The Kikuyu girl child is so empowered within her cultural context that she sometimes struggles to comprehend why a Kisii woman cannot simply step out and apambane kama wanawake wengine kwa debe… She assumes that, just as in the Kikuyu community, competence, merit, and individual capability should be enough to earn a woman respect and a fair shot at leadership. She struggles to understand a social reality where a woman’s marital history can weigh more heavily than her education, qualifications, or competence; where divorced women, single mothers, and women with children from different fathers are often judged and looked down upon, regardless of their accomplishments, yet may be accorded greater social acceptance in the Kikuyu community. She struggles to understand why a child she carried, laboured to bring into the world, and nurtured can be identified by the father’s clan name rather than her own, as though her contribution to that child’s existence is secondary. And perhaps, most importantly, she struggles to understand why outsiders perceive aspects of Kikuyu culture as matriarchal, sometimes going as far as mocking Kikuyu men for carrying their mothers’ names. The irony is that her own cultural environment may have afforded her a degree of agency, acceptance, and social freedom that she unconsciously assumes is universal. She may mistake the privileges she enjoys for the natural order of things, failing to recognize that other women navigate entirely different social realities. Such is the nature of privilege: it can be so deeply woven into one's lived experience that one mistakes it for the norm, never realizing that what feels ordinary to you as a kikuyu woman is an unimaginable freedom to a Kisii woman. 😔