adminYolanda Ndlovu
Kenyan born educator and activist, Dr Kakenya Ntaiya, says after undergoing a traditional circumcision procedure, she left her country to find a way to empower young girls.
“After the trauma, I knew I had to leave and do something. When you go through trauma in your life, you think, I do not want someone else to go through what I have gone through,” said Dr Ntaiya during a public lecture at a local university last Thursday.
Dr Ntaiya delivered the sixth talk in the “Hope/Fay Lecture Series for Gender Equality,” which is jointly organised by the Women’s University in Africa (WUA) and the United States Embassy.
She is the founder and president of Kakenya’s Centre for Excellence in Enoosean, Kenya. She spoke on “The Role of Women in Child Marriages and Gender-based Violence.”
Like many Maasai girls, life for Ntaiya was supposed to follow the traditional path. Engaged at five, she was to be circumcised shortly after reaching puberty, an event that would mark the beginning of her preparations for marriage.
Her life would then consist of caring for her family and seeing her own daughters married away at a young age.
But Ntaiya broke the cycle and is now helping hundreds of girls in southern Kenya do the same.
She negotiated with her father to delay circumcision, recognised in her culture as the rite of passage to become a woman, to enable her to complete her high school education. He agreed.
Ultimately she had to face the procedure. She recalls a very horrible and painful process.
“You do not question it – so I went through the cutting, it is something that happens without anaesthesia, you are not prepared and you cannot even cry.
“You are told you are a Masaai woman and Masaai women are strong, so you can’t cry. You are also forbidden to talk about it,” she explained.
After she graduated from high school, she convinced her village elders to allow her to attend college in the United States.
She received a scholarship to Randolph-Macom Women’s College in Virginia.
“When the story came that a girl had to go to America, all of a sudden it was a bad thing; this is an opportunity for a boy, they said, but I had applied to a women’s college, so I had to go,” said Dr Ntaiya.
“During my years at the university, a whole world opened up for me. You learn that female genital mutilation is against the law, you learn that every child has the right to go to school,” she narrated.
She noted that female genital mutilation (FGM) is recognised internationally as a violation of human rights and constitutes an extreme form of discrimination against women.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than 125 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where FGM is concentrated.
“I asked why this information has not been provided in my village,” she said after realising that what is now described as a violation of human rights had occurred to her.
“Whilst in university, I kept on thinking, so and so’s daughter has been married or has been cut . . . I learnt that women are not supposed to be abused and they can own property . . . in my village property belonged to the men, even though my mother took care of everything.”
After earning a Doctorate in Education from the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to her village to build a school, which opened to the public in May 2009.
The Centre for Excellence, a girls’ primary boarding school in Enoosaen, Kenya, seeks to empower and motivate young girls through education to become agents of change and to break the cycle of destructive cultural practices in Kenya, such as female genital mutilation and early forced marriage.
The school serves the area’s most vulnerable and underprivileged girls and currently has an enrolment of 170 students in grades four through eight.
“I started a school at primary level, because that is where our education system lacks.
“When you don’t have that foundation you are locked out of the system,” she says.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the primary school enrolment ratio for girls in Africa is less than that of boys by at least 20 percentage points in about 22 countries.
The dropout rate for girls is also greater than that of boys, and in Kenya, only 20,9 percent of girls make it to high school.
This discrepancy in educational opportunities is problematic because evidence shows that educating girls improves economic growth and health indices and reduces poverty.
The “Hope/ Fay Lecture Series for Gender Equality” aims to increase engagement on issues facing women in Zimbabwe and globally, and an official at the US Embassy said they were eager to bring Ntaiya to Zimbabwe “to inspire others to make a difference in the same way she has in Kenya.
“Her exposure to US education enabled her to study and learn new perspectives and approaches, and brought that education home to make a real difference in her community,” said Rebecca Zeigler Mano, EducationUSA Country Co-ordinator.
Legal activist and Mandela Washington Fellow alumni, Rumbidzai Dube, was the discussant at the lecture.
She encouraged women to be agents of change, noting that her colleagues had resigned their aspirations to fate.
“We can change that as she (Ntaiya) has proved. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort; it takes one person to change the lives of a 1 000 girls. An hour of mentoring a girl child who could have gone the marriage route changes a life completely.”
In addition to speaking at WUA, Ntaiya participated in a fireside chat with Nigel Mugamu of @263Chat, visited out-of-school programmes at Chiedza Childcare Centre and River of Life, spoke at a brown bag gathering of 150 policy analysts and development workers at UNICEF’s Zimbabwe office, and shared a lunch and a breakfast with women’s and child right activists. – ZimPAS © October 7, 2014
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