What The Camels Knew
Pretty
Tekii
©
Copyright 2025 by Pretty Tekii
|
Photo courtesy of the author. |
The
sun cracked the earth beneath my feet as I walked barefoot, my thin
dera clinging to my damp skin. The mathenge trees stood stiff,
offering no shade. Flies buzzed around me, the air thick with the
stink of goat dung and salt. It was the dry season in Isiolo
the season of silence.
The
dry season always came with stillness, as if the wind itself was
afraid to move. Water had to be fetched before dawn, before the sun
boiled the jerrycans on our backs. The women fetched water, carried
firewood, cleaned, cooked, bore children. The men sat under the
acacia tree outside the mosque, discussing livestock prices and
Allah. The girls, like me, existed between service and silence. We
were not taught to speak only to obey.
I
was eleven the day they took me. There was no warning, just the soft
grip of my mother’s hand tightening as we passed the market.
She didn’t look at me. Nobody did. No one said a word. Not the
woman selling milk. Not the boys who had once teased me when I
carried water. Not the butcher with the red-stained apron. Everyone
looked away.
In
the hut with the thatched roof and no ceiling, women gathered around,
whispering prayers. They stripped off my dera. I remember rough hands
pushing me down. I screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the
drumbeats outside. Drums to drown out the cutting. Drums to mask the
pain.
My
blood soaked into the earth. My childhood disappeared with it.
I
woke to a searing pain between my thighs, stuck together, the bandage
made of leaves already soaked brown. My grandmother sat beside me,
murmuring Quranic verses and patting my arm — like that could
undo what had been done.
The
wound festered. The herbs did little. I was forbidden to cry.
“You’re
a woman now,” they said. But I didn’t feel like a woman.
I felt like something broken.
I
couldn’t walk for weeks. The camel oil they used to soothe me
only stung. The silence stung more.
Sometimes
I’d hear the low grumble of our camels outside the way they
paced when something was wrong, the way they knelt near me as if they
too felt the ache. I believed they did. They always knew when someone
in the family was hurting. Their sadness felt like mine.
At
madrasa, the girls didn’t ask. They wore their hijabs tight,
their pain tighter. Every girl in that village was a secret. Every
girl had bled. No one ever said a thing.
When
I was thirteen, they called me “ripe.” A man nearly
thirty years older than me offered ten goats and five sheep for my
hand. My father accepted.
That
night, I dug a small hole behind the goatshed and buried my favourite
beaded necklace. It was made of red and black beads the ones my
mother gave me before she changed. Before she let them take me. I
remember the camels were restless that evening, stomping the ground,
groaning low. “If I disappear,” I whispered, “remember
I lived.”
But
I didn’t disappear. I ran.
One
moonless night, with blistered feet and a stitched wound still
tender, I followed the riverbed out of the village. I drank salty
water and walked until I collapsed near a kiosk in Isiolo town at
dawn. The walk took everything I had. I thought I would die. I wanted
to die, just so the pain would end.
A
woman named Sister Miriam found me. She worked with girls like me
girls with wounds no one wanted to talk about. She had eyes that did
not flinch. Hands that were warm. She wrapped me in a shawl and said,
“You're safe now, my child.”
I
spent weeks in a safe house, learning how to sleep without waking up
screaming. There were other girls there, each with her own silence.
We didn’t talk at first. We couldn’t. But slowly, we
began to hum songs from our villages. We learned how to hold each
other through pain.
The
pain didn’t go. But the silence began to break.
At
sixteen, I stood before a classroom and told my story. Some girls
cried. One fainted. I stood tall. I didn’t hide my scar
anymore.
“I
was cut,” I said, “but I am not broken.”
As
I ran, bleeding and breathless, I remembered what I swore that day:
If I ever had daughters, their thighs would never carry the same
scars as mine.
I
went back for the necklace years later. It was still there, buried
behind the goatshed. The red beads were faded, but still whole. Just
like me.
When
I left that second time, I didn’t look back but I heard the
soft groan of my mother’s old camel, the one that always knelt
near me when I was sick. I think she knew I wasn’t coming back.
I think she understood.
And
today, I’m happy God blessed me with sons boys who will never
undergo FGM like I did.
I’m
now a single mother, cast aside because of the cut but I’m
relieved. I am no longer bleeding for silence.
I
am raising sons who will never demand blood to prove worth. Sons who
will know that no tradition is worth a girl's scream. Sons who will
remember their mother stood tall despite it all.
I
am not healed. But I am whole. And I am still standing.
Pretty
Tekii is a writer from The arid parts of North eastern
Kenya, whose work explores the harsh beauty of her homeland and the
hidden lives of young girls and women.
She
writes from lived experiences, using her story to break silence around
pain, resilience and the quiet strength of survival. Her writting is
rooted in truth, memory, the hope of change and the fight for dignity
in a place where choice is forever denied.
Through
her work, she hopes to protect future generations of girls and inspire
change by speaking the truth many are forced to bury.
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