“We must ignite feminist fires everywhere” – Kavinya Makau (Kenya) – 2/3

Fierce and fiery: Meet Kavinya Makau, a feminist human rights lawyer from Kenya.

My conversation with Kenyan human rights lawyer Kavinya Makau is just getting better and better! After narrating her journey to feminism, Kavinya now explains what feminism means to her and how she goes about living by her values every day.

[Just so you know: (*) I am using “womxn” as a more inclusive alternative spelling of "woman"/"women", which includes trans and nonbinary folks. Also, this interview was edited for clarity and brevity.]

You told me how important it is for you to claim the feminism label and wear it with pride, but we haven’t yet discussed what the word means to you. So, tell me: how do you define feminism?

Feminism for me is about challenging the unequal power relations that perpetuate discrimination against girls and womxn in their diversities. That means understanding power and deconstructing it actively. For those of us who are human rights professionals or womxn's rights professionals, this is what we're doing at work on a daily basis.

But it has to go beyond that, beyond the professional context. You know the famous tag: the personal is political? Feminism is also about your daily interactions. It's something that you live by, not just something that you're dealing with in boardrooms or in the context of your research, or whatever situations present themselves in the workplace.

It is challenging patriarchal norms, standards and practices – both in your personal and your professional life. It is also about allyship and solidarity with progressive social justice movements that are also questioning and addressing oppressive power structures and systems.

Feminism is also about your daily interactions.

I completely share your views about feminism being something that you live by in your daily life. Can you share some of the ways that you systematically and consciously do so?

Conversations about sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are a good example. As a feminist, I believe in comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights for all girls and womxn. And I mean the whole gamut. I have noticed that people are comfortable with you talking about SRHR when you’re advocating for affordable or free healthcare so that girls and women can access maternity care. But when you start talking about safe abortion care services for example, people become very uncomfortable.

There have been a lot of conversations about SRHR within the human rights space and the women's rights movement here in Kenya. I've taken a step further by having conversations with people in my extended family. My relatives are Christians with strong views which they are vocal about. I have conversations with them, difficult as it may be, around why it's important for girls and womxn to have access to safe abortion care services for instance. I talk about what it means in terms of our maternal mortality and morbidity indicators, and how we shouldn't blindly moralize this conversation without due regard to our contextual realities and girls’ and womxn’s bodily autonomy and rights.

Why was it important for you to bring these tough conversations home?

It’s fine to have these conversations with feminist sisters or human rights activists, but this is part of a much broader social conversation. The country is clearly divided on the issue, but if we can’t discuss controversial topics with relatives and friends outside of boardrooms and policy spaces, then we're not going to change the narrative. As a feminist, you have to consistently challenge everyday patriarchal views and norms in your own homes and in your personal relationships alongside advocacy with policymakers.

Do you get a lot of backlash? And if so, what does that backlash look like and how do you deal with it?

Let's just say that when it comes to close family and friends, we have a policy: we are all vocal individuals with strong views, but we agree to disagree. We remain family. I'm privileged in that sense, to have family and friends that I can have difficult conversations with without impacting on our relationship. 

When I started doing this work, people questioned why, in the whole spectrum of human rights issues, I would choose to also deal with the most controversial ones. People thought: “you're young, you're idealistic, maybe it's a phase you're going through.” But I’ve always been clear that my view as a feminist and a human rights defender is that there is no hierarchy of rights.

A lot of people, including family and friends, did not understand this – they thought I was going to destroy my career. I’ve had to have countless conversations around why it is that I do this work. Why I believe in it so much. Why it is important for me to be consistent as a feminist and a human rights defender. And over time, they've come to understand that this is not a phase that I'm going through. Nothing has happened to me. I am thriving. I think it's just that consistency, you know? People they see that you actually believe wholeheartedly in what you’re doing and that you live by the values you’re preaching. Then they come around, or at least they agree to disagree.

If we can’t discuss controversial topics with relatives and friends outside of boardrooms and policy spaces, then we're not going to change the narrative.

Let’s talk about how backlash plays out beyond our family circles – say, online. I wasn’t spending much time on social media before launching Eyala, and maybe that’s why I can’t get over all feminists have to put up with every time they express their views on anything. It hasn’t yet happened to me on a large scale, but every time a feminist sister becomes a target, I feel attacked as well. And I wonder how far behind this is going to push us. Any thoughts?

You and I have been part of this movement for a long time, and there are certainly things that we have made so many advances on right? But we’ve also seen a reversal of gains. Online and offline, we find ourselves having or repeating conversations that we shouldn’t be having in 2020! Conversations around safe abortion care services in Kenya for example, or a pregnant teen’s right to school in Tanzania. Just when you think you have achieved something, something else comes up. With social media, the frontiers of abuse have shifted, and now social media will be used against you in so many ways to intimidate you.

So yes, patriarchy is constantly reinventing itself. There will constantly be new threats. We have to be prepared for them, and we need numbers to deal with this. Movements are about numbers, right?

What I mean is, fighting the patriarchy is exhausting so we’ll need everyone we can get. And also, we need to bring in a variety of actors who will deal with these threats long after we are gone; continuity is important. This is why I believe that we must ignite feminist fires everywhere and in as many people as possible.

At that point in the conversation, my neck was hurting from nodding so hard. But Kavinya was not done preaching! She shared some brilliant advice in the final part of the interview about how to deal with that gnawing feeling that we, as feminists, often have: the feeling that we are not doing enough. Read it now!

Join the conversation!

Does Kavinya’s definition of feminism resonate with you? Let us know in the comments below, or let’s chat on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram @EyalaBlog.

Want to connect with Kavinya? Follow her on Twitter @kaviemakau.