Kate Copstick: Tribal cleansing in Kenya continues stealthily – still unreported

In yesterday’s blog, I ran three edited extracts from journalist Kate Copstick‘s diary. She is currently working with her Mama Biashara charity in Kenya. The story continues in these edited extracts from her diary, which she has been posting on her Facebook page.

Tuesday 21st November

Still no news from Oliver. Doris is now linked into several groups on WhatsApp, trying to help mothers and wives find their missing boys. All young men. Bodies are turning up in far-flung hospital morgues. Beaten men are being dumped by roadsides far from their homes. This is ethnic (well, tribal) cleansing by stealth. But no mention in the press …

And, if this is how it is in Nairobi, then out in the villages…

We need to find a way to get the displaced women out of Kisii county. Farm lorries seem to be the best way. VIcky is still up there but treading very carefully. She now has some help from villagers and farmers who have no problem in helping the refugees. The plan is to pay one of the big farm lorries to ferry them out in smaller groups.

I hear that half a dozen houses were torched in Kibera last night. I recount our tale of Oliver. No one looks hopeful. I tell about the bodies dumped. There is a lot of nodding. “That is what they do,” says Mwangi. Everyone has a tale of young men being ‘disappeared’ in the night.

Wednesday 22nd November

The mothers’ group is up and running. We start to think about a name for the rescue house when it opens in January. The women are – in stark contrast to how they were at our first meeting – nothing if not to the point.

STOP RAPE is the most popular suggestion. STOP MEN RAPING is another. I suggest it might be slightly in yer face. And point out, jokingly, that these “Kill All Men” titles are not always helpful. They actually quite like KILL ALL MEN, especially when I mention T-shirts.

Doris appears. Nothing from Oliver but she is in a bad way, having just spent the morning miles away in a place called Tigoni, with a group of mothers also looking for their disappeared sons.

The network of mums (now numbering about 46 in Nairobi alone and centred on Mama Biashara as a point of communication) does internal alerts whenever a body turns up, wherever it is. And mums go.

If they find their man alive or dead, his name is taken off the list of the missing.

None of these alerts is ever, ever made by the hospital. The young men are dumped on them in the night. If they do have ID, the hospitals (so the group have been told) have been instructed to destroy the ID. So only mothers and sisters and wives and friends can identify them, as long as they are prepared to search.

This morning, there was just a badly beaten body to identify. And Doris was there to take care of the distraught mother. This young lad was a student at a technical college on his way home. Taken with two friends. They are yet to be found.

Jayne calls (from Awendo). She has been going to KIsumu to visit a boy in hospital. The matatu she is in has been hijacked on the way and now she has nothing but her phone which she hid when the hijackers took everything from everyone. I send her the money to get home.

Thursday 23rd November

Doris says her friend in the horrendously abusive relationship has been much enlightened by my info on BDSM.

Now she knows what’s what she is keen to take my advice to get out. Especially as the latest news is that he has bought a state-of-the-art knife sharpener and has applied for a gun licence. Easier said than done in a society where:

1. the man can do no wrong, only the woman can fail in a marriage and

2. her family is toxic with Christianity and will probably explode at the mention of anything sexual. Especially extreme bondage and the kind of demeaning shit this monster is into. But she is going to talk to her parents and try to rouse the family group behind her.

Still no sign of Oliver.

His auntie/guardian (Oliver is an orphan) is now in on the search.

Friday 24th November

The poor abused woman with the psycho husband has moved out and is with her parents, where he will not dare reach her.

I bring her up to speed on the child rape rescue centre project and ask if she can think of a name. I want something hard-hitting. Punchy. Says it as it is.

Swahili is not the greatest language for saying it as it is in a punchy way.

“I know what you want, Copi” says Doris. “But you must not…”

“Not what?” I ask, girlishly.

“Call it something like TOMBE TOMBE BABA MBAYA” she says.

I am convulsed with a mixture of hysterical laughter and out-and-out admiration for Doris’ brilliance.

It scans… It trips off the tongue… It says it like it is…

It translates roughly as FUCK FUCK BAD DADDY.

Oh how I wish…

I am hearing the Christmas single… seeing the crowds chanting our name…

If only…

She then suggests I name it after Daddy Copstick. Don’t think I had not thought of that, but BIG BOB’S HOME FOR THE REPEATEDLY DEFILED is not a name I see gaining popularity.

I get brought up to speed with the whole ‘disappeared’ saga.

We have found another young man. Doris has spoken to him (in case he knows Oliver) and he says he was taken in a group of three by men who appeared out of nowhere (again, in Huruma) and identified themselves as police.

The boys were bundled into a van. There were many more boys in the van. The boy offered up his ID but the men tore it up in front of him. The captives had sacks over their heads. They were taken to somewhere unknown and beaten to within an inch of their lives. Or further.

The boy does not remember how long they were there. But then they were divided up and dumped in various outlying locations – some alive and some dead.

The boy woke up in a hospital about three hours from Nairobi where he pretended he could not speak because everyone there was speaking Kikkuyu and he did not want to give himself away as a Luo and face a repeat of what he had just been through.

He watched and waited and said he was treated very well. Finally, a cleaner came in the night and let him use her phone. He alerted his parents. He is now unable to walk properly but alive and safe.

And then something amazing happens.

Doris gets a call.

Oliver’s mother has been contacted by someone saying they think they know where he is. They are waiting for another phone call. He is in some sort of a retreat for pastors and priests outside Sultan Hamoud – which is about a third of the way to Mombasa. Two and a half hours without traffic.

And he is alive. Injured but alive.

The mother is already on her way there.

Saturday 25th November

I awake to a dozen messages on my phone.

The mum had reached the place where Oliver was but the men there were terrified to let him go with her. Doris persuaded her uncle to drive her to the place, getting there about four in the morning. The men running the retreat knew only that Oliver had been dumped on their doorstep in the middle of the night and that, twice since then, a group of men has arrived, demanded entrance and asked if there is a boy here who arrived at night.

The men say they are going to tell the enquirers, if they come back, that Oliver just escaped. He was badly bashed about head, severe wounds on his back where he was beaten and an injury to his leg. He says the men in the retreat treated him really well, but just kept him secluded and never told him where he was.

The men in the retreat, says Doris, seemed more frightened than Oliver.

Anyway, Oliver and his family are off back to his home area now. Doris says he just cried and cried all the way back to Nairobi. HIs mother is planning a ‘cleansing’ ceremony when they get home. For whatever good that will do.

In more good news, the first 20 women have left Kisii en route to their new life. This is all wrapping up rather well.

We discuss names. Gotta have a name.

I mention something Doris suggested the other night. And Joan loves it. So, for the time being, we have the working title :

BRAVEHEARTS – MAMAS FIGHTING RAPE

If anyone can do better, I would love to hear. Acronyms are good.

Though I still like TOMBE TOMBE BABA MBAYA.

Kate Copstick in Kenya: “There is an odd failure to report this in the papers.”

Journalist Kate Copstick is currently in Kenya working with her Mama Biashara charity, which gives small sums of money and advice to poor people so they can set up their own small, self-sustaining businesses which will allow them to help themselves out of poverty.

Mama Biashara’s slogan is:

A HAND UP, NOT A HAND OUT.

Copstick and Mama Biashara make no money from this and 100% of all money donated to the charity is used for the charity’s work. Copstick works for free, receives no money herself and covers 100% of her own costs.

She keeps a diary which she posts in full, when possible, on her Facebook page. These three (edited) extracts from last weekend give, I think, a fair idea of the background within which Copstick and Mama Biashara have to work.

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Friday 17th November

Doris calls with news from Kisii. Yes, we are STILL trying to find a way to help the women hiding out in Kisii County (as mentioned in previous blogs/diary extracts).

Good News: between Vicky and themselves, they have found some farmers and villagers who are not tribalist to the point of violent criminal insanity and who will give them jobs. That is about thirty of them with at least a life-raft to cling to.

Bad News: there is a something between a gang and a sect with absolutely the worst aspects of each which operates in Kisii. They are called the Chinkororo. They rule the place. They arrived in one of the decent, helpful villages a couple of days ago, called everyone together, pointed at a random woman in the crowd, declared her to be a witch, doused her in petrol and set her on fire. While everyone watched. Pour décourager les autres, one assumes. If, say, a screaming, terrified child tried to run away or even look away, one of the gang would hold its head and force it to watch. Until the woman died screaming and squirming.

Vicky was sent this on a smartphone video.

Doris saw it and is still traumatised. Doris is not traumatised easily.

There are a lot of silences in our phone call.

Then I get a call from Joan, wondering where I am.

“Still sick?” She worries. “It can be malaria.”

She has some good news, though. Earlier in the week she had called me about a girl – just newly eleven years old, raped when she was 10 and now pregnant. She wanted to know if we could find a doctor to give the girl what is generally referred to here as a ‘wash and blow-dry’. The wonderful… er… hairdresser… who had helped some very young girls for us before has moved to Turkana but it seems Joan found one herself. The girl is now great, and currently home with her mother.

We are getting increasingly worried about Oliver, the marvellous Mobile Phone Whisperer who was going to spearhead our training of young women in mobile phone repair. I had asked that he come to Nairobi to meet with me so we could discuss things properly. Despite all warnings from Vixen and Doris, he went to stay with some friends in Huruma – a scary place at the best of times but, with all the political nastiness still happening, now properly dangerous.

We heard, via Vixen, that, in a night of the kind of ethnic cleansing that happens in places like that at times like this, Oliver had been beaten up while trying to leave the slum. Oliver is Luo. That is all that it takes to get you beaten up. Or worse. He went into hiding and has not been heard from since. It is a nightmare. Huruma is not the kind of place you go wandering around looking for a lost mate.

Doris wants to come over and pick up some headed letter stuff that I set up so we could give people letters of recommendation. Vixen has found jobs for about twenty women in a resort in Malindi and it looks like this could be the start of an ongoing relationship with the owner, who knows the backgrounds of our ladies and is happy to give them a chance, a good training (hotel and kitchen staff) and a really good salary. But he wants a letter of recommendation. Kenyans LOVE letters, certificates… anything on paper.

Plus Doris wants to talk.

Saturday 18th November

There is still no sign of Oliver, but what is emerging is a huge community of mums and wives who are searching for young men who have simply disappeared across areas like Huruma and Mathare. Every other day a body will turn up in some place far away, the other side of Nairobi and a flurry of hope/dread will stir. So far, no Oliver.

Luos are being kicked out of Kenol (on the outskirts of Nairobi), says Doris. They just get a visitor in the night who tells them to go or suffer the consequences.

Kabiria (where Joan lives) is on a knife edge.

Kawangware has sporadic outbursts of what can only be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Things are not happy.

But there is an odd failure to report any of this in the papers.

I think if people were really looking, they would find that just as many people are being killed now as were killed in the 2008 riots. It is just being managed more carefully this time. Kept sporadic, geographically spaced out. Just young men disappearing from slum areas… who just happen to be Luo. The sixty odd in Kisii who disappeared while Vicky has been up there have not reappeared. People are now looking for a mass grave.

Sunday 19th November

Talking to Doris again I remember that I never DID tell you what she wanted to talk about on Friday.

We have been approached about all manner of domestic and sexual abuse. But nothing like this case. And it is all the fault of UK Kink.

Precis: middle class Kenyan (male), presumably a massive bully, physically and emotionally. Goes to Oxford. Discovers BDSM. Totally perverts it to cover and give a modicum of imagination and sophistication to his own bullying tendencies. Marries a sweet Kenyan virgin. And lives a 24/7 full-on BDSM existence. She is abused physically and mentally.

We are talking to the extent that, before he leaves in the morning, he ‘marks’ her by pissing on her and she is not allowed to wash it off. Oh yes. Because she was so innocent when he married her and is so controlled by him, she thinks this happens in all marriages.

Only now, because he left his browser open and she saw some of the pages he likes, she has she begun to realise what is happening is not normal.

On behalf of BDSM fans everywhere, I am outraged at what this man is doing. I give Doris a gallop through the basics of BDSM, garnished with personal anecdotes and heavy on consent. It takes a lot to gobsmack Doris but gobsmacked she is. Utterly.

We are going to meet up with this woman and see how she wants to proceed. I am thinking a day in a dungeon with the CopMistress and no safe word.

Great news from Brian. Mama Biashara’s Special Condiment has been VERY popular with the ladies of Homa Bay. A refuge for abused girls was suffering regular break ins by state police who would stop off on their way from the pub for a quick rape of some already abused and vulnerable girls. A full face of Mama Biashara’s Condiment is a surefire way to distract a man from any planned action in the jap’s eye area to the searing agony in his other eyes. Production is underway, so that all the women can be safe. Well, safer.

… CONTINUED HERE …

Multiple rape and desperation in Kenya and an appeal from critic Kate Copstick

Following on from my previous blog – more extracts from comedy critic Kate Copstick’s diary, slightly edited. Full versions on her Facebook page. She is in Kenya where her Mama Biashara charity is based.

Mama Biashara (‘Business Mother’) gives small sums to impoverished individuals and small groups to help them start self-supporting small businesses.

Their slogan is that it is a hand up not a hand out.

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Doris, one of Mama Bishara’s main workers

Saturday 4th November

I get a call from Doris who has had a call from Vicky to say that the farmers who own the land in Kisii, where the refugees are huddled, have let it be known that, if anyone brings any form of help to the refugee community, all hell will break loose (I loosely translate from the angry Kisii).

So we are holding off on our mercy mission. David and I cancel our trip to the Indian Blanket Supremo and the medical supplies wholesaler. I head straight to the market.

Doris also tells me that, overnight, the government has pulled a U-turn on the NHIF restriction (mentioned in the previous blog). It will now continue unrestricted. I am saying nothing. But am impressed with the swiftness of the reaction. It is the right decision.

Doris has gone out to Limuru to see a group of people she is desperate to help. They are currently working for £1 per day on a big tea farm. They are wholly uneducated, helpless, hopeless people. Too frightened even to try starting a business in case they are thrown out and lose their £1 per day. They want us “to empower them” says Doris.

The Mama Biashara method of a brisk talking-to, a decent business plan, a good chain of supply and a useful choice of business location, topped off with start up grant and a hearty hug is obviously not going to work here. Doris says she will update me.

I get round the market in about four hours. I am knackered and sore and my tiny ears are ringing to the cries of “Mama Biashara! You are my Mother! Promote me!” I can only disappoint so many people in a day without breaking.

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Felista needs money for a non-underwater kitchen in Nairobi

Sunday 5th November

I am going to DECIP (the home for children that Mama Biashara built) to make some little videos to put up on Facebook in the hope of getting some money for Felista. She is a woman with a heart the size of Kenya and has been rescuing kids from abandonment, abuse, rape and destitution for a decade.

Mama Biashara sends her about £170 per month. She gets nothing from the government, although the Children’s Department are very supportive. She is the reason I am in Kenya and I often feel bad, as I hare off all over the country setting up businesses for the desperate poor, that I do not do more for her.

So we are going to put out some pleas for help for her and I will set up a MyDonate page for her. She is someone who infuriates me but whom I am so very proud to know.

I have brought her some shoes, a bag, a skirt and two tops. Felista almost never gets anything for herself. Even the one room in the home that should be hers is always full of the youngest children playing and looking for a cuddle.

DECIP has had improvements. A marvellous lady paid for the dormitories to be re-floored so the water doesn’t flood them any more, the passageway from dorm to dorm is now covered over and the water from the roof harvested, many places have new roofing, and a nice rich Chinese man is going to build a big hall for them to use for exams and recreation.

At this time it is proving really difficult to help people – because of the numbers of weapon-wielding other people in the way. So I am going to concentrate more on DECIP this trip. And see what we can do there.

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Some of the needy children at DECIP in Nairobi

Monday 6th November

I suddenly start to feel decidedly not OK. Just the usual crap, but that tends to mean getting horizontal and trying to sleep it out.

That not being possible, I turn to the small packet of gifts from our newest volunteer Chris.

There are few things that can go wrong with the human body that have not gone wrong with Chris.

There is absolutely no upside for her. But for me, it means that any painkiller is available. And I have with me a selection of the finest. I curl up till all is made chemically well.

Now I have a meeting with Joan. Through her we have worked quite extensively with the albino community and with groups of women with badly disabled kids. The businesses we started with the mothers are doing really well in Kibera, apparently. I will go and visit. Joan’s main work is with child victims of sexual violence.

When we last met she was in a little house in Kabira with six small girls who had been raped and one older girl, mentally and physically challenged, and also a victim of rape. I wrote about them on my last trip.

During the endless, tit for tat, post and para election violences here, a group of militant kikkuyu took it upon themselves to attack the compound where Joan was sheltering the girls. All of them were beaten – from the two-and-a-half year old rape victim to Joan herself. Everyone ran. But Susan, the big girl, was too frightened and she hid. And was discovered. And was beaten and raped again. Everything was stolen from inside Joan’s house.

The men from the compound caught the rapist. They took him to the local police station (well, the one that had not been burned down). Where he was released because the police did not want the militants to come and burn down their police station too.

The girls are now with Joan’s aunt but that cannot continue. She is looking at places in Ngando and has been offered a four bedroom, stone built, self-contained house beside the Catholic church. Great security.

What I am thinking is that Mama Biashara can help pay the rent here, we will help set it up as soon as we can and we will support it as a Mama Biashara project for victims of child rape and sexual abuse.

All of the current group of victims are the children of women who do low-rent commercial sex work. The girls are locked in the house while the mothers go out at night. Which is why they are so vulnerable to passing rapists. Mama Biashara would – as part of this project – work with the mums and set them up in a decent small business so they can give their daughters a proper secure home.

I am hugely enthused about this and we are going to see the house tomorrow.

Anyone fancy taking money out of their offshore tax haven and using it to help these kids?

You can now uncross your fingers about the money from the lovely trust who helped us before. We did not get anything. They are concentrating on more formal, UK-based charities. Pretty devastating for Mama Biashara. And it means, short of a miracle, I will be cutting my trip here a bit short.

Going to my tent now.

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Mama Biashara subsists solely on donations and from sales at its London shop. Copstick covers 100% of her own costs, including flights and accommodation and takes zero. 100% of all donations go to the charity’s work. You can donate HERE

Comedy critic Kate Copstick in Kenya: charity, child rape, schools, tribalism

Continuing on from yesterday’s blog, more edited diary extracts from Kate Copstick in Kenya, working for her Mama Biashara charity… The full diaries are on her Facebook page.

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Doris, one of Mama Bishara’s main workers

WEDNESDAY

Doris is in the High Court this morning, taking her rat of an ex-husband for some support for the kids. He has never given a penny. David is both disapproving and skeptical: “This is Kenya. This cannot happen.”

I have finally reached Jayne in Awendo. I get a texted wish list that includes nail polishes, sanitary pads, perm curlers, school shoes and sundry other needs. She also, she says, ‘needs to talk’ about my finding her a sponsor for the school. This is such old ground. She knows I was against the school in the first place.

Schools are simply unsustainable without a hugely and eternally generous donor. She educates the poorest and the neediest in mud huts her husband built and it is all great but then she also insists on a Graduation Day for the tinies where they spend money they do not have on bloody mini mortarboards and diddy gowns.

Mama Biashara just cannot get involved in schooling.

However anyone out there who would like to take one on…

I get the same from Felista.

Actually my very dear old (not that old) school friend Rachel has just sent Felista a wedge of money to help pay for the teachers in her school at DECIP. Felista was ecstatic. I don’t think either Jayne or Felista has ever met a child she couldn’t love. Having said which, Felista is currently struggling with some of the kids brought to her from Awendo.

“Eh, the Ruos!” she says. “Crazy people!”

The Luo tribe and the Kikkuyu are a bit like Rangers and Celtic Football Clubs in Glasgow.

“We have a beeeeeg girl at DECIP, and she is a Rrrruo and she dances nikid. NIKID! And she is beeeeeg!”

Felista, stalwart Mama Biashara co-worker with Copstick

Felista doing an impression of a naked, plump, large-breasted Luo sixteen year old “dancing nikid” is something that will live with me for a long time.

“She says it is her culture,” Felista tells me, screwing up her face. “THIS is not culture. To dance nikid.”

We head out and plunge into the gooey, smelly, crazy mess that is Gikomba market. I get a load of sanitary towels at a wee wholesalers and we decide to make for River Road to get started on Jayne’s list. It does not go particularly well. The traffic is solid. When the jams are like this, there are small crashes and broken down cars and trucks every few hundred yards, creating a jam within a jam. It takes an hour and a quarter to make what should be a ten minute journey.

I hurtle up and down River Road (on foot. There is no hurtling anywhere in a car). The big cosmetic wholesaler is rammed. I am all for physical contact but this is crazy. Sweaty. And deeply unpleasant.

As I fight my way up to the back where the nail polishes are stacked I am horrified to see two fully armed soldiers: flack jackets, helmets and AK47s. It is a bloody cosmetic shop!! Maybe they are expecting a jihad against vain, non-burka-wearing women? But with the push and pull of the crowd we are one wrong finger away from nastiness.

I get Jayne’s stuff and leave. Next, I search for wool. Nada. I give up and we go back to Gikomba where, as darkness falls, we get school shoes for Jayne’s orphans, some great scarves, I have a spirited conversation in German with a Kenyan lady ‘ho’ who had lived in Stuttgart for fifteen years. We drew quite the crowd. My giving her my phone number in German practically gets an applause break.

I buy a great watch for £1 and we eat absolutely the finest and most delicious chicken innards ever, grilled to crispy on the outside and served with a red hot salsa from some boys with a grill in the middle of the mud patch that is now New Pumwani Road.

Sorry veggies and vegans, the sight would have appalled you, but at least the Kenyans eat everything from a dead animal. On the grill were liver and heart combos, neck, gizzard, wiggly intestiney bits, feet…

The man from the little kiosk where I sometimes buy milk greets me like a long lost friend. I told him my Kikkuyu name (Nyaguthie, whch means ‘Let’s go’ or ‘Keep going’) and he uses it at every opportunity. He introduces me to his mates and I am almost immediately proposed to. I politely decline. They want to know if I have a husband at home.

“No,” I say. “No husband.”

“Eh! Unachelewa!” exclaims my wannabe hubby. “You are late !!”

Copstick (left) working for her Mama Biashara in Kenya

THURSDAY

I may have mentioned that the ‘roadworks’ have made the journey to and from home an absolute nightmare. With a vast detour necessary through the grimier parts of Gikomba and surrounding areas.

I had noticed, as we squeezed the car through a gap, a young girl selling sugar cane juice so, as we pass this morning, I tell David to stop while I buy some.

As I leave the car I feel the front wheel of a pikipiki collide with my leg. This particular tiny rat run is beloved of the pikipiki boys.

I turn and rip into him, channeling Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, I roar: “I’m walking here!!”

The pikipiki boy is so gobsmacked he apologises while his colleagues hoot with laughter.

I am meeting Joan to give her a bag of sunscreen for her albino group in Kibera and a load of HTC’s Cod Liver Oil and Kids’ Fish Oil.

“This is life” nods Felista, who has joined us for lunch.

“It is” agrees Joan.

The little hut we built for Dan and Joan’s disabled therapy group has been demolished to make way for more soldiers to camp out at the Kibera DC’s office. There is an election looming and Kibera is always a hotspot. But Joan has all the stuff with her at her new house. So it will be built again. She had to move because a lot of the work she and Dan do is with sexually abused children.

The men, generally, are immediately released on police bail (if caught). And the Kibera courts are notorious for saying “Men will be men” and letting perpetrators off with a small fine to rape again.

So Joan and Dan get a LOT of threats.

Dan gives me their current file which includes a girl, now in Nairobi Women’s Hospital with seventeen stitches holding her together, raped by her stepfather… a trio of three and four year olds, one of whom cannot leave her room because, if she sees a man, she just starts screaming “No! No! No! No! No!”… some six and seven year olds raped by uncles… and a girl of twelve who is six months pregnant by her next door neighbour.

Child rape is endemic here, with Kibera and Kawangware seeming to be particularly bad.

“Luhya and Kisii men,” says Joan.

“Luo men,” says Felista.

Joan says nothing, Joan is Luo. She currently has four raped girls staying with her because they are not safe around their own families and there is nowhere else for them to go.

At Corner we meet Andy again. He has been chasing green stone for building and has just returned from Juja. We drink beer, eat stewed goat and then politics rears its ugly head.

David is 100% Kikkuyu. If a pile of shit in a bag stood for president, as long as it was Kikkuyu shit, he would vote for it.

Andy is so horrified by David’s refusal to acknowledge that President Uhuru Kenyatta has basically sold Kenya to the Chinese to get a railway and some decent roads to his credit that he will not even shake hands with him as we part.

David hoots with laughter.