JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES
ISSN: 1530-5686
Issue 7 (2005)
| JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES ISSN: 1530-5686 Issue 7 (2005) |
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KEEPING THE FEMINIST WAR REAL IN CONTEMPORARY KENYA: THE CASE OF WAMBUI OTIENO |
Wambui Otieno continues to reawaken the feminist war in contemporary Kenya and makes feminist work feel like fun again, at least for me. She was not born a defiant woman, she becomes one. She still experiences the most outrageous and reactionary attacks for her defiance in Kenya. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss Otieno with a special focus on her defiance against the symbolic order of cultural norms in Kenya. Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I will show that Otieno’s present defiance to social norms in contemporary Kenya has emerged from her past experiences of defiance. Particular attention is given to how Otieno’s habitus informs her defiance because I want to stress that history—the production of history—is the fundamental concept in understanding the feminist struggle epitomized in Otieno’s defiant practices.
Wambui Otieno a former freedom fighter and politician is now 67 years old and recently shattered age and class barriers to marry a 25-year-old man—Mbugua who is a stonemason. Otieno’s marriage speaks defiance in the contemporary Kenyan cultural context. Being a defiant woman in this sense has been problematic. Certain clergymen, politicians, family members and ordinary Kenyans have shunned her. We see this rejection when she turned up as an accredited delegate for a meeting on the constitutional review in Nairobi soon after her marriage to the young Mbugua.
The male Members of Parliament (MPs) led by MP Bonny Khalwele wanted her ejected from the meeting for negating the very concept of African culture that they were discussing. Yet the well-intentioned Hubbie Hussein, a conference delegate did little justice when she declared in Otieno’s defense that there were land grabbers, looters, murderers and other criminals among the delegates, yet no one had questioned their presence in the conference. A sense of Otieno’s defiance reawakens when she declares that she would continue to attend the constitutional conference in her capacity as an observer, a former freedom fighter and a politician. (BBC: a, 2003; Carnell, 2003; Karuri and Ndichu, 2003).
It is worth even mentioning that Otieno was condemned for not consulting cultural gurus on her decision to marry a younger man. This critique was offered by a catholic priest, Father Emanuel Ngugi, who reprimanded her for not consulting her local community (the Kikuyu) before going ahead with her ‘uncouth’ marriage. Otieno’s children only invoke the age gap, when they boycotted her wedding, warning that their mother would live to regret the day she married a "boy". (BBC: b, 2003; Carnell, 2003; Kariuki, 2003).
This rejection takes on a tragic twist when Otieno’s mother-in-law, Florence Nyambura (who was 14 years younger than her) refused to accept her as a daughter-in-law and succumbed to high blood pressure following this marriage. Again, the ground for Otieno’s rejection as a daughter-in-law was the age gap between her and her husband or was it the age gap between her and her mother-in-law? Yet Otieno cannot understand why her opponents refuse to see that love is what matters and that indeed love is blind. (BBC: b, 2003; Kariuki, 2003).
Symbolic domination is thus present in the Kenyan contemporary society. Otieno’s marriage to a younger man is a fine illustration of her struggle against this symbolic domination in contemporary Kenya. It is my contention that Otieno’s defiance in this symbolic struggle is socially and historically conditioned. As Bourdieu sees it, the reaction of an individual to another is pregnant with the whole history of these persons and of their relationships. (Bourdieu and Wacqaunt, 1992: 124) To tease out the active presence of Otieno’s defiance it is necessary to return to her defiant practices, the site of the modus operandi of the habitus. What I want to show now is how Bourdieu portrays the term habitus.
Drawing on Bourdieu, habitus can be seen as deeply ingrained experiences that are actively present in an objective state (in what one does) and an embodied state (in the mind). The habitus is thus a product of conditionings that one acquires through implicit or explicit learning, which deposited in an individual, generates thoughts and beliefs that shape ones practices. It is productive (and hence different from a habit) in the sense that it produces and transforms ones practices in relation to the situation that one is born into or enters through work or other activities. The habitus is the product of an individual’s history, so long as one does not forget that it self corrects itself, to adapt itself, to new and unforeseen situations. The end product is of course durable transformed experiences that still remain within the limits of the habitus. (Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu, 1990:a; Bourdieu, 1990:b).
For Bourdieu, the home of the habitus is the field, another related component of habitus. Most actions are the product of an encounter between habitus and a field. While the habitus exists inside an individual the field exists outside the individual. As Bourdieu suggests the notion of field allows one to break with vague references to the social world such as a ‘context’, ‘milieu’, ‘social base’, and ‘social background’. Bourdieu sees fields as structured spaces that allow for the expression of different practices. Members of the field include the dominated and its dominators, its conservatives and its avant-garde who engage in subversive struggles with the aim of transforming and maintaining the established relations of forces (capital). ( Bourdieu and Wacqaunt, 1992; Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu, 1990:a) For the purposes of this paper, I argue that, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is an important tool for discussing Otieno’s defiance in the contemporary Kenyan cultural field.
Drawing on Otieno’s autobiography—Maumau’s Daughter: A Life History, I will look at the past experiences of Otieno’s life where her habitus of defiance reveals itself. (Otieno, 1998) The aim is to problematise her defiant position including how she got there and from what original point in the cultural field, as this is inscribed in her habitus. In excavating the defiance of Otieno, I will therefore consider different situations that have generated her defiance to become deeply rooted experiences. As Bourdieu states “social agents are determined only to the extent that they determine themselves”. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 136) So, to understand Otieno’s defiance and analyze sociologically what she does, first means understanding the path or conditions in which her defiant practices have accumulated.
The moment that the young Wambui questions colonial influences during her schooling years is the moment that she endows her habitus with the potency of defiance. Otieno was often punished in school for not answering to her English name “Virginia” preferring her African name “Wambui”. She once again reveals her anger at being taught Scottish dances in school with “pomp and glory” while her ethnic group dances were treated as repugnant and sinful. These school experiences signify how colonial practices in the school produce Otieno’s early discourse of defiance. Here one sees how habitus begins to embody her history of defiance.
The fight for freedom, the site for rebelling against colonial rule, is the place par excellence where Otieno acquires through experience a sort of retreat from compliance. At the heart of Otieno’s defiance is her struggle for the land of her ancestors. Angered by the repressive rule of the colonialists, the young Wambui joins the dreaded Maumau movement, which challenged colonial rule. If the young Wambui had a mentor, then it appears to be her great grandfather, Waiyaki wa Hinga (a famous freedom fighter), who suffered greatly at the hands of the colonialists. She points out that, “I was prepared to do anything to avenge him”. (33) She risks death in this mission and experiences the horror of repeated rapes when she is arrested and detained. Yet we encounter a defiant Wambui who refuses to weep in front of an “imperialist” and in the process hardens her heart. This is the same woman who is not perturbed by the ‘home-guards’ when she says: “I dared them to shoot me. I was too angry to care” (36).
The emergent Wambui is clearly revolutionary with a defiance developed through her stint in the Maumau struggle for independence. The fact that she was the great granddaughter of Waiyaki wa Hinga enabled her to wield a considerable amount of defiance power during the colonial era. In this way, mentorship tends to stimulate Otieno’s discourse of defiance. It is not unfair to point out that without this family connection, Otieno may not have acquired the motivation for defiance quite so easily. In this context one notes that Otieno insisted on getting married on August 17 in 1963 in memory of the day that the colonialists exiled her great grandfather, Waiyaki wa Hinga. But let us return to the Maumau struggle where Otieno acquired the nickname Msaja (a Bagandan word that means man or mister) for her courage, an indication that she too could not escape from patriarchal attitudes in the sense that she enjoys the acceptance of the freedom fighters on men’s terms. The influence of this masculinist ‘reward’ including her male mentorship becomes a real fact in the defiant practices of Otieno’s life. It follows that Otieno takes on traditional masculinist attributes of defiance and makes them her own.
By focusing on Otieno’s first marriage to S. M. Otieno who was from a different ethnic group—the Luo, we encounter an excellent illustration of her defiance. Interethnic marriages in contemporary Kenya were and still are out of the social norm. Indeed Otieno had to contend with the resistance from her mother, who sarcastically asks her: “Inonayo wamiruta naku?” (Where did you find this one?) (93) Yet Otieno defies this resistance: “Even when faced with the animosity of SMs relatives, I did not heed my mothers advice to find a Kikuyu to marry”, she writes. (93) In a sense, Otieno’s marriage to S. M. Otieno is no different from that of her current marriage to 25 year-old Mbugua. But marrying two men who belong to different social universes means something. It means that certain objectified societal norms trigger Otieno’s defiance. The effect of her habitus is that it equips her to be defiant in these circumstances. The same habitus of defiance is hence actively present in Otieno’s first and second marriage, and therefore she, from the banal situation of a marriage, can produce defiant conducts.
Defiance is actively present in Otieno’s refusal to follow Kikuyu marital customs in her marriage to S. M. Otieno, her first husband. This habitus of defiance smothers her father who could not therefore demand for dowry on her account. Otieno expresses this defiance to her father thus: “Dad that custom is outdated and I do not like it. I am not a goat to be sold. I am your child”. (97) Another example of defiance is seen when Otieno wavers about legalizing her marriage to S. M. Otieno fearing that this would interfere with her political career. Is it surprising then that Otieno alludes mischievously to the enjoyment she got from refusing to obey S. M. Otieno (her first husband) intimating that, “slavery had never been acceptable to me and if I did swear to obey, it must have been a bad mistake”. (100) While there is no surprise here, there is a feminist element to her defiance directed at the demand for equal treatment of women by men. Again this is not surprising: Otieno’s own bid for a parliamentary seat in the Vice Presidents own backyard in the 1992 general elections, not to win but to show that a woman could oppose a VP, is testimony to her investment in feminist defiance.
There is no case in which the defiance of Otieno is so strongly marked as in the fight for the right to bury her first husband, S. M. Otieno in 1987. Although the conflict between Otieno and her brother-in-law, Joash Ochieng had to do with the ultimate burial place of S. M. Otieno, at a symbolic level it was a battle of the sexes. Indeed, Joash Ochieng had taken it for granted that he would be the ‘chairman’ (successor) of Otieno’s homestead now that she was a widow, his brother’s widow, a situation that Otieno defied at all costs. Her battle for the right to bury her husband and inherit his property in the legal front can be traced in the very texture of her defiant style and rhetoric. In the end the protracted legal battle for the body of S.M. Otieno was simply a front of disguised patriarchal interests that got politicized by some politicians into an ethnic group match between Otieno’s ethnic group, the Kikuyu versus her husbands ethnic group, the Luo. The stakes and interests in the S. M. Otieno burial case were the votes of the Luo ethnic community as various politicians sought to gain political capital from this burial case. These politicians got so carried away by their stakes and interests that they forgot that it was a grief stricken widow—Otieno that simply wanted to lay her beloved husband to rest on her farm in Ngong near Nairobi.
To her utter amazement, the legal system in the end released the body of S.M. Otieno jointly to Otieno and her brother-in-law to be buried in the chosen burial site of her brother-in-law, which was in rural Siaya in Western Kenya. This overt gender discrimination disposes Otieno to revolt, by refusing to attend the burial ceremony of her husband. Clearly, the rules of fair play in the cultural field were disregarded due to the high stakes and interests that various parties had invested in the outcome of this case. It is not surprising that Otieno breaks the rules of the game, by refusing to be involved in the burial ceremony of her husband. The competition in the cultural field for symbolic profits is also evident, when the President then, through his henchwomen coaxed Otieno to attend the burial of her husband. Surely Otieno would attend this burial if she were provided with top security (protection) during the burial ceremony, entry into the ceremony in the company of the President and an imported dress from Britain! The habitus of Otieno, an automatic tendency to detect domination through state trickery, serves her well in resisting politically motivated gifts.
This defiance strikes a chord when applied to an earlier case when Otieno rejected the post of an ambassador or chief government receptionist as a ‘consolation’ gift offered by President Kenyatta, for being sabotaged and rigged out of the parliamentary race for Langata constituency in 1969 by the powerful GEMA (Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru association). This defiant disposition was also at work when Otieno was running for the parliamentary seat; she, categorically refused to stage a separation gimmick from her first husband, who was Luo while she was Kikuyu, for political expediency or rather to counter the existing Kikuyu-Luo animosity then. It is thus possible to see how Otieno’s habitus generates defiant responses more or less adapted to the demands of certain fields.
Thus when Otieno married Mbugua regardless of his youthful age and low social-economic status, really, she was disinterested. She was not consciously seeking to maximize social profits, because her defiance to cultural norms had already been internalized in her as second nature. My thesis is that Otieno’s lived experiences predispose her to approach the world with the resources of defiance that she has acquired in those circumstances. It makes sense then to conclude that Otieno appropriates her internalized defiance against those agents in the field that seek to conserve and impose their reality on others such as their culturally definition of a ‘legitimate’ marriage. Suffice to say that her defiance flows naturally in the face of dominant cultural traditions. So long as there are dominant societal norms the habitus of Otieno will reproduce defiant practices
It can be seen that the Kenyan cultural field is a highly patriarchal system based on African traditions, colonialism and religion. Otieno, an avant-garde and feminist per excellence, takes on her habitus of defiance against this symbolic domination. Her habitus of defiance is created through her defiant social practices and it is through these practices that she creates her social world of defiance. Discussing Otieno’s consistent defiance, it can be concluded that her habitus is what gives her defiant practices regularity and predictability. In this case Otieno’s defiant nature is acquired from her early experiences as a child and the whole collective history of her life as a freedom fighter and a politician and it naturally adjusts itself to the world that she is up against.
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Citation Format:
Wanjiru Kariuki. “Keeping the Feminist War Real in Contemporary Kenya: The Case of Wambui Otieno,” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 7, 2005.
Copyright © 2005 Africa Resource Center, Inc.