“If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence and neglect, they could make the world shine.” – Michael J. Tucker

“I was stunned when I saw on the ultrasound a tiny, living creature spinning around in my womb. Tap-dancing, I think. Waving its tiny arms around and trying to suck its thumb. I could have sworn I heard it laughing.” – Madonna

I had an experience while I was in school that really made me rethink my stand on this matter. It was late, close to midnight and a seventeen year old girl came into casualty, well and truly sick – vomiting, vomiting and very, very feverish with a foul, foul vaginal discharge. With a Stink that was holding a one-way express ticket to high heaven.

Sister furrowed her nose, made those “there’s a bad smell” wordless exclamations that only middle-aged African women can make, you know. The ones that communicate hatred for the Smell, disbelief that something can smell so horrid, and utter disdain for the source of the justly maligned Odour.

She then filled the room with air-freshener, and it was infinitely more disgusting to mix the already deathly Smell with that of violently murdered flowers canned for the sake of commerce – then she threw up her hands and yelled, “I can’t do this today!” and left dramatically, slamming the door – leaving me, the doctor, the patient, her mother, her other seven-month old child and Smell-from-Hell alone in the room together.

By that time the patient – through her shivers – had told us a fantastic tale about how that Smell came as an allergic reaction to her contraceptive injection two days before – we ignored that blatant lie. The doctor – a very tall, very dark man who’s usually quite the teddy bear – frowned a scary frown upon her and shook his fists.
The truth came pouring out once we had kicked (grand)mother and infant out of the room.

She was seventeen, with another child out of wedlock and her mother was already taking care of that child (the same pair of people we’d just kicked out of the room). So when she discovered she was pregnant again, she felt that she really couldn’t take that story home again. She went to a backstreet clinic and a hanger was untwisted and used, then she went home convinced the problem had gone away. Then the sickness descended and she tried to hide it.

But then came the Smell.

One has no words to say about that sad, sad, sad event. Many people can argue that she was irresponsible, and she should have known better, but the facts remain, and they were Smelling all over the place. Who could honestly come to her at that point in time and tell her what she should have done? In this, our society which frowns upon publicly-admitted abortions and at the same time frowns upon young, unwed mothers (especially this one, who didn’t seem to have learned any kind of “lesson” from her past, whatever the “lesson” is supposed to be)?

After that, I really started to think about what pro-life and pro-choice actually mean.

We are led to believe that pro-lifers are activists for morals and for the life of the unborn; a tiny, vulnerable someone who cannot fight for him or herself. Their usual saying is that you and I were not aborted, so why should we take away someone else’s right to live? That life is not a decision we can make because it’s not ours to give.

Their opponents say they are violent, patriarchal fundamentalists with no real understanding of real life or of the need for family planning, or of the horrible things that can happen to a woman to make her pregnant. “What about rape?” they ask, “Incest? Pregnancies resulting from abuse of women who are mentally challenged?” They are accused of using pressure and coercion and guilt trips to get their point across.

The pro-choicers on the other hand, see themselves as agitating for a woman’s right to decide what should be done with her body. She doesn’t have to be pregnant if she doesn’t want to be. Pregnancy -with how it can weaken and sicken the body – should never be forced upon someone. And they say that that is another choice used by men to put them down, and that men cannot really have a say in the matter as they will never understand where the woman is coming from.

Women have to leave school and jobs and recover from pregnancy and childbirth and then be depended on for years, and that can have all kinds of negative effects on her person. The pro-life movement have labeled the pro-choicers as heartless, amoral murderers, pagans, feminists and people out to make money from a child’s blood.

So there it is.

On principle, I fall on the pro-life side of the debate, but I asked myself the other day, when I remembered the unfortunate 17 year old, “Isn’t it unfortunate that the Church – perhaps because it falls so close to their docket – acts as though they own the pro-life team? It’s a ridiculously incomplete picture. Who doesn’t want happy, healthy children around? Happy, healthy children are indicators of a happy, healthy society; of happy, healthy living.

So if you desire happiness and health for yourself and the generations after then you, my friend, are pro-life, whether you like it or not. And why must a life be protected only when in-utero, and be completely unshielded when it’s delivered into this harsh, cruel world? Mothers are single more often than not because the fathers have denied responsibility for the pregnancy.

So why aren’t we fighting for legislature that would make it easier for women to get child support? Laws that would give women time to take their children to the clinic when they get sick? Laws that would allow a woman certain allowances – if she can prove she is entirely without support – to take care of the child? There are a million ways all the above can be misused by the unscrupulous, but there are a million ways anything can be abused by the unscrupulous.

And why would the Church demand that a woman should keep the pregnancy while ostracizing her and talking badly about her, leaving her deeply scarred for life? Being a mother is one of the most difficult things that any woman will ever have to do.

The fact that the pro-life squad only cares about the unborn – to me – is one of the deepest kinds of hypocrisy. Pro-lifers must also ask themselves, what do we think should be done with prisoners of war? With the old and the infirm? With prisoners on death row?

Why, indeed, must women raise babies if they don’t want them? There are plenty of baby-less families roaming the earth, looking for babies to love…and a glut of unwanted babies in some corners of the world.

I do know that some of the stories about post-abortion traumatic stress disorders, infertility, feeling haunted by past decisions, infinitely deep regrets, depressions, psychoses and suicides are documented facts. The human being, and the woman by default, is a creature that is composed of mind, body and that intangible thing that goes away when you die; the soul, the spirit. The termination of a pregnancy is not just like pulling a tooth. It rends life from life and cannot possibly leave one unscathed.

This is not a decision that should be made under pressure from boyfriends who are not ready to be fathers, from society’s expectations, and with rising levels of hysteria, yet those are usually the circumstances under which it is made. A woman should be empowered to choose long before she gets pregnant, she should be equipped with the understanding that she is much more than “just” a potential baby-making machine.

She can choose to say no to pressure to have sex with anyone, especially people in positions of authority using sex for barter trade. She can learn self-defense. She can choose to use contraception if she doesn’t want to get pregnant, and there should be a provision for her to learn about different methods and choose what fits her best. And she should be allowed to be sad and vulnerable and scared and doubtful when she gets an unwanted pregnancy, without being judged and pointed fingers at.

So in that sense, I’m both pro-life and pro-choice. I don’t want anyone to have to die; the baby, or the misused woman, but I also don’t want anyone to be backed into a corner and be lied to that they have the choice to either live or be lived for. Refuse the lies, mwananchi, that a death of some kind has to occur.

Your Country Is NOT Going To The Dogs!
by Dr. Njoki Ngumi

“I pledge my loyalty to the President and Nation of Kenya,
My readiness and duty to defend the flag of our Republic,
My life, strength and service in the task of nation building,
In the living spirit embodied in our National motto ‘Harambee’,
and perpetuated in the Nyayo philosophy of Peace, Love and Unity.”

- Kenyan Loyalty Pledge, apparently still recited in primary schools countrywide to this day

I’ll be honest. I recently Googled “how to become a Swiss citizen”. I did. I won’t lie, I’m shallow. I can speak basic French, and I want to be a milkmaid in some tiny farm on the Alps and learn how to yodel. I feel that the Swiss must be so neutral about everything that even racism is too much effort for them.

Why did I do that, you might ask? Why Switzerland? Why abscond from “Magical Kenya” (who else hates that ad and thinks we’d be better represented by a remix of “Niko na Safaricom” and “Tusker Milele”?)?

Why? I hate the news. In newspapers, on TV. I want to kick the TV’s or tune them permanently to Afro-Sinema so I can laugh at something that’s actually funny. I hate the blind, naïve hope that things have to get better. I hate the wish that everything would just burn, that every member of a certain generation would die and then we could start again from a clean slate.

I hate that random moment, because it reminds me that even if I won yodeling competitions on the Alpine farm and somehow convinced cows to yield 20 liters daily, there’s probably no other place my soul will ever feel completely at home. I would actually be restless for this crap-mountain that has the nerve to call itself a country; something like – forgive the politically incorrect analogy – those battered wives going back to the drunken husband with their black eye still smarting, and cleaning up his vomit and his soiled pants and cooking his favorite dinner afterward.

Yuck.

I hate that my feelings for this country might qualify me to be schizophrenic.

And then I met you.

I met a guy who finished school 3 years before I did, and is now a medical superintendent at a tiny place called Endebes. I didn’t even know where that was (it’s near Kitale, apparently). I was talking to him about it, and he said something poignant. “People need us. They do.” This guy could have a brilliant, money-paved, somewhere-over-the-rainbow future ahead of him if he’d go back to school – yet there he is, in god-forsaken tiny town.

I was taught a class by a nutritionist recently – a brilliant guy, who’d do excellently in private practice because he has amazing people skills and expresses himself VERY well, and KNOWS what he’s talking about (doctors are usually difficult people to impress with knowledge, yet this guy managed to have a room of almost 40 hanging on his every word for more than an hour). He chooses to work with the government, counseling people with HIV/AIDS on good food choices. In Molo.

I have a friend who got a posting that was difficult for all of us to accept. But she went anyway, and will hold her head up high living alone for a year in a town that smells of sulphure, eight hours away from everything she has ever called home. She’ll become more effing brilliant than she ever was, and people will have to wear shades while looking at her.

I know another woman fighting tooth and nail as we speak to keep Kenya’s only repertory theatre open, despite having to fight bloody civil wars with always-busy, ass-wipe people. She gives herself daily to developing it even though she could be easily earning way more as the brilliant lawyer she is. It exhausts her, but she still gets up and polishes her sword.

I could go on.

But all of you have taught me something deep and lasting. I can see – even if it’s by a dim flame – that Kenya is not just disgusting roads, bad mobile service providers that won’t let us send texts for free, prosperity-gospel preachers, ‘internationally-certified’ pseudo-universities giving poor quality education, HATEFUL POLITICIANS WHO FIGHT FOR THE NEWS CAMERAS AND PLAY GOLF TOGETHER ON WEEKENDS, narrow-minded mothers-in-law who frown upon marrying someone from another tribe, hospitals where they steal government supplies and sell them back to patients, KPLC publishing a power-rationing schedule then not sticking to it and the epidemic of married men and women with ‘mpango wa kando’.

Kenya is people. Individuals with a voice that can become a collective cry for change. Kenya is you. Kenya is me. Kenya is hating it, but getting up and saying you’ll try, grabbing your shovel to start the clean-up of the Crap Mountain, like all the inspiring people above have done and continue to do.

Being Kenyan is – even if you look like a criminal on your ID photo, and you have every reason to want to be one (and would probably succeed doing it) – deciding every day not to be a criminal.

Kenya is not absolutes. We can’t trash all politicians. All NGO’s. All public institutions. But if can see a way in the dense forest of yuck, and the only way through it is with a slasher, and we know our hands will get blistered and will hurt, and we know it will take forever, we still say we’ll give it a try. At least.

Instead of sit back and complain.

The alternative is to become the first black Swiss milkmaid with a Bachelor’s degree which makes her worse than useless to cows. .

You guys, all you fracture-splinting, wonderful patriots…your Kenya is NOT going to the dogs. You will wrest it out of their iron-jaw clasps, even if you bleed doing it. Thank you for your panoramic vision.

Your Kenya is NOT going to the dogs.

And, by Providence…neither is mine.

by Njoki (re-posted with her kind [and baffled] permission)

There’s probably no phrase I hate hearing like I do “the youth”. Sentences starting with “The youth of these days are…” !!! There’s the implication, by the usually patronizing tone making such statements, that youth is inexperienced and ignorant and foolish and shallow and reckless.

Youth, I feel (and I may be biased as one of the so-called “youth”) is for dreams and hopes and colour and fights and decisions and experience and living.
Anyhow, before I digress further into a non-point, there’s a way everyone who’s even set foot in a university is supposed to feel deeply privileged. Not everyone gets that chance, we’re told, to keep studying after secondary school. So we should consider ourselves lucky – blessed, even – and work as hard as we can.

Then we go to public universities and find that people have to carry chairs into lecture halls because there’s not enough space, and the administration conveniently forgot to expand facilities for the multitudes whose fees they’re accepting. Toilets are cleaned once a week (if at all) – and that’s if there’s water. There’s no tissue paper or soap available, even as we should be leading the country as examples of good hygiene, and it’s somehow acceptable to have effing flies all over effing sanitary towel disposal units. Sub-standard condoms run out in rusty government dispensers and are replaced months later…as we “fight” HIV.

Most lecturers last gave a damn centuries before we were even born, don’t usually bother to mark assignments, and if they do, they use arbitrary marking schemes that differ from person to person, they ridicule any questions asked in their sessions, their presentations are the very same ones they’ve been making since the university got its charter and all that if they bother to turn up for class at all. Libraries are full to bursting of books so outdated that even fires would be ashamed to be lit using the paper from them. Administrative processes are vague and unhelpful; you arrive in a room and (after your story has been forced out of you by 5 people who are just looking to pass time and don’t care either way) are told that the one person who can sign your document went on leave and their phone is off and no one knows how to reach them.

School. If you’re being taught anything, it’s that one can get paid for mediocrity and shoddiness.

Some of the brave just up and leave university and chart a different path. Those that decide to stay and fight may finish, but leave very jaded by a system that has taken more from them than it has given, carrying the remains of their dreams in coffins of harsh reality. People had grand dreams. To be lawyers that argue out points and take part in constitution-making for justice and equality. Then you find out you have to wear clothes like morgue attendants to go to court, wear smelly horsehair wigs (EFFING WHY??!!), spend hours going through lengthy documents deceptively labelled “briefs”, then have someone guilty go scot-free because he knew who to pay.

You wanted to be a doctor. Save lives, serve humanity, and all that jazz. You find that supplies have to be locked away – because, apparently, if they’re not, the employees or patients will steal them – and that it takes over an hour to get one blood sample because the guy who was last seen with the key to the supply closet has mysteriously disappeared to a place in the hospital which seems to have no network. You then have to prescribe essential drugs which the patient’s family has to go and buy from chemists in town because the hospital has run out, and the tender process has gotten stuck between committee approvals. You wanted to be an engineer. Your school books are so ludicrously out of date, people use them as doorstops and foot-rests. People are teaching you math that you’ll NEVER use in everyday life.

And that’s the kind of life form 4’s countrywide are urged to aspire to. ??!!

That’s an education system that is doing nothing to remain relevant to a people who are exposed to world-class standards and have to compete in an international job market. Then there’s the right-wing parents and guardians and teachers, pouring vitriol on those who have unorthodox dreams, usually of the artistic and sporting variety. Going home to say that you want to be like Didier Drogba or Eric Wainaina! Be serious, they say. Be a lawyer. A doctor. Go do computers. French.

Kids aren’t told to think about what will make them happy or asked if 5 years from now they’ll still be OK doing the same thing every day. Kids aren’t encouraged to find what they’re good at or told that life is about getting better at that. Kids are told to do what will bring home the money. Something that will guarantee them a job. Money in the bank. However it gets there is not the issue. And the hustle is all about getting there first, undercutting everyone else if you want to win.

So, of course people will cheat in exams, if only to leave overcrowded schools and their demon lecturers. Of course they’ll start the hustle by taking bulbs from lecture theatres and selling them. Of course there will be disregard for public property, and gum will be stuck under broken desks and upholstery on chairs torn seconds after refurbishing. Of course there’ll be regional organizations like Loitokitok Students Union where the first item of the agenda of the meeting is “Constituency Development Fund”, and how the students of the union can get their hands on some of it.

Of course student politics will be a dirty game. People are practicing for the real thing. At the end of the day, though, there’s no excuse for lawlessness, but if it’s the only thing you can see giving results that seem to work?

We’re teaching the youth, who are the dawning of future hope, tomorrow’s leaders – and all the other clichés attached to the young – that if they love music and art and sports or whatever, they have to bury that joy for this; to sit in ancient, stuffy auditoriums and dust off moldy books. That to succeed, they must go to university and do “marketable” degrees with course outlines which haven’t ever changed since the teachers got their degrees, with minimal help from the system. The same system that will then preach to them to stay home and build the nation despite salaries that cannot keep up with inflation rates…and so they will have to have a dodgy undercover hustle to make things work.

So to you, college dropouts…godspeed. To you, college when-will-this-all-enders…godspeed, as well.

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it, but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and broken.”
W. Somerset Maugham, “Of Human Bondage”.

Njoki