Among the Fulani of Nigeria’s Southern Plateau, naming a baby is a major ceremony. In August, several groups of villagers gathered to choose a name for a baby boy born in Nairobi, Kenya.

The fact that the baby was not a Fulani did not make the ceremony any less significant. After six hours of deliberations among the groups, the name “ Jouro” was agreed on.

“Jouro” is the name of a revered Fulani king from centuries ago, known to have been merciful to his enemies and a respected peace mediator.

The villagers then called Wairimu Nderitu, an internationally recognised armed conflict mediator and peacebuilder, and asked her to relay the name of the baby to the parents.

But what interest would a group of Fulani villagers in Nigeria’s Southern Plateau have in a Kenyan baby, let alone naming him?

It all comes down to appreciation and honour.

The baby’s mother, Caroline Nyaga, a project officer with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, at eight months pregnant, had been led by Nderitu traversing the conflict-prone Southern Plateau of Nigeria, as part of a team that was mediating peace among 56 warring Fulani communities.

The spectacle of a heavily pregnant woman, almost sacrificing the life of her unborn child for the sake of peace, finally saw the communities reach a détente. And Nyaga took the first plane to Nairobi and had the baby on August 4. The Fulani communities felt indebted to her and, to show their appreciation, they asked for the honour of naming her baby.

“These are some of the moments that make me feel that I am doing the right thing,” says Nderitu.

Women mediators

War is often a man’s game, so it is naturally assumed that peacemakers too should be men. This is the norm in almost every culture, and so Nderitu and Nyaga were quite a spectacle to the local communities.

Nderitu admits that most of the villagers attended the peace meetings just to see the two foreign women go on about peace. They were perhaps the only women in the history of these communities who had ever led peace talks.

Nderitu is one of the few women mediators of armed conflict in Africa, and in October, she was awarded the inaugural Global Pluralism Award for her exemplary work.

A huge chunk of Wairimu Nderitu’s job as a peacemaker and conflict mediator is also in conflict prevention. PHOTO | MARTIN MUKANGU | NMG

The award is a programme of the Global Centre for Pluralism, an international education and research organisation founded by the Aga Khan and the government of Canada. The international award jury is chaired by the Rt Hon Joe Clark, former prime minister of Canada, and has five other independent members from various disciplines.

During the announcement ceremony in Nairobi in early October, Prof Azim Nanji, a board member of the Global Centre for Pluralism, noted that the jury pored over 200 nominations from 43 countries, vetting the nominees through a rigorous process that ensured that their said achievements were corroborated by results on the ground.

The award comes with a $50,000 prize and in her acceptance speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Nairobi, Nderitu said she would use the money to set up a team of women mediators of armed conflict across Africa.

“Of all the inclusions sought in peace processes worldwide, women’s is the most contested,” she said. “In Nigeria, we have changed that narrative by ensuring pluralism in all the stages of the peace process leading up to a peace agreement.”

One must wonder how Nderitu manages, given that the peace process is extremely emotionally draining and involves dealing with hardliners from different communities.

The process of peace-making, Nderitu says, takes a lot of research and preparation.

“I use stories to communicate. If I want to address atrocious behaviour, I will tell a story to speak to what they are doing,” she says.

Not a debate

Body language is obviously a keen aspect of the entire peace process. Her job is not just listening to what is being said so much as it is listening to what is not being said. The peace process, she suggests, is like a debate, only that you are dealing with people who have killed each other’s kin.

Her unique mediation tactic is described as “consummate” by Meredith Preston, head of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue regional office in Kenya. “She has the capacity to get people who are in extreme situations of conflict and mistrust to trust her,” says Preston.

Her work also encompasses conflict prevention. She works with African leaders at the highest levels of influence to prevent violence, especially in periods leading up to elections. She is a founder and co-chair of Uwiano Platform for Peace, a Kenyan conflict prevention agency that uses crowd sourcing to devise appropriate early responses to conflict.

But even before the dust settled on the Pluralism Award, last week, the Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue announced Nderitu as the recipient of the 2017/18 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue.

The award recognises Nderitu’s international leadership in the use of dialogue to advance peace building and human rights. 

The award offers a short residency in Vancouver and Ottawa next February, to explore such themes as human rights and genocide prevention, the role of multiculturalism and education in conflict prevention, and women in peacebuilding. 

Wairimu Nderitu in her home library. She’s a voracious reader and prolific writer. PHOTO | MARTIN MUKANGU | NMG

The beginning
Nderitu is not new to peace-making.

Her work as an armed conflict mediator began when, as a member of the Kenya National Commission of Human Rights (KNCHR) at the beginning of the millennium, she was involved in the Mount Elgon peace process in Kenya.

With a background in human rights from her decade-long career as an officer in the Kenya Prisons Service, she saw a gap in peacebuilding that required the linking of human rights and conflict prevention.

As she worked with the communities in Mt Elgon using dialogue to advocate for a peaceful co-existence, she took an interest in alternative dispute resolution.

She was deeply moved by the experience of the protagonists and in 2004/5, she attended a 17-month course on Conflict Prevention at Oxford University in the UK to learn more about how she could help.

Nderitu was sucked further into the world of conflict resolution when, following Kenya’s disputed presidential election of 2007 and the subsequent post-election violence that saw the country’s worst inter-ethnic fighting and internal displacement of people, civil efforts to restore peace saw the birth of the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) in 2009.

She was a natural choice for the commission after her success in the Mt Elgon peace process, and she was thrust into a 16-month peace process in Nakuru town, in the Rift Valley region, the worst hit by the ethnic clashes.

The process led to the signing of the Nakuru Peace Declaration in 2010, bringing together the various communities, especially the Kikuyu and Kalenjin. She was the only woman mediator in a team of over 100 elders drawn from various ethnic communities. It was then that she realised women were conspicuously missing in peace building.

Jos, Nigeria

The 2007 violence was a wake-up call for those working in mediation and conflict resolution and Nderitu and Uwiano worked behind the scenes for a peaceful process during the 2010 Constitutional referendum and 2013 election in Kenya.

Through her work, she became a Transitional Justice Fellow of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in 2011 and in 2012 was named Woman Peace Maker Of the Year by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego, US.

When, in 2013, her term at the NCIC ended, Ms Preston of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue asked her if she was interested in working in Nigeria’s Jos area, a job that required her to encourage more women to participate in the peace process. She jumped at the chance.

It was at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue that she met Nyaga (Jouro’s mother) and the two of them set off to work in rural Nigeria to advocate for peace and conflict resolution.

Nderitu has been working in Nigeria since then, and in 2015, she was the lead mediator in the peace process between 29 ethnic communities in Kaduna State, leading to the Kafanchan Peace Declaration, which was signed by Nasir El-Rufai, the state governor of Kaduna, and Simon Bako Lalong of Plateau.

This year, she embarked on what she described as one of the toughest assignments, when she had to mediate between 56 ethnic communities in Plateau State. After months of dialogue, the Southern Plateau Peace Declaration was signed.

Working in Nigeria meant total assimilation into the local culture. She learnt bits of the languages, how to bow before community chiefs, and how to wear the traditional Nigerian dress. It was a complete culture overhaul. So far Nderitu has mastered only three of about 20 ways of tying the Nigerian headscarf.

“Having a headscarf in traditional Nigerian culture elicits respect,” she says. “Nobody will take you seriously if you have no headscarf.”

This explains why, during the announcement ceremony of the Global Pluralism Award last month, she was dismayed to find that she had forgotten her Nigerian scarf at home. It was important that she had one as she addressed the media and posed for pictures, otherwise the communities back in Nigeria would not take her lack of it kindly.

Solace in writing

Nderitu’s work in Nigeria has received global attention. She is considered a paragon of fearlessness and integrity. She has earned her stripes through a steady string of little victories punctuated by occasional missteps — sometimes, the communities would resume fighting.

To debrief emotionally, Nderitu finds solace in writing. Her seminal works is Beyond Ethnicism: Exploring Ethnic and Racial Diversity for Educators, a manual approved for use by the Ministry of Education.

“One of the kinder stories that we need to tell Kenyans is that we are working to teach young people that they share a space with people they are ethnically, racially and religiously different from and that they have duties towards each other,” she says.

Her most recent book, Mùkami Kímathi: Mau Mau Freedom Fighter, is the story of the role in the fight for Independence of Mukami Kimathi, the wife of freedom fighter Dedan Kímathi. Nderitu has been a close acquaintance of Mukami since her childhood and Mukami often insisted that Nderitu would write her memoirs someday, often teasing her that she would not die until the book was written.

Mùkami Kímathi: Mau Mau Freedom Fighter and Beyond Ethnicism: Exploring Ethnic and Racial Diversity for Educators, by Wairimu Nderitu. PHOTO | MARTIN MUKANGU | NMG

Background

Nderitu’s career in mediation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding has been a long and winding road, which began with a little mishap.

After graduating from the University of Nairobi in 1990, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, she wanted to be an information officer. There was a mix-up with her application to the Public Service Commission, and she ended up being posted to the Prisons Service headquarters in Nairobi.

She had to attend the compulsory nine-month basic training — of which she had had a taste of hardly three years earlier as part of the compulsory pre-university training — at the Prisons Staff Training College, in Ruiru just outside Nairobi.

Her first post-training posting was to the Lang’ata Women’s Prison, in Nairobi, in 1992 to serve as the duty officer. This meant that she was running the women’s prison, and the decision of what the 500-plus female prisoners and over 50 toddlers would eat rested with her.

“My father,” she says, “often came to visit me. He was fascinated by the way people around used to salute me. But I was not comfortable,” she says. She requested and was transferred to Shimo la Tewa Women’s Prison in Mombasa.

The prisons system that Nderitu found in the 1990s was a far cry from the near-glamorous prison life it is today. Prison back then was a death sentence. The food was terrible and prisoners died of hunger and dehydration every day. The prison warders’ lives were equally deplorable with their living quarters unfit for human habitation.

Preventable deaths

Nderitu was in for more shocks when she was assigned a house near the dispensary, from which the inmates almost often never left alive.

“I was haunted by the police pick-up truck that would ferry away dead prisoners — their feet would be dangling for all to see. That left a lasting impression,” she recalls.

It was while she was at Shimo la Tewa that in 1996 she had her son, Mark Nyingi Nderitu. She realised then it was definitely not the right environment to raise a child but she was stuck there.

However, her mastery of the Prisons Act and impressive command of English — which is rare among prison warders in Kenya — earned her a promotion, first in 1997, to officer-in-charge and later in 1998 to the Prisons Headquarters in Nairobi as superintendent in charge of research and statistics.

A self-confessed voracious reader — and today the owner of an impressive home library — Nderitu immersed herself in reading reports and statistics from prisons across the country. “That was when I noticed a glaring problem,” she says. “Prisoners were dying preventable deaths.”

The turning point came in September 2000 when six inmates were found dead in a prison in Nyeri, central Kenya, in an infamous case that came to be known as the “King’ong’o Six.”

Prisons authorities insisted that the six had attempted a prison break and were apprehended, but following intense pressure from civil society, human rights groups and the public, investigations revealed that the prisoners had been bludgeoned to death.

Nderitu, then the personal assistant to the then commissioner of prisons Edward Lopokoiyit, found herself in the eye of the storm. She had to provide answers not only to local pressure groups but also to respond to letters from Amnesty International, that arrived daily.

“Eventually these situations take their toll on you psychologically, and that was when I realised I had to quit,” she says.

But before she left, she worked in a three-man ad hoc committee set up to overhaul the prisons system in Kenya that ushered in the open-door policy. The results were astonishing. Nderitu describes the situation as “a revolution” that eventually led to policies that made Kenyan prisons humane.

It was, therefore, natural that Nderitu would move on to the world of human rights; she played a key role in the inclusion of prisons in the Bomas Constitutional Review process.

This was followed by a stint at the Kenya National Commission of Human Rights as a liaison officer for the prisons, where she was also instrumental in setting up the human-rights education department.

Today, she is a member of the Kenya National Committee on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and All Forms of Discrimination, and has a Masters degree in armed conflict and peace studies from the University of Nairobi.