Hope Beyond the Bruises

I first met the young woman in Entebbe, Uganda. She was Kenyan, like myself, and we might as well have met in Nairobi. But she was a woman on the run, though not in the traditional sense. Being on the run is for criminals fleeing justice, but Njeri was desperate to escape her husband and the father of her two sons.

As I arrived at the swanky hotel she was staying in, I saw a woman no more than 33 hanging around the reception, trying desperately to fit in. But I knew instinctively that she was the person I had an assignment with. My journey had been a pretty clandestine affair; full of the kind of intrigue I had previously seen only in movies. It was not until I arrived at the JomoKenyatta International Airport that I learnt my destination. Having arrived, I could feel her vetting me from a distance before she dropped her guard and approached.

Our lives would touch ever so fleetingly—three hours in all—but Njeri would remain in my mind and in my heart for two years. Whenever I think of Njeri now, the first word that comes to my mind is fear—in capital letters. Njeri spoke of her estranged husband with the kind of terror that should not belong in a marriage.

Her first born, old enough to know what was going on around him, was far too grown-up for a child aged only six, so fiercely protective of his mother that he refused to go more than two meters away when bidden to go play by the pool side. In the end, we let him be. After all, the assaults we would speak of were nothing new; he had been witness to it all.

Formally married

Njeri’s agony began long ago. He first beat her because she came home late from work, and this was a time they were not even formally married. He would go on to beat her right in her parents’ homestead and in the presence of his own parents and siblings. It is unheard of in most African communities for anyone to beat a woman in her own parents’ house and subject the in-laws to public humiliation and threats. But such was his towering rage that none of his own relatives ever thought to intervene.

Not even her flight in 2002 to the battered women’s shelter in Nairobi run by the Women’s Rights Awareness Program could save her from the distress. He was always one step ahead, arriving in person to bully the staff, threatening everyone through cell phone, letters, and email. As we spoke, Njeri constantly looked over her shoulders because, she confided, he had even managed to track her to the home of a local women’s rights activist and threatened her with what we Kenyans call “dire consequences.”

I returned home subdued, only for the news to break a couple of days later. The man, curiously enough a senior officer in an international non-governmental organization, was threatening to sue anyone who carried the story. Njeri’s parents were on air and everywhere they thought they could get help for their daughter.