I do not begin with statistics. I begin with blood.
The way it stains the sheets of rented apartments in Nairobi. The way it soaks into the thighs of girls who thought love might be a little less like dying this time. I begin with the name Rita. I begin with the name Scarlet. I do not know them. But I taste them in the back of my throat like prayers I was too afraid to say out loud.
I think about what it means to wake up and read about women’s bodies like they are morning obituaries. I read about 44 women killed every month in this country, and I clench. My mind becomes a fist. My thighs, an archive of tension. I read about mutilation, about heads severed from dreams, and suddenly I can’t sit still in my skin. Femicide is not a headline. It’s the sound of keys clutched between fingers. It’s the way we text each other, “Let me know when you get home.” It’s erotic how fear makes us loyal to each other. Intimacy forged in panic. Sisterhood as survival.
Desire has always been dangerous here. But lately it feels terminal.
A woman meets a man in a rental. She wants pleasure. She gets a blade. The internet blames her body, not his hands. Men say she was looking for money. I say, we were all taught to trade safety for romance. That capitalism made intimacy transactional long before she ever booked a room. And when she died, they whispered her shame louder than her name.
I want to touch this country with my mouth. Taste its contradictions. Lick the patriarchy off its bones. But every time I press my tongue to the skin of Kenya, it tastes like grief.
They say it’s just a few bad men. I say it’s the culture. The silence. The father who tells his daughter to be quiet. The church that tells her to forgive. The police that tell her to prove it. The court that tells her to die more politely next time. Kenya doesn’t have a word for femicide in its law books. But I’ve carved the syllables into my clavicle. Say it. Say it with me: Fe-mi-cide.
I have been mourning for women I never met. And somehow that mourning has made me harder to fuck. I flinch when a man touches my thigh like it’s his. I ache with a rage that is not theoretical. Feminist rage lives in my pelvic floor. It pulses with every news article. Every hashtag. Every protest where we carry placards like we’re carrying tombstones.
#EndFemicideKE is not a slogan. It’s a collective orgasm denied. It’s all the ways we’ve tried to love in a country that does not love us back.
At the January protest, I watched women weep in the streets. I wept too. But it wasn’t sadness. It was feral. It was holy. There’s something orgasmic about righteous anger. We read the names of the dead like we were invoking saints. We marched like our bodies were spells. We wore red. We screamed. We dared the world to look at us.
Men said we were dramatic. But let me tell you something — a man calling you dramatic is just scared that your pleasure might outshine his power.
The government responded with press releases. Promises. Money. A shelter here. A hotline there. President Ruto said he wanted his daughters to be safe. But what about ours? What about the women with no names, no connections, no lawyers? What about the women killed with more passion than they were ever kissed with?
I want a justice system that doesn’t need me to be a corpse to believe me. I want intimacy that doesn’t end in autopsy. I want to be touched without calculating the nearest exit.
I am not just a theorist. I am a wound that studies itself. I am a feminist with a clit full of grief. I am a girl who thought words might save her. I still do. That’s why I write them like this. Wet. Broken. Screaming.
Because sometimes the only way to survive a place that’s trying to kill you is to make your mouth your weapon. Your pleasure, your protest. Your story, your resistance.
And so I tell mine.
Not for closure.
But for the next girl.
Whose blood hasn’t been spilt yet.
Whose name I want to write as something more than an elegy.
A sentence. A song. A future.
Still breathing.
Still here.
There’s something devastating and sacred in the way you refuse distance how you name fear, desire, protest, and sisterhood as things that live in the body. This doesn’t ask to be agreed with. It asks to be felt. And it is.
Men say we’re dramatic. But men are afraid women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid men will kill them.
That is the distance between our fears. That is the imbalance no one wants to name.
Thank you for writing it like this. For the next girl. For the ones we don’t know. For the ones who are still here.
💜