Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya

Awino Okech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Print ISBN:
  9780367788049
  9780367077679
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429663376
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the practice of widow inheritance in order to explore the intersection between power, gender and sexualities in Kenya.

Using widow inheritance amongst the Luo of Kenya as a case study, the book explores the role of body politics in the construction of gendered subjects and nations. Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya unpacks how 'respectable femininities' and 'wayward sexualities' become the 'sites' within which national and state politics are ritualized and where tensions resulting from non-hegemonic performances of both gender and sexuality are 'resolved'. The empirical research that underpins this book is qualitative and grounded in feminist methodology, challenging the erasure of women's narratives in hegemonic epistemologies.

Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya will be of interest to students and scholars of African gender studies and women's rights.

1 Gender, sexuality and culture

This chapter provides an overview of three major analytical zones that anchor the research in this book. The first section interrogates the absence of gender as a variable in understanding contestations around the ‘new African state’ in the immediate post independence era. Scholars such as Lewis (2003), Wilson-Tagoe (2003) and Mama (1996) theorize the implications of gender neutrality in analyses of post-colonial state formation. In doing so, they highlight the gendered slippages in the vocabularies of ‘culture’ and ‘democracy’ that are key lexicons in analysis of post-independent states.

The second section examines the terms on which women were drawn into the post-colonial African nation/state project. By examining both development and empowerment paradigms, I am interested in deconstructing the lenses that shaped the inclusion of African women in the state. The modernity/ tradition binary emerges as a discursive device used to shape and influence the evolution of gender in the ‘modern’ nation state, while maintaining the policing and regulation of women’s bodies as central to the machinery of nation building. Thomas (2005) and Pereira (2005) and Badoe (2005) suggest that while the contexts and interlocutors may differ, the contested nature of women’s sexuality reveal that these are not simply ‘private matters’. An analytical approach that ignores women’s bodies and gender identity as a site in which both states and nations continually define and redefine themselves is myopic.

The third and final section examines the politics of writing about women’s bodies in a period characterised by a range of global concerns, specifically those animated by increased violence against women, HIV/AIDS and women in leadership. In doing so, I examine the legacies and continuities of ‘the regimes of “truth” that underpin a political discourse of who can be intimate with whom and in what way and make it a primary concern of the state and community policy (culture)’ (Stoler, 2002: 2). These conceptual frames shape the contours of the analysis in this book.

‘African culture’ and gender

African discourses on ‘culture’ have emerged out of the historical condition of colonialism, with African cultural theory concentrating on challenging imperialist cultural domination (see Wilson-Tagoe, 2003). The nature of ‘culture’ as an element of resistance to colonial domination lay in the fact that ‘African culture’, ideologically, was the manifestation of the material and historical reality of colonised African people (Chabal, 1983: 141). Cabral argued that, ‘it was always within the realities termed as cultural that the people found the seeds of challenge, which led to the structuring and development of national liberation movements’ (Chabal, 1983: 141). Accordingly, national liberation movements were organised around the expression of ‘culture’. Kwame Nkrumah, ‘African cultures’ saw ‘culture’ as the core of political revolution noting that socialism lay in the high point of ‘African cultures’, i.e. the collective ethos (Botwe-Asamoah, 2005: 50). This collective ethos was also manifest on the social level, in institutions such as the clan, which underlay the initial equality of all and the responsibility of the many for the one (Botwe-Asamoah, 2005: 50). This position was also implicit in Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa policy, in which he argued that there were no sectional interests in pre-colonial Africa (Nyerere, 1968: 52). Put together, the collective argument was that the production of African culture based on tribe was part of an imperial project, which Africa’s national liberation movements sought to re-articulate through the construction of ‘national’ ideologies (see Chabal, 1983; Nyerere, 1967). Burton (1999) and Stoler (2002) note the centrality of sexuality as a zone and women’s bodies as a site through which insecurities related to physical geographical boundaries and internal discord within the false culturally secure colonial set-up were negotiated. They point to the tentative and perhaps contrived nature of cultures created and defined within the colonial set-up, which defined and locked up certain practices and norms as given and assigned them to specific races. Drawing on the intersection of race and gender, Stoler (2002) identifies marginality and fear of disruption of identities underpinning citizenship, nationality and geography – specifically who had access to land and property and who could legally claim these rights.

For African liberation movements, the notion of ‘culture’ became part of a political process of constructing a distinctive identity through the creation of new knowledge about Africa’s place in world history (Wilson-Tagoe, 2003: 25). ‘Culture’ determined by the exigencies of anti-colonial discourse strengthening the link between ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ led to the presentation of culture as coherent and homogeneous rather than as continually contested and renewed (Wilson-Tagoe, 2003: 25). Post-colonial scholars suggest that the contestations around unifying ‘culture’ and ‘traditional’ norms in Africa pertain because Africa as an idea and as an object of academic and public discourse has been and continues to remain fraught (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004: 348; Mudimbe, 1988). Mohanty (2002: 505) asserts that the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Third World’ retain a political and explanatory value in a world that appropriates and assimilates multiculturalism and ‘difference’ through commodification and consumption. References to ‘culture’ therefore infiltrate discussions and debates in ways that codify and entrench the binary between Africa and the West (Lewis, 2004: 30–1). This argument is picked up in critiques of transnational approaches to feminist scholarship that centre the influence of global discourses on ‘other’ women. Mohanty refers to it as ‘the discursive colonisation of Third World women’s lives and struggles through the power/knowledge nexus of feminist cross-cultural scholarship expressed through eurocentric, falsely universalising methodologies’ (Mohanty, 2002: 501).

Gender post flag independence

Gender discourses and interventions in post independent African states operated within universalising discourses where ‘fictions of authenticity, custom and “the past” worked to bolster patriarchal goals and desires. In doing so as Lewis notes they perpetuated the servitude of women whilst demonising the men and women who reject heterosexist norms’ (Lewis, 2003: 1). Nationalist discourse staked out those sexual practices that were nation building and race affirming by marking unproductive eroticism not only as immoral, but also as unpatriotic. Thomas (2005: 175), writing on Kenya, notes how politics of the womb have been crucial to ensuring material prosperity and constructing moral people and communities. While noting the importance of the historical moment in which these discourses are produced, she notes that in Kenya, it has not always been easy to neatly separate issues of land, labour and political control from those of gender, sexuality and reproduction. However, the interface with development discourses in the early 1970’s led to a range of essentialist constructions of femininities and therefore gender.

These developmental interventions can be traced to the emergence of the Women in Development (WID) framework that was popularly associated with a wide range of activities concerning women, which donor agencies, governments and NGOs adopted between the 1970s and the 1990s. WID was coined in the early 1970s by a Washington-based network of female development professionals (Tinker, 1990: 30). Based on their experiences of overseas development work, they began to challenge trickle down theories of development by foregrounding the differential impact of modernisation on men and women. Instead of improving women’s rights and status, the development process appeared to be contributing to deteriorating their position (Tinker, 1990: 31). The second major influence on WID was the emerging body of research on women in developing countries; the work of the Danish economist, Esther Boserup, was most influential. Boserup’s Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) challenged the assumptions of the welfare approach to gender by highlighting women’s importance to the agricultural economy. Boserup critiqued colonial and post-colonial agricultural policies that had facilitated men’s monopoly over new technologies and cash crops and undermined women’s traditional roles in agriculture thereby destroying female farming systems (Razavi & Miller, 1995: 11). Consequently, a dichotomy emerged where men were associated with the modern, cash-cropping sector and women with traditional, subsistence agriculture. Relegated to the subsistence sector, women lost income, status and power relative to men. More importantly, their essential contribution to agricultural production became invisible.

Boserup’s work was taken up by WID advocates because she offered evidence of a recent past of relative equality for women that could make the case for development assistance to be directed towards women to address gender inequalities, thus also challenging the idea that equality was a Western import (Jaquette, 1990: 61). The singular focus on the consumptive and productive capacity of women to reject the narrative of gender equality as a Western import resulted in an emphasis on efficiency demands as a route to altering their status of powerlessness. Gender re-distributive arguments prioritised women as a group, not because of their needs but due to the targets that could be achieved through their productive labour. Consequently, broader socio-political questions that informed women’s and girls’ exclusion were muted. The residual effects of these WID approaches can still be felt today with generalised claims about what women’s equity can do for states and for development. Razavi (1995) argued then that the cure for Africa’s food crisis, child welfare, environmental degradation, and the failure of structural adjustment policies are all sought in women (Razavi & Miller, 1995: 10). The legacies of this approach are evident today. While this greater focus has given women a higher profile in policy discourse, women are expected to compensate for public provisions, even though stringent fiscal policies and mismanagement of resources limit their actual ability to make any shift in structural inequality. Indeed, the unpaid care work debate, that has resurged today in global gender and development circles, was picked up as an unintended effect of the WID approach by Kandiyoti (1988) and Goetz (1994) who pointed to the intensification of women’s workloads as the onus shifts to them to extend their unpaid work as feeders, healers and teachers of children to include the provision of basic services to the community. This cushioning of state deficiency in the provision of basic goods and services was an observable trend during the food, financial and fuel crisis in 2015. An AWID study pointed to the increased burden on women through increased care work and increased poverty due to a reduction of decent work, and cuts in wages and jobs. Women’s social reproduction roles are called upon without question to cushion economies due the absence of effective infrastructure to deliver education, health, water and food (Craviotto, 2010).

Debates on the role of women in rescuing states from economic under-development are also evident in development funding. On the one hand, funding agencies claim to be setting up self-reliant organisations, yet they are primarily interested in funding short-term projects that would produce quick and measurable results. This has resulted in a development funding discourse that locks those located within it into a tightly regulated set of relations defined by the international marketplace and foreign aid (see Smith, 1997). As Smith argued, contrarian views that suggest that recipients of funding should ‘do development’ on their own terms are regarded as dangerous because it upsets the balance of power that positions the aid industry as knowers and helpers (Smith, 1997: 229). The impact of neoliberalism on the development sector is illustrated by an AWID (2013) study on the state of funding for women’s rights work that points to the systematic reduction of resources towards women’s funds and women’s organisations. This reduction in funding occurs at the same time as the rise of corporate led programmes targeting girls and women through innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives while at the same time reducing the question of women’s freedom to one about individual hard work and economic empowerment, and not about the hetero-patriarchal structural conditions that sustain gender inequalities (Wilson, 2011). The development framing of gender has often overshadowed feminist approaches seeking radical understanding of gender. Lessons learnt from the uptake of gender within ‘development’ point to the generalities that sustain this work: ‘women are the poorest of the poor’, ‘women do most of the work in African agriculture’, ‘educating girls leads to economic development’ (Cornwall et al., 2008: 1). The NGO-isation of gender has meant that discourses on gender follow global interests and resources. In the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and a growing international interest in violence against women, due in part to the increase in violent conflicts on the African continent, opened – albeit problematically – discussions on sexuality. These discussions and the interventions that have followed in their wake have been limited to sexual practices specifically in connection to safety, illness and violence. The articulation of women sexualities through the vectors of disease and pollution, entrench the modernity/tradition binary. Feminist engagement with sexualities that do not re-inscribe these perspectives are positioned as ‘a form of liberation from a former victimhood under atrocious African traditionalism or another version of restored respectability’ (Mupotsa, 2008: 11). Additionally, the conflation of ‘respectable’ femininity with social and biological ‘mothering’ or ‘motherhood’ is retained as central to the nation, thereby reproducing it as a stable and closed entity (Mupotsa, 2008: 11).

Body politics and sexuality

Feminist analysis of body politics and sexuality illuminates how difference, defiance, morality, purity and dirt re-emerge to validate state-led actions against women’s bodies at specific political moments. In Badoe (2005) writing about the “witches camp” in Gambaga explores the narratives of women expelled by their families and communities in one of the four places of exile in the Northern Region of Ghana. Those most vulnerable to witchcraft accusations were widowed women who were forced to move back into their fathers’ homes after their husbands had died (Badoe, 2005: 40). Additionally, successful ‘single’ businesswomen, women without children and women without an adult male brother from the same mother to protect their interests in the extended family were also vulnerable to charges of witchcraft (Badoe, 2005: 41).

Through the Lawal¹ case, Pereira (2005) distinguishes between the legal and normative understandings of zina.

Zina is transgressive according to Sharia criminal law. While the Sharia does not explicitly define zina as transgressive heterosexuality, it is clear from significant elements of its conceptualisation that, for instance, consensual sex between a man and a woman who are not married to one another, … that zina involves heterosexual sex and that the source of its transgression is its occurrence outside marriage.

(Pereira, 2005: 52)

Pereira argues that interpretations of zina are presented by those whose interests it serves as uniformly applicable under all circumstances and as fundamentally unchanging and unchangeable (Pereira, 2005: 62). Pereira (2005: 75) underscores the significance of history and politics in the interpretation of cultural practices, including practices integral to heterosexual culture. The daily and legal discursive interpretations of zina reveal how the surveillance of women, their bodies and their sexualities are sanctioned through civil and religious legislation.

Legislative surveillance also features in the immediate post-independence period in Kenya. Thomas (2005) shows how national debates generated wide-ranging consideration of the state’s role in defining and ensuring women’s legal rights. Kenyan politicians and the public argued over whether national independence should entail greater autonomy and guaranteed rights for women. Reproduction became the subject of colonial and post-colonial debate and legislative intervention in Kenya because so many people viewed its regulation as fundamental to the construction of political and moral order and proper gender and generational relations (Thomas, 2005: 4). These debates produced diverse political discussions over whether national independence should entail greater autonomy and guaranteed rights for women (Thomas, 2005: 4). The connection between the regulation of reproduction and the construction of political, moral order and proper gender and generational relations is seen in its reflection within state policy objectives (Thomas, 2005: 4). In South Africa, Ratele’s analysis on Zuma’s rape trial points to the ways in which sexuality becomes a site in which political and legal struggles are re-inscribed and become de facto norms. Ratele (2006: 59) continues: ‘it is clear that nations, societies and cultures are continually contested and contesting – just as sexual conduct and relations are not “natural” entities, so masculinities and sexual identities and rights are fields of power’. Ratele’s work focusses attention on hegemonic and hetero-normative discourses that have coloured analysis on sexuality.

The McFadden–Pereira debate (2003), on the other hand, elucidates the complex terrain (both intellectually and contextually) on which sexuality debates occur. McFadden (2003) argues against the proclivity of feminist work in Africa to engage with what she terms as the ‘safer’ zones of sexuality. This, in her view, is evident in the overwhelming focus on reproduction (specifically within marriage) and the sex rights discourse as the basis for intellectual and practical work around sexuality. She situates pleasure and choice as a critical part of sexuality by suggesting that the erotic, and the agency associated with claiming it, presents a powerful political and transformative tool. As Mupotsa and Mhishi (2008) note, essentialised categories that position research on sexuality as a liberation discourse, moving away from ‘silences’ of victimisation and oppression, reveal the characterisation of sites charged with political tension such as reproduction as safe, potentially apolitical zones. Countering McFadden (2003), Pereira (2003) offers the importance of contexts and the heterogeneity of women in Africa as critical starting points for any assessment of ‘safety’ in approaches. While Pereira does not question the fact that ‘silences’ exist in approaches to activism and theorising of African women’s sexuality, she suggests that the daily negotiation of state, cultural and religious violence by women, with their bodies as a target, offers a potential framework to understand why there is a focus on rights and reproduction in some African contexts.

Continuities: debates on sexuality in Kenya

There are a range of continuities shaping debates on sexuality since 2008 when this research was conducted in Kenya. The tensions that McFadden (2003) noted remain relevant and can also be understood as indicative of intergenerational forms of organising that have developed across the country. Three vignettes are offered here to situate the framework that this book privileges. In 2005, a national constitutional referendum was instituted to begin to close the constitutional reform process begun in the 1990s. The key issues under contention were land ownership, legalisation of abortion in specific cases and the inclusion of Muslim Kadhi courts. The Catholic church mobilised its parishioners against the draft based on moral arguments about the sanctity of life and women’s responsibility to avoid children out of wedlock. Unplanned pregnancies and choice were immediately linked to the institution of marriage, women’s morality, the state and the church’s responsibility to secure both. Warembo ni Yes,² a campaign initiated by Bunge la Wananchi,³ was developed to mobilise y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gender, sexuality and culture
• 2 Dominant discourses on widow inheritance
• 3 Widow inheritance and gender identity
• 4 Discursive boundaries: building nations
• 5 Gendered language and culture
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index