Concept of Home (Part One) - Ivy

People make me feel at home. I have always thought that specific people in a space guarantee me safety and safety mean I am home. Therefore, if I call you a friend, it simply means you are home for me. You are safe. The concept of home to me is people and not necessarily spaces.

The concept of home as space was destroyed by the fact that I was abused in a space that was supposed to be home, so the idea that a physical space can simply be safe is something I struggle with personally. Even now, when people keep mentioning that 'this is a safe space' I am quite weary.

I was abused in places I considered private, so I have also always been wary of 'private' spaces and conversely always felt safe in 'public' spaces. I have always imagined that in public spaces, you can always rely on at least one person to be humane and stop abuse if it is happening. Idealistically I believed in the power of humanity in public spaces. Not everyone is evil, and not everyone will be complacent.

I remember when I read about Ivy's death. I didn't know her, but it felt like I did because I still remember being on campus at Kenyatta University very fondly. I remember being hopeful then and knowing that I had a lot to hope for. Ivy Wangechi was a young Kenyan girl that was hacked to death in public by a man who felt rejected by her. Ivy was a medical student at Moi University in Eldoret. The murderer Naftali Kinuthia used an axe and a knife to kill Ms Wangechi. When interviewed, he claimed that he had invested a lot on Ivy to be rejected by her.

There had been several women that had been killed before Ivy, but Ivy's death lingered. I remember what I was wearing when I read her story, and I remember the sounds, I remember being frozen, and I remember the distinct smell of fear. I remember the fear because when I think of the trauma I have gone through and think of what has lingered, it is the fear that I am not safe and the fear that I could be abused again that has remained. It is this same fear that crept in and at that moment dispelled a concept of safety I held. The idea that public spaces are safe was gone. The idea that people could save me in public when I am being abused was also gone.

Ivy was abused in public. Her abuser carried an axe in public and hacked her to death in public. She died in public. In response, people made fun of women being hacked to death. People thought joking about feminists being disciplined using an axe was funny. The message was apparent. I wasn't safe in public. The message was also unequivocal that people think the death of women is a joke.

As someone working with women who have been abused, I have always known distinctly that this country is not safe for women. However, this incident cemented this fact. The little hope I had left that people can be humane when faced with injustice, was gone in a minute and the dread of fully understanding that I wasn't safe and was never going to be safe replaced it. When you work in human rights, one of the most significant assumptions you make is that people don't know that what they are doing is harming people and that when confronted with the truth, they will learn and change. This is an assumption I am no longer making when it comes to violence against women. Ivy's story taught me that Kenyans know that violence against women happens. They know that we are dying, but it's a joke. Violence against women is embedded in our culture, and a different strategy is required to change things. 

Shailja Patel talks about survivors not being home in their own bodies and to be honest; no one has ever described trauma for me this fluently. The fact that trauma lives in your body and healing is somehow finding a way to still feel safe in your own body. An abuser invades your body, and you spend a lifetime convincing your mind that your body is safe, that it is home. Kenyan women have been abused in this country, and the concept of safety is foreign. For some whom this violence has already invaded our bodies, we are no longer at home in our bodies and can no longer find spaces that we can feel safe and call home all the time but my prayer is that we will defiantly create those homes.

Statistics show that gender based violence against women during this period has significantly increased. Others, have called it the other pandemic because home is not always a safe place for women.

I recognise the body of work that the feminists at Feminists in Kenya have done to express, teach and remember women who have died as a result of femicide. Thank you. It is as a result of this work that I somehow found language for this.

We owed you so much Ivy, may our grief teach us something new about how we could have kept you alive.