Africa carries the shame of the highest rate of femicide in the world. In 2023 alone according to a UN report, our beloved continent murdered over 21,000 women just because they are women.
In Kenya, almost 100 women have been killed in just the past three months, according to police records.
Uganda does not fare any better. The 2023 Uganda Police Annual Crime Report revealed that 15,184 people were survivors of Domestic Violence, out of which 10,792 were female. We have also witnessed spates of femicide in the past, with limited action by the government.
I wish I could be allowed the space to detail the horrid tales of every individual reported case of femicide. From blazing Rebecca Cheptegei in gasoline, to torturing, mutilating, raping, kidnapping, strangling, stabbing, and dumping remains of murdered women in garbage pits.
In South Africa, 5.5 women are killed by their intimate partners per 100,000 women. Several South African women have also been raped and killed by Uber drivers recently.
There is a clear pattern in all these femicides across the continent linking deep-seated misogyny to the perpetrators of this genocide against women. Being female in Africa, and in the world, has been, and continues to be a very life-threatening existence. Neither family nor the state seems concerned for the protection of women, as proved by the Kenyan police’s tear-gassing of demonstrators who had been chanting, “Stop killing women” and, “Women have rights, too.”
The police failed to arrest and bring to justice the many men who have killed tens of Kenyan women, but arrested activists demanding justice for the victims.
The Kenyan police cannot even allow a peaceful demonstration to accompany the memories of murdered Kenyan women to their graves.
This can only be understood by linking the state and its coercive apparatuses to the patriarchal social system which it subconsciously aims to preserve and maintain through misogynist violence.
The state is a product of a patriarchal, misogynist society, shaped by ages of masculine domination over women. The state emerged as an instrument of men since men have for long been the most politically dominant gender.
Kenyan women, and indeed all women across Africa ought to tirelessly confront not just femicide but also the state, because it is the umbilical cord feeding the patriarchy that perpetrates femicide.
No wonder there is a poverty of moral outrage against femicide amongst all of us, men. Even in historical struggles such as the anti-slavery movement, some leading male moral radicals against social inequalities ironically discriminated against women.
Women’s oppression can be defeated because it was invented – it is not eternal. It is a social, not biological/ scientific reality. Social fictions are powerful but not immutable.
Even the understanding of femicide as the killing of women and girls based on their gender is a socially adulterated concept because it opaques fundamental forms of gendered harm against women such as sexual violence, denial of rights to property, psychological abuse, etc, which normally donot necessarily kill women.
Femicide should rather be understood within the parameters of genocide and crimes against humanity – because it is a targeted, group-based and ‘widespread’ offence.
The feminist struggle should push for the widest possible protection of women and girls from femicide since it is characterised by several iterations of abuse and violence which the law in most countries overlooks. This can be done while also ensuring sufficient specificity and clarity to distinguish femicide from other clans of human rights violations.
There is also need for women to liberate themselves from the pervasive conventional beliefs and norms which constitute the web of their oppression disguised as their social safety nets – religion and the family.
For centuries, religion has been the most efficient ideological justification for male domination over the female, both in Judeo-Christian-Abrahamic religions and traditional African religions.
As long as women continue to pay homage to these male-created gods and religions, they will remain under the purview of patriarchy and misogyny.
The modern monogamist family is not innocuous either. It is anchored in the disguised domestic enslavement of women.
In majority of the cases, men are the breadwinners of the family, which gives them a dominating position in society, consequently entitling them to special legal privileges.
Men/husbands in the family, as Friedrich Engels would put it, are the bourgeois whereas the women/wives are the proletarians. This is even further entrenched by Capitalism which rewards wages for the labour of men, and overlooks the domestic labour of millions of housewives, yet unpaid domestic work is the fuel on which the labour-power of working men runs.
We cannot look on as femicide endures on and on. The modern society is almost expediently taking the posture of slave owners in the past towards female slaves.
We industrially exploit women when it is profitable to exploit them as if they were men. There, we are blind to their gender. And when, for the sustainability of patriarchy, women are abused in ways personal to their womanhood, we become apathetic, just like the Kenyan state is proving to be.
And it is not just the Kenyan state, because some people may risk making it an African problem. American soldiers in the Vietnam War were instructed to search women with their penises and it was also an unwritten policy of the US Military Command to systematically encourage rape, since it was an extremely effective weapon of mass terrorism.
If not even the modern, democratic state can stand up to protect women from male violence, perhaps the next movement we should advocate for is a gynaecocracy – complete rule by women.