Wambui Otieno captured the imagination of Kenya over decades. While many may not have met her, her name is instantly recognisable and is accompanied by multiple narratives about nation building, gender, sexuality, ethnicity that in and of themselves have generated wide ranging public and academic analysis. When she died in 2011, the most featured reports in the Kenyan media spoke about her struggle against the Umira Kager clan for the right to bury her husband SM Otieno but most focused on her marriage to Mbugua, a man decades her junior. I am interested in Wambui Otieno - the widow, who was transformed through the act of marriage to a younger man into an immoral woman. The respectability associated with Wambui, who was imagined to be sexually inactive and companion-less for over thirty years after her husband’s death were reversed with one action – her mobilisation of the institution of marriage as a site that is argued to frame respectable sexual relations.
Using Wambui Otieno’s as a pivot for a larger body research I have conducted on widowhood practices in Kenya, I explore how expressions of sexuality that do not cohere to ‘respectable’ femininity are constrained, surveyed and demonised not because they are transgressions that undermine the social organisation of power. Actions such as Wambui’s especially when ‘performed’ in public destablise ruling forms of masculinity that are critical to sustaining political power bases.