Bananas are such a sweet fruit. Soft, delicious, golden slices of joy. So, I fail to understand what the English were up to when they decided that ‘bananas’ could mean crazy or maddening. But then again, what should we expect from a people who colonized entire continents in the name of ‘liberation”? They saw sweetness and decided it was chaos – sounds about right.
Well, here I am, feeling bananas. Is that even a thing people say?
I’m writing this on a Saturday evening during that hazy period between Christmas and New Year’s. You know the one: when the days blur together, and you’re either floating in a bubble of family joy or drowning in a pit of existential nothingness. If you had lively festivities with friends and family, your body is probably singing with laughter and good food. But if you come from a family like mine—a chaotic, dysfunctional cyclone of pain and pretense—you’re just surviving. You’ve been surviving all year. And now, you’re crawling to the finish line.
Wacha niandike hii story initoke. Here, have a banana. Take your time peeling it. You might not finish eating it by the time I’m done ranting, but I hope you’ll feel bananas with me.
2024 has been a year, hasn’t it? A wildcard of wildcards. I don’t know a single soul who’d disagree. This year, I’ve done things—things I didn’t think I had in me. Scary things. Brave things. And the one thing that still shocks me to my core? I stood up to the most abusive character I’ve ever known in my life: my father.
Growing up in a violent home, my goal was always to escape. To get away, far, far away, and never look back. And for a while, I convinced myself I’d done it. But violence has a way of lingering. It clings to you like the smell of cheap cologne—hard to scrub off and impossible to ignore. Even from a distance, I still feel the weight of his fists, his threats, his wickedness. My father is a man capable of horrors I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
And while I’ve physically removed myself from that hellhole, I still feel its grip. I send money for hospital bills when the bruises get too bad. I play therapist to a sibling too young to understand their trauma and to my mother, too tethered to her own pain and drowning in learned helplessness. Heck, I’ve become a parent to my mother and my siblings. Worse still, there’s the silent scourge that festers in such a violent hellhole: the unrelenting stress of persistent trauma. It seeps into the body, planting the seeds of funny illnesses—early heart attacks, hypertension, ulcers, and those migraines that turn light into agony. Violence doesn’t just break bones; it reshapes entire lives.
I, too, bear the scars. Some are invisible, etched deep into the fabric of my being—reminders that I survived, that I made it out. But as I tend to their emotional and physical wounds, I can’t help but look back at my own. They remind me of what I endured, what I escaped, and what still haunts me. Each act of care for them reopens old wounds, forcing me to confront the cost of survival again and again.
And all the while, I am barely holding myself together.
This year began with women taking to the streets of Nairobi, demanding justice for victims of femicide and an end to gender-based violence. And we’re ending it the same way. Two marches. One message: women are human beings. We deserve safety—in public, in private, everywhere. I was on the streets for both marches. Wailing. Shouting. Demanding. And yet, on those same days, my father sat at home threatening to kill my mother. He’s been doing it for years. And out of fear, I’ve kept silent.
But 2024 broke something in me. Maybe it was the boldness of my generation—Gen Z, who’ve spent this year calling out everything from government corruption to societal evils. Maybe it was the realization that silence makes me complicit. Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I summoned every ounce of courage I didn’t know I had. Leaning on the strength of my peers (not the ancestors, because let’s face it, they condoned this wife-beating nonsense), I called my father to order.
It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t confront him in person—I’m not suicidal. Instead, I crafted a text message. A ticking time bomb of carefully chosen words. My hands shook as I typed it out. My friends reviewed it, edited it, and gave me the go-ahead. Timing was everything. I sent it in the morning, so that if he exploded, there’d be witnesses. I kept it respectful to minimize the violence it might spark. But my message was clear: only weak men hurt women. His wickedness ends now.
Did the message land? Oh, it landed. Like a grenade. Did he flip out? Absolutely. But for once, his rage didn’t find its usual targets. I had crafted my words so carefully that any violence would make him look like a fool—a monster even his allies couldn’t defend.
Here’s the thing: working to help GBV survivors while your own home is a battlefield is a curse I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s exhausting. It’s soul-crushing. And it makes you feel like a fraud. Being brought up as a good Christian girl, questioning the darkness within my parents’ marriage was never an option. Silence and compliance – in the name of obedience – was drummed into me day in, day out. It was sung in songs, preached from pulpits, and enforced by the heavy hands of shame and isolation.
The few women who dared to leave or speak out were shunned by their Christian families and communities. They were branded “bad women,” condemned in Sunday sermons by pastors riding their high moral horses. I hope all these moral police fall from their dizzying heights and land with a solid concussion—or better yet, permanent vertigo.
Shame is everywhere. It clings to our communities like a foul stench we pretend not to smell. It’s in the divorcee who isn’t invited to the estate Christmas party because “married couples only.” It’s in the teacher who mocks a child because their parents were heard fighting last night. (I’ll take on bad teachers another day, but their day is coming.) It’s in the pastor who refuses to baptize a child from a single-parent home because the family doesn’t fit his perfect holy narrative. It’s in the coworker who dismisses a woman’s opinion because “she couldn’t even keep her husband.”
To the parents, aunties, coworkers, and nosy neighbors who excuse violence in the name of family values, I hope you choke on those values. To the pastors and elders who return battered wives to their abusers with sanctimonious advice like, “Marriage is not easy, shida hutokea,” I hope your offering baskets run dry, and every skeleton in your closets—yes, all your sex scandals—comes tumbling out.
To those who stay silent, watching abuse unfold, let me be clear: you’re complicit. You’re the ones handing the abusers their weapons, nodding as they wield them. Violence is not what you were put on this earth to uphold.
Now, a lot of us love to say that a person’s values and character are molded at the family level—the basic unit of society. But here’s what we don’t talk about: the direct connection between state violence and family violence. They are not separate; they are reflections of each other. In the same way a violent father demands silence and obedience in his home, the state demands silence and compliance from its citizens. The same fear that keeps a battered woman from leaving her abusive husband is the fear that keeps citizens quiet in the face of police brutality or corruption. Violence in the home normalizes violence in society. It teaches us that power is about control, that resistance is dangerous, and that those with less power must simply endure.
Think about it: if a child grows up seeing their mother beaten and silenced, why would they believe they have a right to challenge authority outside the home? If the state allows security forces to harass, brutalize, and even kill with impunity, why would we expect anything different from abusive men in their households?
The parallels are glaring. When police storm a peaceful protest and unleash tear gas on citizens demanding justice, it’s no different from a father flipping the dining table because dinner isn’t ready on time. When the government steals public funds meant for healthcare, it’s no different from a husband draining the family’s resources to fund his vices. The violence is the same—it’s about dominance, control, and silencing dissent. And just like in violent homes, the silence of bystanders is what keeps state violence alive. The neighbors who pretend not to hear screams from the house next door are no different from the citizens who look away when police officers harass a vendor or beat down a poster. It is the same silence, and it feeds the same beat. Fear and apathy – they’re the lifeblood of every system that protects abusers, whether in the home or in government.
Here’s the truth: if we are going to dismantle state violence, we have to start by dismantling the violence in our homes. These things are tied together, tangled like the roots of a rotten tree. You can’t fight for justice out there while ignoring the oppression in your own space. And you cannot heal a nation without first confronting the power plays and toxic dynamics that shape its families. To those who dismiss family violence as “private matters,” and to those who defend state violence as “necessary for order,” let me tell you this: you’re two sides of the same rotting coin. Both of you are propping up systems that crush the vulnerable and keep the powerful untouchable.
Violence is violence. Whether it’s in a home or on a street corner, it stinks the same. And we all have a choice: to ignore it or to tear it down.
I am angry. And I want you to be angry with me. Not the kind of anger that sits quietly in your chest, but the kind that moves you. The kind that sparks something, the kind that makes you stand up, speak out, and act.
So, this holiday season, as you enjoy the sweetness of family and festivities, remember those who can’t. Think of those trapped in homes that feel more like prisons. Think of those who live in silence, swallowing their pain because they don’t see another way.
And as we close this year, let’s make a pact. Let’s not let the vision slip away: a world where every human being lives free of violence. Grab a banana. Peel it. Feel bananas with me. And on New Year’s Eve, at 11:59, twende tupige nduru moja safi.
Because this madness must go. MUST GO!!