I remember speaking to my mother about a mjengo site I’d worked at, how uneasy I felt watching the way young girls selling chai na chapati were looked at—not as daughters or workers, but as offerings. She didn’t flinch. She only nodded, as if memory had just slipped into the room. “It was the same in Mathare,” she said. “And Kariobangi. I’d walk from estate to estate with my bucket of simsim na njugu, and men would ask what else I was selling.” She said this without bitterness, only a tired honesty. They saw her labour, her hunger, her dignity—and still chose to diminish her to something consumable.And she kept going. Every day. Not because she was fearless, but because she couldn’t afford to be afraid. In its own way, that was feminism—unspoken, untheorized, but fierce.

I have come to realise that feminism—especially at the grassroots—is often misrepresented. It’s spoken of as something imported, foreign, loud. And so, many women in places like Mathare or Kisii or Baringo do not use the word. Yet they live it—in resistance, in survival, in uncelebrated courage. Feminism in these spaces is not a conference, it’s a confrontation with hunger, violence, and silence. 

As Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí reminds us, even the language we use to name oppression can be part of the distortion. In her work on the Yorùbá, she argues that colonialism did more than redraw maps—it reshaped how people were seen. It introduced rigid, hierarchical binaries: man above, woman below. But in precolonial Yorùbá life, identity wasn’t built around gender in this way. Status came from age, role, or seniority—not sex. The idea of “woman” as inherently subordinate, as someone always needing saving, was itself a colonial invention.

This matters—especially when feminism is brought to places like Kariobangi, or Kakamega wrapped in Western slogans. It assumes a universal shape of suffering, a universal story of patriarchy. But as Oyĕwùmí teaches, what we think of as “gender oppression” might itself be shaped by outside eyes. So when women in these communities resist being inherited, fight off street harassment, or feed their families in defiance of men who reduce them—they may not call it feminism. And yet, it is. The misrepresentation lies not in their silence, but in our expectation that their resistance must wear familiar labels to be real.

Both conversations split something open in me. A kind of discomfort that doesn’t ask to be soothed, but understood. And in that discomfort, I start to see myself. Not just as her son, or as a witness—but as a man trying to unlearn the ease of looking away. It is here that the idea of feminist masculinity begins to make sense—not as theory, but as a way of standing. As Dr. Willy Mutunga wrote of Prof. Micere Mugo, she mothered a kind of manhood that listens, that questions itself, that refuses to become complicit in silence.

And maybe, just maybe, that is what I’m reaching for now. A masculinity that makes room. That doesn’t pretend to understand every wound, but holds space for the telling. Because in the dust of these paths—mine, my mother’s, and the girls still walking them—there is something worth naming, something worth protecting. Not in spite of being a man, but because of it.

And so, I walk back from that conversation with Miss. Kakai—not as a man defeated by feminism, but as one awakened to its misplacement. At the grassroots, it is not the word that matters, but the work. It is not the slogan, but the soil it grows from. And perhaps, in all this reflection, I find myself reshaped—not less a man, but more. A feminist masculine—not a contradiction, but a quiet reconciliation. A reaching across the line, not to erase it, but to redraw it—so that all our names can stand beside it, not behind it.

Reading List

1. African feminism as decolonising force: a philosophical exploration of the work of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí By Azille Alta Coetzee

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