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The Most Outspoken Sex Workers on the Continent

30-11-2021
During the last Orange the World campaign, WO=MEN published six different portraits of women human rights defenders from around the world. Courageous women, who have dedicated their lives to their cause. And who have chosen not to be a victim, but a fighter. This is part two: Carolyne Njoroge en Phelister Abdallah, National Coordinator of the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance (KESWA).
 
Read part one: The Girl who wrote to Uganda's parliamentpart three: I’ve Been Fighting Since I Was Twenty, part four: Women Aren’t Safe Here, And That’s In So Many Ways, part five: The Single Act of Daring To Be and part six: People Should Have The Right To Love.


 
 
 
 
  Stories by Makena Ngito.   

We have so many memories of our childhoods, right? And some, of course, stand out more than others. Maybe your tenth birthday when you finally got permission to have your friends for a sleepover, or maybe even your first ever crush in kindergarten. For a lot of us, those memories are happy, places we go back to in our minds when we need a bit of cheering up.
 
But for Carolyne Njoroge, the memory that she has from a childhood, which later came to change her whole life course and make her who she is today, the fighter that she is today, is of her mother being butchered by a client, and that being splattered all over the news and radio, and Caroline, amidst all this grief and chaos, having nowhere to go after her Presbyterian family refused to take her in on account of her late mother’s profession, and the fact that she had been raised in a brothel.
A child, she had to turn to the very streets that raised her to survive. But this time, she went back with a vow. No one would ever be able to harm a sex worker as long as she could do something to prevent it. And that, became her lifelong mission.

Carolyne is a sex worker living positively in Nairobi, Kenya. She lives by the vow she made to herself as a child, and her work speaks for it, where she works for different organizations to challenge violence against fellow sex workers, both from society (mostly in the form of clients) and the state sanctioned violence, which is seen by the government’s refusal to decriminalize sex work, and the sweeping under the carpet of cases of violence unless sex workers.

This violence doesn’t only manifest itself in the physical infliction of harm to this particular community, but also in ways such as a rise in the number of HIV infections, since sex education in Kenya is not that easy to come by, if anything, it is seen as taboo. That and the absence of condoms in ready availability, and lack of access to sexual and reproductive health care sees to it that infections keep increasing, and not enough care is given to those living with the virus, owing to the stigma that the disease carries with it.

She knows all this, but it doesn’t deter her from speaking up against it and finding solutions for these issues. Even before she began her work with the organizations, she raised her voice in the streets, becoming a regular at the Central Police Station in Nairobi, constantly walking in to report cases of sex workers who had been harmed, and even though the officers never took any action and at times chased her away, she’d come back, more determined than ever. In a country where sex workers have no rights even when they are sexually violated, she knew that she had to speak up, because no one else would.

And after all, no one knows a story better than the person who has a lived experience with it.
But it wasn’t always this easy for her. When she found out about her status in 2016, she was angry. That’s the word for it, angry. Angry at life, that after it had dealt her so many blows, it brought this to her doorstep too. Angry at the realization of how this would affect her work. At the fact that someone else had so callously infected her. Angry that even after getting on her medication and not being able to transmit the virus to anyone, a client still almost strangled her to death when he found out about her status, and she had to be saved by the lodging’s security guard. She went down a dark path where she would drink a lot, to escape the pain even if for a while, she slacked on her meds too, and it was visible to her friends and everyone else who knew her.

Eventually, she came to terms with her status, and stopped seeing it as a death sentence, but rather like any other disease that is manageable if she takes her meds as prescribed. She is now very open about living positively, in the hopes that other sex workers stop seeing their status as a hindrance to their work and day to day life.

 
Her colleague and fellow sex worker, Phelister Abdallah, has a different story.

There’s a general assumption that all sex workers were forced into the profession, and people like to conjure up all these horrific ideas about their lives, not believing that someone could actually just decide to get into the profession, voluntarily, same way some of us are writers, and someone reading this was really into math growing up and decided to become an accountant.
She loves her body, and believes in bodily autonomy. That people, specifically women- because of patriarchy and all its oppressive structures- can do whatever they want with their bodies, and when they are ready, just like any other job, they can retire. She knew that she wanted to be a sex worker, and tossing aside all of society’s biases, she set out to do what she wanted with her body and being, and so it has been for fifteen years.

It has been a journey of ups and downs, of achieving huge milestones, like an attendance of more than 1500 sex workers who showed up for a protest on the 1st of March 2010, to having sex workers in Kenya being the most outspoken on the continent.

Her work has seen her find smart ways of ensuring that sex workers get justice, such as having those among them who are interested in pursuing their education further enter the legal field, in order to ensure that they are equally represented and cases can be taken forward to the highest courts.

Something that Phelister wants people to know, is that sex work is work. It is not immoral, it is not human or sex trafficking, it is work, just like any other. And even though it is still criminalized in this state, and they face more dangers than any other field of work, they are happy with what they do, and are just as deserving of human rights, access to services, dignity, respect and safety just like everyone else.
 
About the author:
Bios are interesting to me, and I’ll use one of my favourite things in the world to summarize it. They’re like trying to fit the vastness of the ocean, it’s size, beauty and might, into a glass. My name is Makena Ngito, and I’m a writer. I use words to describe myself, to explain things actions couldn’t show and to capture the beauty of my thoughts in a paragraph when speech fails me. I hope you like my words. I hope they light up that little part of you that you’d forgotten exists, and I hope they stay in your memories forever too.
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