The Woman with a Knife in Her Head
Wanjeri Nderu and Nanjala Nyabola
“I will kill you!”
On the evening of 6th January 2016, 32 year old Fatuma Abdullahi was stabbed 7 times by her husband, Mohammed Warmojee, adding 7 new puncture wounds to the litany of scars on her body that bore witness to a brutal life with him. By this date, Fatuma had already lost all of her upper teeth to beatings. Everything about her demeanour — from the deep worry lines, to the small fragile frame, to the sunken dark eyes — is a testament to the hardship that she has suffered. But from that day forward, Fatuma would be known for the last of these physical wounds — the last jab of the Somali sword that lodged a 10 inch blade underneath one of her cheekbones, through her face, and into the cheekbone on the other side.
Fatuma would report that Warmojee did in fact, try repeatedly to dislodge the blade and continue his assault. “I will kill you!” he shouted, each time he raised the blade and punctured her frail body. But some miraculous twist of fate, the blade would wedge itself tightly in her maxillofacial bones and neither sever any of her major blood vessels nor budge. Although the pictures are grotesque, Fatuma’s life was saved by the fact that she had a 10 inch blade wedged in her skull. But she very nearly didn’t, in great part because of who she is — a Kenyan woman of Somali heritage.
Domestic Violence in Kenya
It is easy to think of cases like this as an outlier, but in fact, domestic violence and violence against women is painfully prevalent in Kenya. According to the 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey approximately 25% of women across all age, wealth, and geographic distributions who have ever been married have endured physical violence by their partner, rising to a startling 42.6% for women aged between 40 and 49. And while the statistics for North Eastern Kenya in the same survey only go to 12.1%, it should be noted that this is the most geographically remote part of the country, with the lowest rates of education — particularly for women — and with the highest levels of mistrust of authority owing to historical factors. Violence rates in the region may be grossly under-reported in this survey.
Consider Fatuma, a resident of Wajir County in North Eastern Kenya. At 32, she is a mother of four but she cannot speak either of Kenya’s official languages — English and Kiswahili — both of which are almost exclusively taught in schools, and thus fluency in either is a fairly accurate predictor of the level of education that the speaker has received. And even though her body told a harrowing story of repeated, systemic violence, this was the first time she came into contact with officialdom as a result. Cases like Fatuma’s, or Khadija’s only 5 months prior — a 16 year old girl married to a 40 year old man who doused her in boiling water and then hid her in their home for four days — are under-reported, under-investigated and therefore silenced in the national conversation on women’s rights. So we really don’t know what the incidence of domestic violence is in North Eastern Kenya.
Crisis of crises
And even if we did, what then? In the aftermath of Fatuma’s case, we personally scrambled making calls to various women’s rights organizations to try and arrange some kind of safe house accommodation for Fatuma so that she could think through her options and receive some kind of counseling in the aftermath of this traumatic ordeal. To call the experience disappointing would be an understatement. Three of the country’s leading women’s rights organizations told us that owing to budget cuts and lack of funding, they were not only unable to provide access to their safe houses, but they did not even have a case worker that they could assign to make sure that Fatuma was safe. Fatuma and many women like her are not only victims of violence from their own partners, but also of the yawning gap in funding for women’s rights organizations in Kenya.
It should shock the national conscience that in the same month that the details of the massive Eurobond scandal were made public, not a single women’s rights organization in the capital city had the financial wherewithal to assist a woman who was found with a 10 inch blade lodged in her face. According to the Treasury, 250 billion shillings was raised through the Eurobond, which was supposed to go towards infrastructural projects — much of which is allegedly misappropriated. Only a fraction of this amount would successfully run a single shelter over an entire year.
Indeed, the consequences of Kenya’s financial mismanagement had an even more direct impact on the level of care that Fatuma was able to receive even in Wajir. The procedure to dislodge the knife from Fatuma’s face was a relatively simple one, but it could not be done until Fatuma was in Nairobi at the Kenyatta National Hospital — the largest hospital in the country. It could not be done in Wajir because on the day that Fatuma was taken to hospital, there were no doctors at the Wajir county hospital, and nurses are not allowed to perform surgeries. The doctors were allegedly in Nairobi for a training conference.
Wajir County’s healthcare system has been battered by the confluence of terrorism and mismanaged devolution. The devolution process kicked off by the 2010 constitution ceded a number of national functions to the county level, including healthcare management, but it did not take into account that some counties were better set up to manage these functions than others. There have been nationwide strikes by healthcare workers over the mismanaged process that has left them underpaid as wage allocations were lost to corruption, and working in hospitals that often did not have paracetamol, never mind higher level pain killers required for surgery. As a result of these and other factors, activists found Fatuma lying in her hospital bed in Wajir - with the 10 inch blade still sticking out of her cheek after two days - waiting to die, even though she could easily have been saved.
And when the African Medical Rescue Fund (AMREF) air services did agree to fly Khadija to Nairobi, they encountered yet another stumbling block that was nearly fatal. Internal regulations do not permit AMREF to fly individuals who do not have identity documents. Fatuma, a 32 year old Kenyan woman did not possess a single identity document. To understand the implications of this, it is important to understand what an ID represents in Kenya. An adult cannot enter most government buildings without proof of identity. You can’t vote. You can’t own a mobile phone because all mobile phones must be registered — using an identity card. You cannot access formal financial services, including microfinance. You can’t fly domestically or buy a long distance bus ticket. You can’t get a tax PIN number which means you cannot be employed in the formal sector. You cannot register for adult literacy classes. Adult life without an identity card in Kenya is barely a life at all.
In Kenya, identity cards are constitutionally mandated. Similarly, Kenya is a signatory to many international instruments that affirm a right to a legal personality. This means that government officials cannot deny any citizen who seeks it an identity card. And yet Kenyans of Somali origin have been routinely denied identity cards since independence in the name of security, as the central government has accused generation after generation of not being Kenyan enough. And, although it is not an offence under law to not have an ID card, security forces across the country harass and often illegally detain people who cannot produce an ID card when it is demanded.
When news of Fatuma’s case reached Nairobi, doctors at AMREF rushed to organize a medical air rescue for her, but were met with an unexpected roadblock. Fatuma did not have an identity card and thus her details could not be registered. We should be concerned that adult, whose family has lived in the same region of the country for generations did not have any form of government issued identification, where government issued identification is so fundamental to the vagaries of life.
Violence breeds violence
Fatuma Abdullahi is going to live a normal life, thanks to the timely intervention of activists and local politicians like area MP Abdikadir Ore who intervened on her behalf. However, recalling that you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable, this shocking episode is a painful lesson in the many ways in which the erosion of state systems puts women’s lives at great risk. And without in any way excusing his actions, it also raises questions about the pathological violence Warmojee himself has endured to normalize his brutality against his own wife. Egregious violence against women is the canary in a coalmine of a state crushing its citizens under the spectre of systemized violence.
The woman with the knife in her head is telling us that something is wrong with the system.
