SISTERHOOD SAFARI
A women-only experience allows Frances Cook to get under the skin of the real Kenya
As we step through the village gates on to compacted red soil, we are met by a wall of noise.
We’re in rural Kenya, visiting Maasai women, and as we arrive they burst into song to welcome us.
They grab us by the hand, pulling us into a singing and dancing circle. Bead necklaces go around our necks, scarves around our shoulders.
The gifts take me by surprise and I glance at tour leader Darlene, not sure I should accept gifts from women who have so much less than me.
She leans over. “They heard you were a group of women travelling together, and were very excited to meet you. So they made you these gifts.”
I’m travelling on the first Intrepid Travel women’s expedition through Kenya. It’s a womenonly group, and focuses on female issues and supports women’s businesses. As such, you get access to spaces usually off-limits to foreigners.
This village is proof of that idea. Tepesua Manyatta is a village for Maasai widows who have found a place to live and work together, selling their beadwork and crafts to tourists.
They’re part of a community of women trying to forge their own way in a country where it is extremely difficult to be a woman.
Hellen Nkuraiya is a leader in their community, having dedicated her life to rescuing young girls from female genital mutilation (FGM), and arranging education for them instead.
She says women are often subjected to FGM between 8 and 12, then exchanged for a dowry of three cows.
The girls Nkuraiya rescues are sent to a school she created, Enkiteng Lepa. The name translates to “our cow school”. She wants them to milk knowledge instead, she says, their education becoming an everlasting cow. Even better, education won’t die from drought or disease.
You can tell she has made that argument before. That’s because within her own community, Nkuraiya is seen as a trouble-maker, challenging long-held traditions.
But she stays because she has leverage, in the form of a borehole for clean water on her property. She tells locals their livestock can drink from it, but only if they send their daughters to her boarding school to receive an education.
Nkuraiya tells us she doesn’t want to change the culture; just let the girls hold culture in one hand, and education in the other.
She’s even created a new ceremony to celebrate their becoming women. Almost everything is the same, but instead of genital mutilation, lines of red ochre are drawn on their thighs to symbolise it.
Red ochre is important in their culture, their warriors often painting themselves head to toe for important occasions.
It’s still not simple, as many of her girls have been told they will never be able to have children if they don’t have FGM, or they will bring bad luck upon their families. Some girls, believing this, will press for FGM themselves, worried about what will happen if they don’t.
The girls aren’t usually here when there are visitors as they have schoolwork to focus on. But Nkuraiya takes advantage of their brief appearance to point to our group. “See, these girls aren’t cut, and they’re okay. You’re not cut, are you?”
We shake our heads.
“See girls, you don’t have to be cut. Nothing bad.” Darlene and driver Becky are helping to navigate a difficult conversation where nobody wants to wade into a polarised local debate on the place of such a tradition, but nor do they want to deny these girls the chance to see there’s another way.
Darlene and Becky are from Nairobi. Darlene is a single mother who has carved out a successful life for herself in a country where unemployment is estimated at 50 per cent.
Becky is even more unusual, the first female overland truck driver in Kenya. When she started driving she was an oddity, with many male drivers looking sideways at the woman joining their ranks.
She handles the heavy truck with ease, even when rural roads pose a challenge through disrepair. She’s now a familiar sight to women along her routes, with children regularly running up to Aunt Becky; some also want to become a driver.
Both women show young girls the independence they can have if they stick with their studies. They contradict what is expected of them, but Kenya is a land of contradictions.
One moment you’re driving through a red, dusty landscape. The next you’re in lush, green farmland.
There are 44 tribes within Kenya, with their own traditions and language. Of those tribes, only seven practice FGM. This makes it trickier for the Kenyan Government than if it were widespread.
In order to keep the peace between tribes, it’s the law that traditions must be respected. That’s in direct conflict with the law making FGM illegal.
We’re told that the government handles this by mostly turning a blind eye, while helping those who are willing to push for change within their own communities, no matter the cost.
Education is seen as the tool to help women change their situation. So the government will sometimes arrange for girls to be sent to Hellen Nkuralya for a different life. They also pay for some of her teachers but not all.
At first Nkuralya's work was supported by donors but she realised she could do more by creating tourism opportunities to let the women sell their work directly for independent income.
She even convinced one woman to give up her work performing FGM, despite having been paid one sheep for each girl she worked on. The woman couldn’t previously afford to stop but now she sells jewellery to tourists.
Community-led initiatives for education and employment are picking up steam across Kenya. On the outskirts of Nairobi we meet the women who work at the Kazuri bead shop. It started in 1975, with two single mothers and employs 340.
Their high-quality work is exported to Australia, Italy and the US. The women rotate between different jobs, making sure they have a broad range of skills to fall back on.
Later, on one of our game drives, we meet two female rangers, Joyce and Helen, who handle their AK47s with ease. I ask Helen how her husband feels about being married to a powerful woman who carries a gun at work. She smiles and shrugs. “He knows this is how it is.”
Back in Nkuraiya's Maasai village, she points to a range of dog collars, decorated with beadwork.
“I told the ladies, you mzungu [white people] love dogs like we love our cows. So we made dog collars for you. Do you like them?”
After decades of fighting for change, she is being joined by the next generation.
One of her students is studying law at university in Nairobi, and plans to come back and act as Nkuralya's lawyer.
Another girl is studying social work and community development at university. She tells us she learned from watching Nkuraiya, and now wants to help her create even more programmes for women. The girls are coming full circle, showing the grassroots movement for change is gathering strength in numbers.