The Burden of Peace

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And as male politicians devise new ways to play the blame-game in light of the impending trials at the International Criminal Court, the voices of women victims of the violence have almost completely faded away.

As Patricia Nyaundi, the executive director of Fida-Kenya, noted in the recently-released documentary, The Burden of Peace, all we hear about is the more than a thousand people who were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, but no one is counting how many women were raped during that period, or what impact the rapes had on them.

Produced and directed by Kwamchetsi Makokha, in association with the Fahamu Trust, the film tells the story of the countless victims of gang-rape during the post-election violence, who have not enjoyed a single day of peace since neighbours, paramilitary police, militia and police officers sexually violated them.

It tells the stories of women like Maureen, who was raped "in revenge for the Kiambaa church killings" by two men who not only impregnated her, but infected her with HIV.

For months, Maureen wished she would die. When her baby boy was born, she says, she even thought of throwing him away. The film tells other harrowing tales, including that of a bed-ridden woman who was gang-raped and left for dead, of a woman in Kibera who was raped by police officers in front of her son, and of women who were reduced to becoming beggars or prostitutes in IDP camps.

But the film is also about survival and resistance — about women picking up the shattered pieces of their lives in order to provide for their families and to support fellow survivors.

Such stories have also been captured in African Women Writing Resistance — a new anthology published this year by Pambazuka Press in association with the University of Wisconsin, which brings together the writings of 31 women from 13 African countries who explore a wide range of issues, including the violence experienced by women in their homes and communities and during conflict.

In this book, you will meet China Keitetsi, a former child soldier in Uganda's National Resistance Army, who was told "to get love from a gun", and that "guns were our mothers, our friends, our whole world, and we must rather lose ourselves than our gun".

Keitetsi, who now lives in Denmark, is the first former African girl soldier to have written about her experiences. You will also meet the Kenyan poet and lawyer, Ann Kithaka, who, in a poem about female genital mutilation, implores her clansmen to tell her where they have disposed of “the severed bit of my despised anatomy after the unkind cut”.

Did they, she wonders, “fling it into some mysterious African pot to concoct that rejuvenating soup, consumed so gleefully by the rika?”

Domestic violence is a dominant theme in many of the women's stories, poems and essays. US-based Nigerian activist and performer, Zindzi Bedu, recalls the incest committed by her father, “the preacher man...who prays with the authority of raging fire”.

In a note, she explains that writing about her painful past is “an act of mediation” that gives her “the tools to reassess an old wound”. The contributors to the anthology do not feel the need — as many non-Western writers do — to disguise, tone down or even “exoticise” their experiences and stories for the benefit of a Western readership.

The editors, Jennifer Bowdy de Harnandez, Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho and Anne Serafin, have allowed the women writers to speak as honestly and as truthfully about their experiences as they can.

As Abena P. A. Busia explains in the introductory poem, “If we don't tell our stories who will speak out for us, when we claim our bodies for ourselves and weep no more... If we don’t tell our stories, hailstones will continue to fall on our heads.”

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Rosemary, a mother of three, will not be celebrating the two-year anniversary of the signing of the national accord today. The wounds are still raw. The bitterness lingers.

There are many other stories such as hers in the Burden of Peace, a gripping documentary directed by journalist Kwamchetsi Makokha.

Sitting through a 29-minute screening of the film is one of the best ways to understand why so many Kenyans hope a credible legal process to try the perpetrators of the violence will be launched by the International Criminal Court.

You will meet Maureen Cherono, who had been plaiting a neighbour's hair when she set off for home in Eldoret on New Year’s Day two years ago.

Waylaid by several men

She was waylaid by several men who told her their kin had been killed when arsonists set the Kiambaa church on fire.

They took her away and raped her until she fainted. She hoped she would die but did not, she told the interviewers. Nine months later, she delivered a baby boy. She thought about throwing the baby away but did not. She has not yet found a family to adopt it.

Regina Muthoni’s own baby was born on January 21, 2008, 21 days after the Kiambaa tragedy. She named the girl Angel Wambui after her wheelchair bound mother, who was burnt to death three weeks earlier in Kiambaa.

The sense of grievance these and hundreds of thousands of other Kenyans live with means that the peace we have today is little more than an illusion. It is, as Maina Kiai says, a sense of calm rather than peace.

There are just too many people living with the indignity of sharing a tent with their extended clan or coping with the bitterness brought on by sudden dispossession and destitution.

It is an overused phrase. But the best way to achieve lasting peace is to ensure the cause of justice is served.

Trying the authors of the violence will not just bring some sense of closure in the lives of victims. It will influence future behaviour by demonstrating that there can be consequences for inciting Kenyans to slay each other to advance personal political goals.

Personal political goals

That is why so much rides on ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s efforts to convince the Pre-Trial chamber at The Hague to allow an investigation into the atrocities in Kenya.

It is no exaggeration to say the nation’s future depends on it. The playwright and poet Shailja Patel sums it up well in the opening segment of the Burden of Peace.

"Peace has returned to our land. The trickle of blood has dried in the streets. Automobile fumes have swapped places with teargas. Parks once barricaded are now free for the public to use.

'Farms abandoned in flight are being tilled again. Shops that smouldered in daylight now trade into the night. Slums once filled with the smell of death now bubble with life. Yet this is not our peace.

‘‘Too many of us do not know this peace. Its colour and tone elude us. We can neither touch it nor feel it. It is not in our hearts. This is not our peace."