Easter and equality: What it would take for Kenyan women to truly rise
A woman chairs a meeting. This Easter, the question is not whether she belongs there but why it still feels remarkable when she does.
What you need to know:
- This Easter, the metaphor of resurrection raises a question for Kenya: what would it take for gender equality to rise and stay risen?
- Despite progressive laws, women still face barriers in justice, leadership, land, and education.
- True change, like resurrection, demands action that cannot be rolled back.
Teaching literature for years does something to the way you read the world. You stop seeing events as isolated and start seeing them as texts, full of metaphors waiting to be unpacked. Easter is one of those texts, and the metaphor at its heart, that something buried and sealed can still rise, has stayed with me. In the Easter story, a heavy stone sealed the tomb where Jesus was buried, meant to mark a permanent end. It did not stay.
On the third day, it was rolled away, and what had risen could not be resealed. That stone did not roll back; it stayed where it fell. That is the detail in my mind this Easter, not as a matter of theology but as a question directed at our country. What would it take for gender equality to rise in a way that stays risen, the kind of change where there is no rolling the stone back?
Think about the women in the Easter story; they tend to get a paragraph when they deserve a chapter. When the disciples fled, they stayed. They were at the cross, at the burial, and at the tomb before anyone else arrived. Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection, the first person trusted with the most consequential news in the Christian faith, and when she went to tell the disciples what she had seen, they didn’t believe her. They went to check for themselves.
Two thousand years later, women who report violence are still being asked to prove what they witnessed. Survivors still walk into police stations and walk out feeling like the accused. The details change, but the dynamic stays.
Kenya has a version of this problem. We have a constitution that is genuinely progressive on gender. It enshrines the two-thirds gender principle, protects matrimonial property rights, and guarantees equality before the law. We celebrate it, and rightly so, because it represents real work by real people who fought hard for it.
But a law that exists on paper and a law that changes how a widow in Homa Bay is treated when her in-laws arrive to claim the land, are two entirely different things, and we have pretended otherwise for too long. Progress in Kenya tends to get announced. The announcement gets the headline. What happens in the years that follow rarely does.
Maternal mortality
A resurrected Kenya, and I use that word deliberately, because resurrection is not improvement, it is transformation, would be one where a woman's name on a title deed is unremarkable. It would be one where a girl does not sit out a week of school every month because sanitary towels are treated as a luxury, where a survivor of gender-based violence is not left to pursue her own case, and where maternal mortality is not still claiming women in county hospitals that lack basic supplies. These are not distant aspirations but failures of political will, dressed up as complexity.
The two-thirds gender rule has never been implemented. Kenya has had more than a decade to figure it out and has chosen not to, through legal delays and parliamentary silence. What that communicates to the Kenyan girl is not subtle: her presence in decision-making spaces is negotiable, her leadership is a favour rather than a right, and the constitution says one thing while the people charged with upholding it have decided another. No country solves its hardest problems by keeping half its population out of the room where decisions are made.
Resurrection, as I taught it in literature, is never comfortable for the people who witnessed what came before, it disturbs the people who had made peace with the way things were.
The people who have benefited most from things staying the same are the ones who will have to move first. Men in power will have to give some of it up, genuinely, not simply perform support in public while protecting the status quo behind closed doors. Institutions will have to change how they actually function, not just what they claim to stand for. And women who have made it through will have to stop treating their own success as proof that the system works, because individual exceptions do not fix structural problems.
Easter does not ask if we are ready. It simply arrives. This Easter, the question is not whether gender equality is desirable, because most people, when asked directly, will say yes. The question is whether we are willing to do what resurrection actually demands; to accept that what existed before cannot be restored and that the only honest direction is forward.
Kenya's women have waited at the tomb long enough. It is time for the rest of the country to catch up.
