Home > Articles > Inheritance Rights: The Gendered Experience of Loss Inheritance Rights: The Gendered Experience of Loss By Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs (September 2004) On November 20, 2002, a few months after burying her beloved husband Billie, Angeline Siparo, an educated, articulate Kenyan woman, fired off an email heard round the world. With the subject line, “gender dimensions of loss,” her email began: Through this experience of losing Billie, I have learnt some things about the gendered experience of loss: Within the Kenyan community — and this is regardless of whether you are luo, luhya, maasai or Kamba — as a woman you own nothing and have no right to property. If and when the woman is economically empowered, this is then used as an excuse that she does not deserve anything more and she can make 'her own money'. I have learnt the difference between having laws in books and enforcement of these laws. Siparo, Kenyan by birth, runs the country office for the POLICY Project in Nairobi. Her email went to several people within the USAID and collaborating agency world, including the Interagency Gender Working Group. One of her contacts at the Futures Group International, where the POLICY project is housed, responded to her email: “If we don't understand what you have written here and how it permeates behavior through society in Kenya and other countries including the U.S., we will never ‘mitigate’ the advance of HIV/AIDS. Angeline, thanks for giving us this powerful statement of your observations, and I hope you will not mind if we share it widely. Let's turn your assessment into a blueprint for action.” Since that time, there have been many assessments, many blueprints, and some action. First, Angeline’s story has spread. Second, attention has been drawn to the situation of women in Kenya and particularly to women’s inheritance rights there. And third, advocacy projects on women’s inheritance rights in Kenya have been supported and strengthened. Angeline’s Story Angeline Siparo has a Masters in Counseling Psychology from the U.S. International University/Africa in Nairobi. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a Member of Parliament in Nairobi, as well as in the Kenyan Diplomatic Corps in Somalia and in Uganda. “My father was not completely traditional,” Angeline says, “He wanted to give his daughters the same treatment you’d give boys.” But when Angeline’s husband Billie died on August 21, 2002, from complications of Meningitis, she was to come up against traditions and customs that she had never anticipated. On the morning that Billie passed away, his mother, who had been living with Angeline, suddenly moved out. That same morning Billie’s family (with whom Angeline had had a good relationship) seized the trucks from a transport business that Billie and Angeline had owned together. “When I tried to pick up my trucks,” Angeline remembers, “the police were called in and there was a huge row outside the police station.” What followed was a court battle, intimidation, and harassment that went on for more than a year. “I remember being tailed,” Angeline says. “One night at 3 a.m. three people came to my house with guns and harassed the night watchman. I was so scared. I locked myself in the house every evening at 7 o’clock. “I remember thinking ‘this is not the way I want my children [two girls who were then aged 2 and 8] to live’… And during this time I had to cope with the children grieving and to cope with my own loss of Billie; to cope with the fact that all of a sudden life was very unsteady. I was just very fearful and betrayed.” Eventually, one of Billie’s brothers told Angeline that he wanted to discuss the property situation. They underwent arbitration and came to a settlement. “But Billie’s family went back on their word,” Angeline says. Despite the painfulness of this second betrayal, Angeline believes her willingness to undergo arbitration (as well as the fact that her father’s friend, who was a Justice of the High Court, stood by her) was very important to the final disposition of the case. In July 2003, Angeline won her court case. One of Billie’s brothers, Angeline says, testified that they had indeed undergone arbitration and what had been “set down” had been true. Angeline said this brother did a “360-degree turn because his wife said to him, ‘Do you realize what you have done to Angeline, your brothers would come and do to me… and I don’t even have a job. I would be left penniless’.” The Situation in Kenya Since Angeline’s ordeal began, a new government has come to power in Kenya and a new constitution is expected, albeit still delayed. But how much has changed for the women of Kenya, who, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (see www.hrw.org/reports/2003/kenya0303) constitute 80 percent of the agricultural labor force and provide 60 percent of farm income, yet own only 5 percent of the land? Asked if she has seen improvements as a result of the new government, Angeline says that she believes there is less intimidation by police now and that more stories are being covered by the media. “While the government has not yet honored a lot of its promises, what I have seen is a more open government where I no longer fear speaking up or police intimidation…. This is now the time to do things around women’s rights, for sure.” Angeline adds that there are indeed laws on the books that protect women’s rights, but “as I said in my email, ‘there is a difference between laws in books and laws in practice.’ I have gone ahead and gotten my property back, but if I had been the one to die and Billie would have been left, no one would have touched him… And, for me, that’s the injustice that I want to address. Why can’t a woman be left in peace?” Advocacy for Inheritance Rights There are advocates working for inheritance rights in Kenya and in the United States right now. Angeline came to Washington, D.C., in April 2004 as part of an advocacy project “Women and Inheritance: A Framework for Action,” being organized by POLICY Project with funding from USAID. The goal of the Kenyan pilot project is to support advocacy and policy change efforts needed to promote and protect women's inheritance and ownership rights to property. POLICY Project is working with Kenyan NGOs to help them develop a shared critical analysis and vision for change, and to develop an advocacy strategy based on this. Already, this project has yielded a draft background paper that assesses the policy and legal situation in Kenya and that will provide a key framework for advocacy planning by stakeholders. Even more important, from August 9-12 a workshop was held in Kenya to work on such issues as women’s ownership and rights. Co-organized by POLICY Project/Kenya and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and attended by representatives of many groups (including FIDA, the Kenyan Land Alliance, community-based organizations from all provinces, teachers, People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), and religious and legal organizations), the objective was to develop a strategic advocacy plan and, according to Angeline, “to come up with an agenda, a clear one, of who is doing what and what there is to do. “We did achieve this objective and the groups are energized, empowered, and ready to work,” she says. The issue of women’s inheritance rights is more important today than ever before, because of its relationship to HIV/AIDS. Women, who have always been vulnerable in the region, are doubly vulnerable because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “When a husband dies of HIV/AIDS (whether a woman is negative or not) the in-laws will often circulate the death certificate so that the widow will be subject to stigma and discrimination in order to isolate her,” Angeline says. “She may not even feel worthy of the inheritance because of this sense of isolation.” Moreover, property-less widows are not able to seek treatment because they have no money and HIV/AIDS orphans are often left destitute when their deceased parents’ property is taken by the husband’s family. In an April 2003 hearing by the Human Rights Caucus of the U.S. Congress, the briefing co-chair, Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN), said, “Now is a pivotal time to confront women’s property rights abuses in Kenya and across the continent of Africa. Failure to do so will perpetuate women’s inequality, doom development efforts, and undermine the fight against HIV/AIDS.” In fact, the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) Task Force 3 on Education and Gender Quality has stressed inheritance rights as a strategic priority if the goals are to be achieved by 2015. In the meantime, Angeline Siparo has advice for women in her country: “When you lose someone you love, it’s extremely hard to fight property battles rather than to be burying him. So, I have been telling all my friends, as soon as your husband dies, get a lawyer. Don’t be nice. That’s what does us women in.”