WUNRN
KENYA'S
FIRST GENDER FESTIVAL
By L.
Muthoni Wanyeki
June
8 2009
Kenya’s first ever Gender Festival took place over three days last week.
Inspired by the now biennial Tanzanian Gender Festival, it brought together several hundred community-based women’s organisations from across the country, together with national women’s organisations and networks.
The Festival focused on what people and organisations fighting for women’s rights have been doing and could do better, particularly in light of what happened to us all last year.
As Patricia Nyaundi of the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya pointed out at the start: “Kenya is a country that is ailing... that needs healing.”
Betty Murungi, formerly of the Urgent Action Fund-Africa, pointed to the fact that what such organisations did here during the crisis was, in fact, not unique to Kenya — similar work was done by organisations in Asia (Sri Lanka), Europe (the Balkans) and Africa.
Such organisations are generally flexible in their approach, and multidisciplinary.
They tend to focus on non-violent resistance to conflict, documentation of women’s experiences of conflict and service provision to address the most glaring human rights violations undergone during conflict and the displacement conflict engenders.
They then, when transitional justice mechanisms are taking off, focus on political participation as well as electoral, legal and political reform.
Murungi said the challenge for Kenya’s transitional justice mechanisms is twofold. First, acknowledging that women are not just victims/survivors of conflict, that some of us also “have blood on our hands.”
And second, while the Kenyan women’s movement pursues justice for what happened, we must be alert to the normalised and structuralised violence against women that existed before last year. We must not seek merely to restore the status quo.
MEN’S ROLES TOO WERE EXPLORED. Dr Willy Mutunga of the Ford Foundation spoke to the need for men to change their own notions of masculinity and thus change society.
His suggestion was that sharing in reproductive labour still predominantly assigned to women — cooking, cleaning, parenting — was one way to address the crisis of masculinity.
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