Wambui Otieno has passed away. Her health had declined over the years and she’d recently moved from being wheelchair-bound to being hospital-bound, requiring daily inputs of blood. But the infirmities of age and ill-health did not prevent her, last year, from participating in a celebration of our new Constitution.
Wambui Otieno was — and remains — an icon for our time. She was one of the many women who played active roles in the armed resistance to colonial rule, not just as fighters but, equally importantly, as information and supply chains for the fighters. Like many of those women, she paid a price for doing so, at one point being banished to and imprisoned on the island of Manda in the Lamu archipelago. She was raped by a colonial officer — and did not take it lying down (so to speak). She demanded that he be charged. He wasn’t, but he did leave Kenya ignominiously.
She married one of the few African advocates of the time, SM Otieno —crossing ethnic lines to do so. When he died, post-Independence, far too young, she challenged his clan and tribal elders by insisting that she had the right to bury him, as his lawful widow. Such was the strength of her personality that it appears that other aspects typical of customary inheritance law were not even raised — such as so-called wife inheritance and its accompanying literal inheritance.
The case made the national headlines — Wambui Otieno against the clan and the tribe. She lost — but the point had been made. Our then Constitution, in its allowance for customary and religious law to supersede equality rights in matters of family or personal law, was shown to clearly discriminate against women in particular.
Early in the new millennium, she raised the ire of the clan and tribal elders yet again. And again made national headlines. The debate this time was not on the legal status of Kenyan women. But on Kenyan women’s right to autonomy and choice in the personal, private domain. She married a man barely 20 —several decades younger than her. And Kenyans went crazy — pontificating on something that was only exceptional in Kenya because, for a change, it was a woman making that choice. Child brides are so the norm that they are not worthy of notice — even when they literally are children and below the age of consent, which is, in fact, illegal.
She ignored it all. And continued to live her life as she had always done — within the limits of what she herself, and nobody else (or at least nobody ultimately irrelevant), had determined.
It is this aspect of her person that we, as Kenyan women, have the most to be thankful for. We can decide for ourselves what is acceptable to us, what ethical standards we want to live up to. Maybe an increasing number of younger Kenyan women can now take these assertions of self for granted. But if they can, they can only do so because of the huge ground that was broken by Wambui Otieno — and others of her generation. Wambui Otieno paved the way for all of us to exercise greater freedom in that way.
In acknowledging her legacy to us all, we have to try to imagine the costs of her having done so — for her as well as for those closest to her. All freedom comes at a price. She went through private contestations and public mockery. Few of us have the backbone, msimamo, it takes to withstand that kind of assault on both fronts, private and public.
Wambui Otieno, rest in peace. You have played your part. We are grateful.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is doing her graduate studies at Sciences Po in Paris
