Under the cover of darkness, the villagers gathered like a tide, their torches licking at the night with tongues of flame. An old woman, frail and bent by years of labour, stood bound at the stake, her grey hair gleaming under the fiery orange glow.
Accusations hissed through the crowd like the slithering of serpents: she had cursed the land, called upon spirits to withhold the rains, brought death to the children. Her protests were lost beneath the roar of righteous fury. The first stone struck her temple, the second shattered her ribs. The flames followed, turning her agony into cinders that rose with the coastal wind.
***
Far in the southwestern highlands, the night pulsed with the growl of distant thunder. Between the rolling slopes of banana plantations, another tragedy unfolded. Here, the air was thick with the scent of damp earth, and the flickering lanterns of angry men cut through the gloom like fireflies possessed by malice.
The
elders, grizzled men with hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, had convened, declaring
a frail grandmother guilty of sorcery. A boy had died of an illness no healer
could cure. The land had yielded little but rotting stems. Lightning had split
the great eucalyptus in the village square.
Surely, this was her doing.
As the first lash of the whip tore through her skin, she did not scream. As the blows fell like relentless rain, she did not plead. But when the sharpened panga blade met her throat, her silence turned eternal. In the distance, the storm raged on.
***
The
wind of time bends the bough of life, and upon the fragile shoulders of age,
wisdom rests. Yet in the lands where coastal winds dance upon sunlit shores,
and in Nyanza where highland mists weave among tea bushes, there festers an
affliction most vile: the slaughter of elder women under the ignominious brand
of witchcraft.
This spectre of female gerontocide (the murder of aged women) darkens our moral existence, revealing an abyss of greed, ignorance and patriarchal violence.
The youthful phase of a woman is a season of toil and nurture; her middle years, a time of sacrifice and resilience. But in her twilight, where there should be reverence, there lurks the shadow of accusation. Once cherished as the hearth-keeper, the wisdom-bearer, she is now seen as a harbinger of misfortune.
When
did the matron become the menace? When did the bearer of generations become the
bearer of curses?
This barbarity is not born of justice, nor of truth. It is a monstrous distortion, an inheritance of colonial fears and patriarchal hierarchies that have poisoned communal ethics. It is the unbridled avarice of kinsmen, eager to seize land and property, that fans the flames of these accusations. It is the ignorance of the young, who mistake the frailty of age for the power of malevolence. It is the indifference of the state, whose silence becomes complicity.
From east to south, the cries of murdered grey-haired women echo. They rise like the wail of mourning winds, witness to the mob horror that masquerades as justice. Their bodies, torched and dismembered, become offerings at the altar of superstition. Yet no god receives them, only the greed of those who profit from their deaths.
Their homes, once warm with the laughter of grandchildren, become empty husks, looted by hands once clasped in clan kinship. Somewhere in Kenya today, to be an elder woman is to tread a path fraught with peril.
The sicknesses of age — dementia, trembling limbs, eyes clouded with cataracts — are taken as omens of sorcery. A tremor in the voice, a forgetful gaze and the whisper spreads: “She is a witch.”
The verdict is swift. The execution brutal.
The mob, like a storm unchained, descends with stones, machetes and fire. And in the end, nothing remains but the charred ruins of a life unjustly taken.
This scourge is not without its roots. It is anchored in a system that denies women their right to inherit, to own, to belong. A widow’s claim to her husband’s land is an inconvenience to those who wish to claim it for themselves. And so, her fate is sealed not by any true misdeed, but by the avarice of those who stand to gain from her absence.
It is also a relic of patriarchal power, where women who outlive their husbands become easy prey. A community that values a woman only in relation to a man will cast her aside when she stands alone. Without a protector, she becomes a liability, a threat to be extinguished.
And beyond greed and patriarchy lies the deeper sin: the failure of reason.
In a world where science should illuminate, the darkness of superstition persists. The state, bound by duty to protect its citizens, looks away. Justice remains a fickle phantom, appearing only when the world takes notice and vanishing when the embers die down.
What, then, must be done?
Community leaders must stand as one against this violence, speaking against the tide of tradition that seeks to justify it. Faith leaders, whose words hold sway over many, must declare the sacredness of life above the folly of superstition.
Schools must teach the young that age is not a curse but a legacy to be honoured. And the government must ensure that elder women have protection, economic security and the dignity they deserve.
What is justice, if not the refusal to let suffering be in vain?
For every life stolen, let there be an uprising of remembrance. For every elder woman cast to the flames, let hands build a fortress of sanctuary.
No society that turns against its wisdom-keepers can claim to stand on the pillars of progress. The highlands must echo with the urgency of this reckoning; the coasts must rise in collective lament.
If we are to claim civilisation, we must first cleanse our hands of this ancestral sin.
No more shall the blood of the wise stain the earth. This is the covenant we must make with those who walked before us, and with those yet to come.
