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Granny’s
fist of fury. Image source: nomeansnoworldwide.org
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Cackling
manically, the old woman points at a sheepish young man by her side in a
poorly-lit tin shack in Korogocho, one of the most dangerous slums in Kenya's
capital.
"He wants to sleep with me! He's younger than
my son," she said as a dozen elderly women, sitting on wooden benches
around her, laugh raucously.
Across Nairobi, more than 200 elderly women, aged
up to 105, are learning self defence to protect themselves against rape, which
is widespread in Kenya, particularly in its slums.
Research by the charity Ujamaa, which runs the self
defence programme, shows that one in four women in Korogocho experience sexual
assault.
Reuters report continues:
The 'cucus' or grandmas in the local Kikuyu
language, learn how to poke assailants in the eyes, whack them in the groin
with a walking stick or break their noses with the palm of a hand.
Some of the women are too frail to stand, so
feigning madness and other forms of trickery are often the best weapons.
"You act like you are crazy and you go towards
the attacker," said Jacqueline Mukami, one of the instructors. "You
scare him because this is not the person he expected."
One of the women attending the class was accosted
by a young boy while walking home from her vegetable patch.
"She called at the top of her voice, 'Hey,
Kamau, why are you so far behind and this boy is disturbing me?'" said
Sheila Kariuki, another instructor.
"No man was with her -- she is probably a
widow -- but she was able to save herself."
The twice-weekly classes are supposed to last two
hours, but instructors first gauge their students' energy levels.
"Cucus are like children," said
instructor Irene Wambui Muthoni. "Their memory is very low ... we repeat
each and every day."
GROWING
The programme is expanding, with seven classes
across the city, up from two in 2012.
"It's just growing on its own," said Jake
Sinclair, an American who started the project with his wife, Lee, in 2007 after
hearing horror stories about sexual violence in Korogocho.
Two or three elderly women in the slum were being
raped each month, with some being gang-raped to death, he told the Thomson
Reuters Foundation.
"Boys had crazy ideas that after a robbery,
when they sleep with an old woman, it's like they are cleansed," said
Kariuki, a former resident of Korogocho.
"The young boys would strangle the cucus ...
Every time we went to pick up the corpse of an old woman, my heart used to
bleed."
The success of the cucus programme led to another,
"No Means No Worldwide", which is teaching 130,000 secondary school
students in Nairobi to stop violence against women.
The cucus are also helping to protect young girls.
Mary Njoki Wainaina, 85, collects waste plastics on
a dump site and sells them for recycling, a job she has been doing since her
husband died 30 years ago.
"You can get stopped and pulled into a corner
by some drunk or drugged youth and raped," she said, wearing an
ankle-length black and orange dress, and a blue headscarf.
She has been attending the class for four years and
shares her knowledge with her five-year-old granddaughter, who she lives with.
"I tell her, 'Do not be bought sugar because
you are going to pay for it with something else which will be bad," she
said.
"I can look at a person and tell if they have
a bad intention. There is no one who can threaten me."
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