There is a currency that is peddled out here. It is used to keep women “in their place”. The currency of shame.
For centuries, it has been used to silence women, to tame women, to punish women. And as a reward, if you did as expected, no one shamed you.
A young orphaned lady is trying to look after her two young children and her younger sisters. Life has been a jungle. The man who promised to marry her left her with two children. She has sold vegetables, mitumba and whatever else to put food on the table and her siblings through school.
She finally gets a job. It is not a big position but it has a salary that comes every month. For someone who has been earning almost nothing thanks to corona, this is a big welcome.
The father of her children also suffered due to corona. He lost his job, not that he was supporting his children anyway so they do not feel the loss. He decides he wants to come back to his baby mama. I mean, she is managing to pay rent and put food on the table. He just does not expect rejection. It hits him a bit too hard.
So hurt is he that he removes his biggest ammunition. Shame. He starts with her family. Calls everyone who will listen and tells them how these days their daughter is a prostitute in Nairobi. He then goes further to the church community. The young lady is distraught.
Just when she thought he had done his worst, he found someone with access to her boss. He just did not count on the boss being a single mother, who is no stranger to being labelled a prostitute. No stranger to shame. Actually a survivor of shame.
A woman decides to run for a political seat. Her children are grown. Her husband is not exactly a baby who needs to be taken care of. She feels she has a lot to offer her community through a certain seat.
Her husband says, “absolutely ducking not!” but she feels she has held her ambitions back for the family and she must do what she must do. Campaigns start and of course, she stands alone, without her husband. And the currency of shame is saturated in this economy of patriarchy and misogyny. “If your own husband doesn’t want you, why should we vote for you?” “Your husband must have left because you are a prostitute!” “Women with no husbands are mitumbas!”
A man shares pictures of his beautiful bride on social media. You guessed it, the shame currency is doing well in the social stock exchange. “What a fat girl!” “You took cows to her home and left with another cow!”
For me, the worst part of all this shame currency is that women deal in it the most. Someone said women are the biggest keepers of patriarchy.
It is your aunties who will gather around to discuss how you have become the biggest prostitute in your country as if they were virgins waiting to go sleep with suicide bombers in heaven. They will watch you suffer, enjoy it, but the minute you begin to make something of yourself decided to use the shame currency to “keep” you in the place they think you deserve.
It is your female friends who will undress you in public behind your back, jeering at your nakedness because they are jealous of you.
It is a female relative who will listen to your ex’s berating unsubstantial tales about you. She will then share it with her chama as a “prayer item”.
It is women who will share embarrassing stories about their fellow women on social media. You will trend because women would rather their milk boiled over on the stove, babies drowned in the bathwater and the cat ate their husbands' dinner than let you be.
A friend said the saddest thing to me the other day. She would rather not have female friends. You know how sad it is that some of you birds (that is not the B-word I wanted to use) isolate and harass good women all because you somehow think you are better than them. Better because no one has used the currency on you. But you are a woman, you will find out.
The thing about currency, it goes around.
