Black woman, seated on a cream sofa wearing a blue, flowered dress with red and pink hair
my activism
It has taken me time to accept that I am an activist, that is what people see me as and that’s what my journey has mostly been about. I am an activist because of the circumstances I was born into and the experiences that I have had. Therefore, my activism is born out of lived experience as a black woman from Kenya who has suffered violence in the past. Audre’ Lorde speaks of the personal being political and my journey and the way I do my activism is a result of being radicalised by personal experience and finding language and meaning for it.
I am a feminist because this lens give me language, values and meaning to the structural issues that I am surrounded by. It is also gives room to imagine solutions that see all of us as equal.
I am a teacher, if I was asked what I do well, I would say that I teach well. I would say that I am here to generate knowledge, to share knowledge and to use this as an avenue to create change.
I am also a survivor leader; this is to reclaim this identity which often comes with stigma and assumptions. Claiming this identity is my activism in a space that excludes survivors and puts them in boxes.
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'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
/ Toni Morrison /
my professional experience
I started out as a grassroots community mobiliser in Nairobi, as a youth activist, my priority then was always the issues that affected the people in my community. When I started I was 16 years and back then I was passionate about young mothers, their experiences with accessing services and specifically young mothers with children with disability. It is through working with children with disability that I learned most of my values on inclusion that I still use in my work with survivors of trafficking. As someone, who had gone through violence and had no received any services, my inclination as a young person was to try and make everything that I saw right because no one made it right for me. Civic education and women rights were the next thing that I got involved in. It is through the women rights work that I encountered feminist theory and truly found language for the systemic issues that I saw around me. Feminism gave me a lens, and it gave me language to express the unseen.
Eight years ago, I started working in the human trafficking space by chance as a result of a personal encounter that revealed to me that I was s survivor of trafficking. This revelation automatically led me to human trafficking work and I have not looked back since. My expertise includes:
Strategic development and management
Curriculum development
Training and facilitation
Mainstreaming of diversity and inclusion
Project development and management
Research
Data management and record keeping
‘I believe that my role is about finding language for empathy, healing and justice in complex systems. ‘