Wrongful arrest that blew up the lid on intersex’s top secret

By MACHUA KOINANGE

The night of March 16, 2005 will forever be etched on Richard Muasya Mwanzia’s mind.

It was the night he was arrested and locked up in a cell at a Kitui Police Station. But that in itself was not Mwanzia’s life-changing experience.

It was the same night that the lid on his well-guarded secret was blown up. And that night, a new chapter on gender was opened in Kenya’s public discourse.

Memories of his childhood in the dusty plains of Kitui came back; as he relived the painful years he grew up cautious not to play with other children. He tried to come to terms with the reason why his mother kept him hidden in the house all day.

He broke down and cried. He was angry with many people in his life – from family and the very few friends who associated with him. Mwanzia (pictured right) had been arrested after a neighbour, who could never understand why he was so reclusive, accused him of stealing cash. Police promptly arrested the young man and frog-marched him to the local station. His nightmare had begun.

Police order

The police ordered him to strip naked. Should he do it? The officers barked the order again and he reluctantly stripped.

The policemen who had arrested him stared in disbelief at what they saw. He had male and female sex organs. Fascinated at what they saw, they found it a matter of interest but would not confine him in a separate holding cell. “I was terrified what the other inmates would do to me,” he recalls. He glanced around the dark cell filled with other men, fear consuming every inch of frustration in him. Why was this happening to him? He spent the night like a sheep trapped amidst a pack of hungry wolves, his eyes kept darting left and right throughout the night. Mwanzia had been born in 1974, and spent his time clinging to his mother and playing around the compound. Later his mother handed him to his grandmother and he moved to Miambani. He never felt odd or different.

“I never grew close to my parents; we rarely had a conversation with them about what was wrong with me. I know I was not outgoing, I never played a lot with other children and I was always kept in the house.”

He is the eldest in a family of eight children – four boys and four girls. He attended school up to Standard Three but could not fit in. In 2004 his father died and his mother remarried and he was sent to stay with his grandmother who kept his secret.

But at 13 years he noticed he was changing. “I started growing breasts and feeling different physically. I could not have a conversation with anyone to ask what was happening to me,” he told The Standard on Sunday.

Mwanzia could at least count on the comfort and support of his aunt, Josephine Musangi who raised him.  She still remembers the first time she bathed Mwanzia when he was two years old and was astonished at his condition.

“He had both sex organs. I noticed he would not interact with other kids,” she said. Josephine had never been exposed to intersex people and everything became a learning experience. The two formed a close friendship, which has survived to this day.

Medical exposure

Without the advantage of medical exposure, Mwanzia resigned himself to his fate; that no one would be able to help him. He kept everything to himself and his close family relatives who knew his condition.

But all that changed the day he was arrested and charged with robbery with violence. Despite his protestations that he knew nothing about it, he was sentenced to hang in 2007 and committed to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

He filed an appeal, but he also took the Government to court for having him held and jailed in a male prison both during his remand and during his prison term. He felt he had been assaulted twice by the legal system – first for being wrongly convicted and second being denied a separate cell because he was intersex.

Mwanzia argued in a landmark suit he filed against the AG, the Commissioner of Prisons, Commissioner of Police, Registrar of births and deaths and magistrate Evans Makori that his rights had been adversely violated while being in both remand and in prison.

“I knew first that I was innocent, I had not stolen from anyone. But I also knew I was terrified every day I was in prison that I would be molested or even killed because of my condition,” he said. The crux of his suit focused on his treatment and the dilemma the prisons department found themselves in; should they detain him in a male or female cell? He was examined by prison medical officers who confirmed he was a hermaphrodite. Mwanzia argued he was made to share beddings and sanitary facilities with male inmates, that he was exposed to constant abuse, ridicule, and inhuman treatment. Curious male inmates also sexually molested him.

It was pointed out that current prison facilities in Kamiti (and indeed anywhere else in the country) are not conducive to intersex inmates.

Mwanzia won his case and was granted Sh500,000 in damages. He is still waiting to collect the money. But even better news came. His conviction was quashed and he was set free in December 2012, a day before Jamhuri Day and two weeks before Christmas.

“I was so happy, I was free. Now I could start living my life again.”

Mwanzia says his biggest challenge so far has been his lack of skills. “I never completed school, I am not educated so I can only do menial jobs.”

When you talk to him, you sense repressed anger and conflict that has been the hallmark of his life. There is quiet rage at a society that seems indolent to people like him. Frustrated with living in Kitui after his release, he moved to Nairobi to live with a family friend and has been doing menial jobs to make ends meet. He had a wife given to him by his father but that relationship did not solidify.  He has not married nor is he in any relationship. “Who would want to be with a man in my condition? I have accepted my life and who I am and live day by day,” he says.