When Kate Njoroge met the man of her dreams, she was 22, beautiful and naive. She was pursuing a degree in sociology at Kenyatta University while her boyfriend was on his way to becoming a doctor.
“I pictured a perfect family. My boyfriend looked and met the cut,” Kate says. In her second year she moved closer to her dream family when she got pregnant. After her studies she moved in with her beau. “Things were really working as I had figured out as a little girl,” she says.
But that’s an old story. Kate is now 41 and bitter at how her happy ending turned out. The mother of two’s marriage turned septic a few years later after moving in. First, her man became unresponsive then he started having multiple affairs. Then he turned violent.
“I didn’t have a job when I completed campus and then my family got evicted in the 1992 tribal clashes, which meant my dad, a farmer, couldn’t support my siblings. I had to step in and help out. Though my husband was working, he was unsupportive. Then he started seeing other women,” Kate narrates.
To counter the dejection Kate got her MBA in record time and soon landed herself an international job.
“He didn’t like it one bit,” she says. “He couldn’t stomach that I had got my Masters before him and now was bringing in more money. He would now go missing for days, and I learnt that he had actually moved in with another woman and got a baby,” the NGO programme manager says.
Wary of the strings of women her husband was hosting, Kate decided to stay away from the marital bed.
“That’s when he hit me really hard. I was so swollen. I had withheld sex for a month insisting that he must get tested,” Kate recalls.
For years that became her life, and since she could not insist that her man uses a condom, she resigned herself to her fate. In December last year, after numerous bad encounters and walking out three times, she decided to move out. For good.
“I am lucky I didn’t contract HIV. God must really love me. But I am bitter that I wasted more than 20 years trying to make it work,” Kate, who says she stuck it out for love and children, shares.
She is right. Many women contract HIV when they are living a life of dependency, power imbalance and lack of control over their sexuality.
“Most women cannot negotiate for sex. Sex is often a man’s prerogative. That’s why some women know the status of their husband only after their death or when they spot the hidden ARVs,” remarks Donata Muthoni, 41, a peer educator at Mbagathi hospital who is also HIV positive.
The mother of two teenage daughters, who has lived with the disease for a decade now, cites herself as an example, saying that if she was more empowered sexually, she would have taken better care of her sexual health.
For years HIV/ Aids experts have grappled with the reasons behind women’s high susceptibility to HIV infection. A 2008/09 study put women’s prevalence rates as twice as high as that for men, which stands at 4.3 per cent.
While the country’s national average is at 6.1 per cent, that for women stands at eight percent. This disparity is even greater amongst women aged 15-24 who are four times more likely to become infected with HIV than men of the same age.