African Woman and Child Feature Service

Download In the Shadow of Death: My trauma, my experience

The book, In the Shadow of Death: My trauma, my experience is public testimony on what the majority women went though during the post-election violence that engulfed Kenya immediately after the Electoral Commission of Kenya announced the results for the hotly-contested presidential polls of the December 2007 General Election.

The crisis brought to the fore a number of factors that separate our society but for long have been ignored by successive post-independence governments: poverty, land, inequality, tribalism, among others.

uses a yum-yum approach by picking major highlights of the crisis based on thematic experiences of women. Such angles include physical abuse, psychological torture, sexual violence, homelessness, widowhood, and economic woes.

Every testimony in the book ends with a message of hope, achieved through individual endurance. Their recollections run true to words of encouragement to black Americans authored by Martin Luther King Jr. in a book titled: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos of Community? He spoke of the star of success dangling up the sky, and that it only required his fellow blacks to jump and touch it.

In the Shadow of Death: My trauma, my experience concludes by reminding women who suffered all manner of violence in post-election times that determination and individual focus and tenacity are the main recipe for touching the sky of hope up the sky.

Download a PDF copy of Shadow of Death