Blood On Two Lands Pretty Tekii   © Copyright 2025 by Pretty Tekii

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I left Isiolo with the wind howling behind me and a scar that still wept beneath my dress. The fertile hills of Meru promised a new name, a new husband, and a life far from the silence I was raised in. But blood, I’ve learned, doesn’t stay buried. It stains. It whispers. It travels with you—across dry borders, across beds, across births. I had bled in one land, but I was about to bleed in another—this time, not just from my body, but from the wound of being seen.

I met him when I was still healing. A young man in a white coat, soft-spoken, clean-shaven, who didn’t look at my wound with disgust. He asked for my name gently, bandaged me like I was more than a girl cut for tradition, and offered silence when words hurt too much. Days turned into smiles. Smiles into conversations. He wasn’t like the others—he asked, he listened. And when I left the clinic, I carried not just herbs under my dress but a secret blooming in my chest.

But love between a Cushite girl and a Bantu man is a forbidden fire. Our people say it burns the ancestors and poisons the bloodline. I was promised to an elder in my clan, a man with a greying beard and five children. It was the final nail in my girlhood, and I was meant to smile through it. But that night, as incense smoke curled around the hut and my mother oiled my arms, I felt my vow harden.

I would not endure again.

When the drums started in the village, I was already gone.

We travelled under the cover of dawn. My heart beat fast—not from love, but fear. I watched every shadow on the roadside, half-expecting my brothers to appear with ropes and anger. But instead, I was met with strangers who greeted me with warm eyes and greetings in a language I didn’t yet know. The air smelled different in Meru—sweet with bananas, soil, and smoke from clean-burning fires. I pressed my forehead to the bus window, watching the land change. From dry thornbush and cracked mathenge roots to green hills, red soil, and rain that seemed to fall whenever it pleased. I had never known such a place existed outside dreams. And for a while, I believed I'd found peace.

We arrived in Meru before midday. I expected stares, suspicion, rejection — but instead I was welcomed like rain after drought. His mother offered me tea without questions. Neighbours smiled and showed me how to fold banana leaves for cooking. Even the market women giggled as they taught me how to say “thank you” in Kimeru. I laughed at my own tongue twisting in new sounds, and somehow, in that laughter, I felt like I belonged.

The land was kind — so fertile even wild weeds looked like crops. Water ran freely. The trees gave fruit without begging. For the first time, I ate to fullness. I slept without flinching.

I prayed aloud.

When my belly swelled with life, the church sang. Women laid hands on me. Strangers gifted me maize, soap, milk. I began to hum again while cooking. The child moved inside me like he too was dancing to a new song.

I started dreaming again — dreams with colour, dreams without knives.

The labour started just after midnight. The pain was deep and slow, like a memory waking up. My husband rushed me to the hospital. I held his hand tighter than I ever had before. I was afraid, but I was also ready — ready to meet the child who had kicked and stirred and whispered hope to me through every night.

The nurses smiled at first. They called me “mother” and told me to breathe. But everything changed when they lifted my dera, when they saw what Isiolo had done to me.

The room fell silent.

One nurse gasped, another exchanged a look with her colleague. Gloved fingers hesitated. No one spoke to me now — they spoke over me, around me. Words like “mutilation” and “taboo” floated in the air like smoke.

By the time I heard my baby cry, the joy had already drained from my body.

Back home, the welcome had changed. The air was colder, not from weather — from eyes. Women who had once called me cucu crossed the road when they saw me. Children whispered behind fences. Even the pastor’s wife, who had once laid hands on my belly, avoided me during Sunday service.

The shame followed me like a second shadow.

And my husband — my sweet, kind-hearted healer — became someone else. It started small. Silence during meals. Sleepless nights. Then came the snide remarks, the mocking, the bitterness.

“They say I married a broken woman,” he spat once. “That I should have stayed with my own kind.”

His shame, fed by other men, became my daily punishment.

He no longer walked with me in public. He refused to carry the baby. He stopped defending me. And then, he began to curse my name.

My world became a closed door.

One morning, I woke up and the walls felt like they were swallowing me. I wrapped my baby in a lesso and stepped outside. No one looked up. No one greeted me. Even the birds seemed to sing differently now — shrill, cold, distant.

I looked at the path that led to town. I had no fare, no packed bag, no blessing. But I started walking. I didn’t know if I was returning to Isiolo, or just running from Meru. I only knew that if I stayed, I would die — not from hunger, but from being invisible.

The sun rose higher. My feet burned on the hot road. My breasts leaked milk and my back ached, but I kept going. One step. Then another.

After several kilometers, a battered pickup truck slowed beside me. A woman in a headscarf leaned out.

“Umechoka, msichana? Kuja, twende sokoni pamoja.”

She was old, her eyes kind. The truck smelled of goats and onions. I nodded, tears finally falling without shame. I climbed in.

We didn’t talk at first. Just the sound of tires on gravel, bleating animals, and the distant buzz of afternoon heat. Then I told her. Everything.

She didn’t flinch.

She held my hand and we cried together.

We reached the Isiolo animal market just before sunset. The place buzzed with dust and haggling, men clapping their hands, goats kicking against rope. The old woman bargained like a queen. I held the baby as she sold every animal she had, save for two tired kids no one wanted.

When the last cow was led away, she wiped sweat from her forehead and counted the worn notes aloud, then turned and pressed half into my hand.

“For your courage,” she said. “And for helping me carry silence.”

I wept right there, between two boys selling miraa and a man sharpening knives. Not from shame this time — but from being seen.

As night fell, she insisted on driving me the last few kilometers to my mother’s land. The sky burned orange, then purple, then bruised grey. We talked, we laughed a little, and she gave the baby his first smile since we left Meru. The old pickup creaked and rattled, but it felt like a chariot to me.

But home… wasn’t home anymore.

My aunt stood at the gate, arms folded, lips tight.

“You can’t bring your shame here,” she said. “You were married. You chose another tribe. You left. You are not one of us anymore.”

She didn’t even look at the baby.

The neighbors watched from their doors. No one spoke for me. No one opened their gate. I was not just Halima the cut one — I was now Halima the cursed.

We sat in the pickup for a long while. The silence was thick, but not empty. The old woman didn’t ask questions. She didn’t curse my people or theirs. She just sat with me — the kind of sitting only women who have carried too much can do.

She turned the key in the ignition without a word. The engine coughed, the tires rolled, and we left Isiolo behind — me, her, the baby, and two unsold goats.

That road back was quiet. Only the cry of birds above us, the hum of dry wind, the occasional screech of tires on gravel. And somewhere inside that silence, I stopped breaking. Not all at once. Not loudly. Just a soft stitch where everything had been torn.

She drove past her own turnoff and straight to her homestead — a small house with a sagging tin roof, a mango tree in the yard, a dog too old to bark.

“This is your home now,” she said. “No more running.”

She gave me a room, warm porridge, and a name that didn’t come with shame. She told the neighbors nothing. And they didn’t ask. In that silence, I healed.

Today, I walk the same road I once wept on — not to escape, but to find girls like me before the cut comes. I speak in hushed tones behind closed doors, in madrasa yards, near the boreholes, where mothers sit with tied lesos and fear. I carry herbs still — but not for wounds. For courage.

They call me crazy. Some call me cursed. But a few call me sister. And that is enough.

They tried to bury me in blood. But blood flows. It finds new lands. And sometimes, the rejected stone becomes the cornerstone.