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  • Kenyan Feminisms in the Digital Age
  • Nanjala Nyabola (bio)

This article is an excerpt from a longer book by the author.

Kenyan Feminisms in the Digital Age

Being feminist in Kenya can be dangerous, where the belief that feminists are angry, unhappy, and looking to destroy everyone else's happiness is pervasive. Iconic Kenyan women like Wangari Maathai who publicly embrace feminism are routinely ridiculed and shamed by both men and women. And where new media has made feminism more visible, so too has it made the backlash against feminism more scathing. For example, in 2016, the Nairobi News published a viral article, "City Girl: How to Be a Twitter Feminist in Kenya," referring to "Twitter feminists" as "the scum of the earth." Similarly, in 2017, a popular blogger published an acerbic post decrying "toxic feminism" for apparently emasculating men and upending traditional gender roles.

Self-identifying as a feminist in Kenya is bad enough, but the derision stemming from the belief that feminism on social media does no real work off-line affirms that being a feminist on social media is either tremendously brave or insane.

Thankfully, feminists are notoriously resilient. In the wake of intense hostility and resistance in public spaces like traditional media, churches, and electoral politics, feminists in Kenya have used new media to boost their political organizing, emerging from decades of stagnation under the autocratic Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Digital media has allowed feminist discourse to reclaim space denied them in traditional media. Political [End Page 261] conversations featuring and centering women—that have nothing to do with their identity as women—are common online in venues such as The Elephant—even though they are almost entirely absent off-line. Despite many challenges, new media has given new voice to feminist concerns and allowed new, issue-based networks to coalesce, giving young radical feminists in particular a platform to push dialogue forward. Below, I identify some cases of online feminist organizing in Kenya to show the opportunities and challenges that women face when using technology to occupy space.

#JusticeForWomen

"Good Women Don't Protest," screams the headline of a 2016 Human Rights Watch Report on Sudanese rights activists, and the same can be said of Kenya. The idea of being accepted as "good women" keeps institutional activism unable to push for the very necessary radical and transformative dialogue needed to bring Kenyan women's rights into the twenty-first century. Social media is allowing women in Kenya to move beyond the burden of "goodness" and be as combative, opinionated, and uncompromising as is needed in order to create a more just society. As institutional women's rights groups have struggled with purpose and/or funding, women's rights organizing online has racked up some major victories for individual women as well as the cause. This has led to striking contrasts of strategy, messaging, and even impact between what traditional, off-line organizing has been able to accomplish in the last decade in Kenya and what social media advocacy is accomplishing.

Three high profile cases underscore these discrepancies. The first and perhaps the most definitive was #JusticeForLiz. On June 26, 2013, a sixteen-year-old girl, Liz (not her real name), was walking home alone from her grandfather's funeral in Butula County, a rural part of western Kenya. While en route, she was attacked by six men, dragged into the nearby scrub. As reported by The Daily Nation on October 7, 2013, the young men beat and gang-raped her for several hours. The girl passed out at some point during her ordeal because of the violence of the attack. Perhaps afraid that they had committed murder, her attackers threw her into a pit latrine and fled. She was found early the next morning, still alive but deeply physically and emotionally damaged. The well-wishers who found her rushed her to the hospital for treatment for the beatings and the sexual assault. [End Page 262] Tragically, Liz endured major spinal injuries and developed an obstetric fistula—an abnormal passage that develops between two organs when hollow organs are punctured—as a result of her attack.

This story was first reported on October 7 in Kenya...

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