarding school. She is an exacting mother, Jane says, because she wants her children to profit from her mistakes, build upon her experiences. She has packed a lot of the latter into her 37 years—but, as she reminds us, her 18th birthday was spent in her matrimonial home.

She had not planned on getting married so young. When she interrupted a trip from Nyanza to visit her sister in Embu, Nairobi relatives influenced her to spend time with a man who later became her husband. Back then, she had found herself pregnant, with a field of narrowing options and a suitcase, standing in the dark outside the home of the man whose child she carried while his girlfriend cooked and cleaned inside.

Jane had changed our meeting place, and sitting now at Adams, I ask why she is herself, what accounts for her existence in the world as she is now. Her answer is full of girlhood and growing up and the pain of women’s shared knowing. Jane had a sister, nyaminwa,* Anne, who died in 1999. Fully preventable human error and a drug overdose in hospital left a family in mourning and dazed improvization. Anne’s husband, wrecked by his loss, had a stroke and soon followed her into that not-so-good night. Later, Anne’s daughter Juliet, short-changed at birth by more medical malpractice, died aged 14, even though Jane tried every means in her power to get help for her physical challenges.

As a bright Form Two student, Jane had been attacked by a man on the long walk home. She left school after fourth form with a fourth-division hardly-pass. Not long ago in Jane’s neighborhood, a 39-year-old man had been caught defiling an 11-year-old. Amidst police wisecracks, the little girl’s wide-eyed incomprehension, the paedophile’s unrepentant boastfulness, his wife’s resignation, and the Kenyan legal system’s ponderous callousness, the case had come to nought.

And then, in January 2008, during Kenya’s post-election orgy of violence, the police shot dead a 15-year-old girl as they hunted door to door for the young men who tore up the railway tracks through Kibera—and Jane Anyango had had enough. At their first press conference shortly thereafter, Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness had pointedly appealed, woman-to-woman, to Lucy (Kibaki) and Ida (Odinga) to please make their men see some sense. They also suggested that the Kibaki and Raila offspring consider the fates of youths their own age in the slums and talk to their fathers about it.

It should have been enough to make any woman bitter, but Jane had a father who loved her. Her eyes lose focus as she recalls him. “I was Daddy’s girl, even though I was the fourth-born girl. He was so proud of me! Because I did well in school,” she explains, insistent that I understand. It was Jane’s father who made sure she attended a computer-training course, even though she had protested leaving her growing family. In the years since, she has had cause to be grateful for his insistence on his girls’ self-sufficiency. Jane has worked in factories, as an office clerk and secretary, and now as bureau owner, in between her growing duties as the reasonable but firebrand feminist from Kibera. Women from Karen seek her support now, and she has been on radio shows and in the news, but Jane Anyango has her priorities straight. “The women in Kibera know what we want,” she explains calmly. “It would be good if someone listened to us for once. We want peace and fairness, and a chance to show what we can do.”

Much of Kibera is in ruins now, blackened and charred and ash-blown. Toi market is a keening wall of tattered stalls, and Olympic surely has seen better days. Jane Anyango strides through it all like a phoenix, and the universe suspends judgment on Kenya, for a while.

*sister, Dholuo (c. 2008)

Wambui Mwangi is a writer and a scholar and lives in Nairobi and Toronto and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers