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The first time I watched Nairobi Half Life I promised myself to never suffer the same fate as Mwas, the film’s main protagonist. Driven by the urge to seek greener pastures in Nairobi, Mwas moves from the village and gets consumed by the allure of the city’s hustle, barely making it out alive. Like Mwas, I was a village girl with aspirations of making it big in the city, but I was certain my life’s trajectory wouldn’t follow Mwas’s. Then there were the tragic tales of Kenyan girls coming back home from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries either broken and emaciated after barely surviving, or lying dead in body bags after succumbing to domestic slavery.
That too couldn’t be me.
But sometimes life has a dark sense of humour because before I knew it, I had become Mwas; in the form of one of those Saudi girls.
Let me take you back to the beginning.
It all started in 2011 when my father’s health took a turn for the worst, and after a long period of hospitalisation, he passed away, leaving five of us under my mother’s care. My father had worked as an accountant, and his income had made life bearable so his slow death meant the family watching as our main breadwinner faded away. But my father didn’t just fade away. He stuck around a bit longer, leaving behind a huge medical bill, yet the family’s income had gone with him.
With nowhere to turn, my mother set up a makeshift kibanda where she sold fruits, eggs and vegetables. It was through the earnings from that kibanda and from the family’s small farm that I scraped through high school – I was in primary school in Bomet in Kenya’s Rift Valley when my father died – making a home run when I scored a C+ and was admitted to Meru University in September 2017 for a Bachelor of Science degree in Food Science.
A university degree was supposed to be the panacea to all of my family’s problems. I was going to deliver it to them.
But first, I needed KSh 33,000 for my first-semester tuition fees, and when all attempts at securing financial aid failed, I resorted to doing menial jobs, starting out as a mama fua doing people’s laundry. The less laborious job was looking after people’s kids, sometimes tutoring them. I wasn’t foolish. I was broke.
I sailed through my first year of university through odd jobs and support from my mother, but by second year, staying on campus was untenable. The jobs were hard to come by, and one evening, dejected, my mother told me she couldn’t afford to support me while simultaneously taking my siblings through high school. She was sorry. I understood. And deferred my studies.
I gave Nairobi a shot, moved in with a friend in the outskirts of the city. For survival, I either had to have affairs with older men or resort to the party life, which came at a cost. Like free lunch, there was nothing like free drinks. I simply couldn’t. I was back at the village, the mundaneness driving me to thinking of packing my bag, writing a short farewell note to my mother and siblings then heading out to the busy Kericho-Litein highway and sauntering into oncoming traffic. Yet weirdly enough, home had always been my sanctuary. When dreams became nightmares, when everything was closing in, I always went home.
The small tea plantation; the beans we grew; the rain drops on the tin roof; the avocadoes we harvested at will; the mango tree I wished I could still climb and swing from; the uncontrolled laughter from my sometimes carefree siblings; my mother’s cautious, always restrained giggles; the familiar smell of rain in the soil; the cat sitting on the window seal; the greenery across the horizon; the singing birds; the coldness that stings if you are not used to it. And outside, my father’s grave, where I would visit in the mornings and evenings and pray.
***
I had always listened to stories of girls who had gotten detained by employers in the Middle East; stories of abuse, domestic slavery and dead bodies arriving at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi in body bags. In my mind, for some strange reason – maybe I was subconsciously conditioning myself to the possibility of resorting to domestic work in the Middle East – I folded these stories like pieces of paper and tucked them away in distant corners of my brain, convincing myself that such atrocities would never happen to me.
And so when I received a text message from a friend offering to connect me to a labour broker, I quickly packed my bags and rushed back to Nairobi. I already had a passport – my high school had an exchange program with a school in Aylesbury in the United Kingdom, and due to my stellar grades, I had been selected as one of the exchange students, much as the trip didn’t materialise. This meant less waiting time before travel to the Middle East, and less money paid to passport fast-tracking brokers.
I was headed to Qatar.
***
There’s a scene in Nairobi Half Life where once Mwas arrives in Nairobi, he pays a broker to get him an audition, only for Mwas to realise the whole affair ni story ya jaba. As it happens, I discovered once I was in Saudi Arabia – I was told just before the visa application that Riyadh made better financial sense than Doha, and so we went to the Saudi Arabia consulate and overlooked Qatar – that everyone involved in the Middle East domestic work brokerage was in it purely for the money, starting with the friend who sends you that first text; they get a commission.
So does the labour broker who connects you to the agent; so does the agent who gets you hired; so does the guy who gets you the visa; so do the people who do the pre-travel training; all costs incurred by your future employer, in my case a Saudi family which had been sold a pipe dream of a superhuman domestic worker. I got to know of this once my host in Riyadh got tired of me.
The tragedy is that by the time you realise you have been played, the culprits have already been paid and have most likely spent the money. I accepted the Nairobi truism ukichengwa chengeka. I was Mwas.
***
I arrived at the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on 27 June 2021 aboard an Air Arabia flight. Being my first flight, I was mesmerised by the usual frills; passing through immigration and reading the Kwaheri sign and knowing I was one of the few who was lucky enough to make an ‘escape’; waiting to board then boarding the humongous fresh-smelling aeroplane; and securing myself on my seat and enjoying on-air meals and drinks, all made bearable by comfort in numbers; there were other girls like myself onboard seeking a life.
The flight was uneventful and the airline staff completely courteous – much as I didn’t ask for anything, there was a feeling that they would be helpful in case I needed to, going by how politely they treated those seated in my vicinity. After sitting for what seemed like a pleasant eternity – I had wanted to stay awake for the entirety of the flight and take everything in, but caught myself a number of times catching forty winks – we finally landed and disembarked, and were met by friendly Saudi immigration officials. At arrivals, our Saudi agents gave each one of the girls a red rose, a fitting welcome into the land of milk and honey.
The pandemic was still on and countries were still cautious. We were driven to a hotel to quarantine for seven days. On the shuttle ride, I took in as much of Riyadh as I could; skyscrapers, wide spotless streets, luxurious residential and commercial districts. Soon I would get some days off and tour the streets of Riyadh, I thought to myself.
Post-quarantine, I was driven to my employer’s three-storey home. I was being employed by a man who wanted me to take care of his daughter and her daughter, his granddaughter. All I can say is the family seemed powerful and well-connected, and the man’s granddaughter was never to be called by her name but by a title which conveyed that she was royalty. I followed the rules.
The first thing my hosts did even before I could settle in properly was to ask for my passport, which they confiscated. I felt like resisting, but looking around, I remembered I was at the mercy of Saudis in their own house in their own country.
I started feeling like an early-day character in those horror Saudi stories; with your passport confiscated, you either run away and get arrested and deported, or endure suffering and humiliation until the ‘contract’ – which could be altered by the employer and wasn’t necessarily binding (like in my case) was over.
Or maybe I was overthinking.
There was another African lady working in my employer’s home, and in staying true to our sisterhood, she did everything she could to see that I found my footing. However, beyond the this-is-the-bathroom and this-is-the-kitchen bits and the standard do-not-answer-them-back-when-they-speak, I was generally supposed to find my own way, and this is where things got slippery very fast.
Our hosts had been sold the lie that all the girls who were making the trip to Riyadh had previously worked in Saudi Arabia, and so the expectation was that I, just like any of the other girls, already knew the drill, whatever that drill was.
Of course, there were cultural and religious differences; our hosts were Arab Muslims and a lot of us girls were neither, meaning there existed major and minor differences ranging from cuisine to beliefs to mannerisms. That there was an expectation for me to be of certain orientations or be in possession of certain skills out of my presumed prior stay in Saudi meant I was starting from a place of disadvantage, a clash of expectations which occurred immediately.
As I found my way around the home, I quickly picked up that the madam, my boss and employer henceforth, always slept during the day and was awake at night. This meant much as I worked during the day, I needed to be on high alert after nightfall since I could be called upon to attend to this, that or the other at any minute. And so I slept with my clothes on, not wanting to risk being called upon and not responding immediately. Any kind of delay wasn’t tolerated.
But this wasn’t my biggest challenge.
The biggest injustice my agent had committed against both my host and myself was to lie to my employer that I had exceptional culinary skills and could whip up a gourmet meal, whatever my hosts’ palates desired. And so from get-go, I was expected to read a variety of recipe books, follow the instructions then fix meals for the family. And much as I knew how to read and could find my way around the kitchen when it came to making Kenyan staples, I had zero ideas as to where to begin when it came to whatever I was encountering in the recipes.
And so it followed that my first day in the kitchen was a complete disaster. Having none of it, my host decided that I was simply being difficult and was refusing to cook, feigning ignorance. Getting out of her bedroom at 7 p.m. on most days, my boss would ask for food, and the moment I lay the plate in front of her, she would go on a shouting fit, saying how terrible the food was even before she tasted it. I wasn’t worth the money she had paid and was paying for me.
I established very early on that I only needed to stick around for as long as my boss’ tirades were in high gear, but the moment she slowed her slander down, I would sneak away to go and start cleaning her bedroom – scrub her bathroom, make her bed, pick up after her. And just like with my cooking, maybe I wasn’t as thorough in my cleaning as I thought I was, because one day after returning to her room after I was done cleaning it, my boss called me, and the moment she opened the door, all I knew were insults and whips from the broomstick.
She dragged me into her bathroom, where we found a single strand of hair lying on the floor, next to the toilet. I had failed to earn the day’s wage. With hands and eyes swollen – hands from beatings and eyes from crying – my boss asked me to first apologise for using my hands to shield myself against her assault. She considered this an act of aggression, and my punishment was to clean the mansion’s three floors, this underscored with a not-so-veiled threat.
‘‘I can just make a call to the police and say you’ve stolen my jewellery,’’ she warned, ‘‘and you will end up spending your entire time here in jail.’’
I started cleaning and crying.
The following day, I took my rickety phone and sent a WhatsApp message to my agent. I was dying. This wasn’t what I had bargained for. Could she speak to my boss and tell her all I wanted to do was to work? That if she wasn’t satisfied with my skills then could she let me go? My agent spoke to my boss. She denied wrongdoing. Turns out contacting my agent was a pretty big mistake.
My boss was furious, saying I had lied to my agent to make her look bad. At that time of the year, Riyadh was extremely hot – I wouldn’t encounter higher temperatures than those during my entire stay in the Kingdom – and so as punishment, my boss decided I needed to work outdoors, in the scorching Saudi sun. As this unfolded, I kept shooting successive WhatsApp messages to my agent, as if I were a hostage in distress (I kinda was, and would soon become a hostage-proper). The messages went unanswered, and as if reading my mind or getting a heads-up from my agent, my boss confiscated my phone.
‘‘Look at me you black monkey,’’ my boss lashed out, a scolding whose every word I recall verbatim. ‘‘You came here to work. I bought you. You will work and do as I say. Your agent can’t help you. I have power. This is my country.’’
Heart pierced, phoneless and moneyless, I had already spent almost a month in Riyadh, and would endure another three months under the same strenuous circumstances before I received my salary on 24 October 2021 – including that one time when my boss threatened ‘‘I will cut off your head and send it to your family.’’ I knew she didn’t mean it, but maybe she just could? -. I was asked for a Kenyan bank account, at which point I asked to be bought for a phone before the rest of the money was wired. My request was acceded to.
When I checked my bank account the following day, I realised I had been underpaid. The amount credited was lower than the difference between my four-month pay and the cost of the phone. I checked in with my boss. She wasn’t amused. I tabled my contract, which had a salary of 900 Saudi Riyals a month. She produced hers; 750 Saudi Riyals. 900 SARs was for experienced hands, she said, which I wasn’t. That’s how I earned 750 SARs henceforth – part of which paid for my siblings’ education, part of which started construction of a new family home. My agent was unreachable. I had thirteen months to go.
Over time, both my physical and mental health suffered. I ate less, food lost its appeal. Death seemed like a plausible option, but I held on because I couldn’t bear the thought of my mother receiving me in a body bag at the airport. I had to push on, and I pushed hard until there was no more pushing left in me.
As my host fasted and prayed during the holy month of Ramadan, I was stuck in the kitchen round the clock, either cooking or cleaning. I had been mistaken to imagine the special month of prayer would soften my hosts’ hearts, even just a little, to make them acknowledge my humanity and stop the abuse, for them to stop looking at me like I was a soulless robot who they wouldn’t look at twice.
But to be fair I wouldn’t blame them. By this time, even I couldn’t look at myself twice. I had lost so much weight and had become completely emaciated, my hair turning brown as if I had kwashiorkor. Joints across my body protruded like those of a Holocaust survivor, my bloodshot eyes and pointed cheekbones making me look like a ghost in a horror movie. My nights were filled with fear and hallucinations.
Fearing I would fall down and die, I asked my host to help me seek medical attention for whatever mix of ailments I was suffering from, but my pleas went with the wind. I was surprised they didn’t mind living with a near-skeleton in their home and having the same bones and a little blood and flesh do all their cleaning, including of where they slept, and to handle their precious food too.
I was back to being phoneless after my boss confiscated my phone once again – she seemed to have a fear of me communicating with the outside world – and so on a day when she travelled abroad, I pleaded with my fellow househelp, who had been warned against sharing her phone with me, and asked her to please allow me to make a couple of calls home. I would go for long periods of time without speaking to my family, but I wasn’t borrowing a phone to call them. I needed to speak to some friends who I thought would help set me free.
My plan was simple. Since I was a bag of bones, I was going to secretly take a series of half-naked photos and then send them to a friend in Nairobi, who would show them to my agent back home. This way, my agent would get a clearer picture of my dire situation and move with speed to avert the looming disaster. I took off my shirt, kept my bra on and snapped a couple of photos. My pants could barely hang on. I was a bag of bones, mainly, with some blood and flesh.
When the photos were shown to my agent, she was nonchalant.
‘‘Diana is working for a member of the Saudi royal family,’’ she reportedly told my friend. ‘‘There’s really nothing I can do to help her. My hands are tied.’’
Seeing that he had hit a dead end yet he was my only hope of getting out of Saudi Arabia, my friend made what some may consider a risky, non-consensual move which could easily have had a disastrous outcome. Without giving me as much as a heads-up, my friend posted the photos I had shared with him on Twitter (X), announcing to Kenya and the world that I was living like a caged animal and that it was only a matter of time before I arrived at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi in a body bag, a bag of lifeless bones.
The photos went viral.
As is always the case whenever a story of domestic slavery makes the headlines, the Kenyan embassy in Riyadh came under pressure, and so did the Saudi diplomatic authorities. The Kenyan embassy and the authorities in Riyadh finally responded. My hosts got a call instructing them to take me to a nearby hospital, where the embassy officials would meet us. By this point, I was still unaware of whatever was happening, uninformed of the Kenyan Twitter storm.
And so my obvious assumption was that my agent must have intervened.
Once at the hospital with the preliminaries disposed of, two Arab-looking men arrived and introduced themselves as representatives of the Kenyan embassy. Going by how I had been treated in Saudi as a lesser human due to my dark skin, I subconsciously decided that anyone Arab-looking couldn’t be Kenyan, and so didn’t really give the two men the time of day until a dark-skinned man from the embassy showed up. Before long, a Saudi bureaucrat joined us, and a discussion ensued between him and the Kenyans. Trying to talk me into finding an amicable solution with my employer, I was adamant that I wanted to leave.
I was thereafter transferred to a different, better hospital, and in the midst of all of this, I was oscillating between relief and terror; relieved to have left my employer’s home even just for a short while, afraid of what the future portended. I did a series of intensive tests, but I was informed I couldn’t get my test results because I had neither an Iqama – a long-term visa – nor my Kenyan passport.
From the hospital, I was taken to a facility called Sakan, where I saw a lot more Africans, with those I spoke to telling me it was a deportation centre. Named after the private company that owned it, the facility’s designation was that it ‘‘provides accommodation for immigrants in distress’’. I was put in isolation.
On my first night at the facility, I was interrogated twice, and from the sort of questions I was being asked, I started suspecting something had happened back in Kenya, still unaware that I had become the latest poster girl for domestic slavery. From being questioned as if I had done something wrong and being put in isolation, I went to bed terrified. However, all this changed the next morning when my Saudi boss showed up with my passport, half the money she owed me and a bag containing my possessions. The Kenya government had bought an air ticket for my return home, I was told. It was 5 September 2022.
Later that day, I was driven from the Sakan centre to King Khalid International Airport, where I boarded a Sharjah-bound Air Arabia flight. I couldn’t believe my luck. I passed out for most of the Sharjah-Nairobi flight, and the next thing I knew we were landing in Nairobi. It still hadn’t registered to me what my friend must have done and the amount of sympathy and attention my case garnered.
The Air Arabia flight touched down on 6 September 2022, and it was only after I emerged at the arrivals that I realised the kind of maelstrom I must have been part of. My mother, all teared up, ran towards me, hands outstretched, almost falling forward, my skeletal self running to her. We embraced, staggered, drunk with emotions, nearly collapsing together onto the floor. Those around us held us together. A woman wrapped us in a red Maasai shuka. Another woman started singing Kongoi Jehovah. The press swarmed around us. Overwhelmed, I couldn’t do or say much. There definitely must have been an all-out storm.
After receiving the most embrace I had ever received in my life from family, friends and strangers, it was only once my mother and siblings got into one of the SUVs donated for the day by the Bomet County government to chauffeur us from Nairobi to Bomet that I started hearing, in small doses, about what had transpired. It mattered and I was curious but I lacked the strength to focus. My mother could not speak much. She prayed almost nonstop, only stopping to touch my browned-out hair and protruding shoulder. Her face was a bunch of emotions, a mix of shock and relief. She needed to keep confirming it was me.
We drove to Parliament, had lunch with MPs from my home area followed by a photo session. Everyone wanted a photo of me or with me. I was lost. We were then driven to the village, where we arrived at 2 a.m. in the morning. The homestead was packed, the whole village had turned out to support me. A lady lady brought a ‘‘Welcome Home Diana’’ cake. That evening, the Vice Chancellor of Meru University called. The school was relieved I was still alive. I was home.
The following day my family took me to Longisa Hospital, where I did a checkup supported by Bomet County. I received treatment for a bunch of ailments and was given drugs and food supplements, to boost my weight. I was underweight and malnourished. Two days later, my Vice Chancellor showed up in the village. Bomet County had offered to pay my fees for the semester and to give me a stipend. I am overwhelmed by comradely love the day I report back to campus.
But before any of that, I am home, sitting in the incomplete house I was building my mother. Sometimes I watch the cat on the window seal, we stare at each other in silence, or look outside the window together, into the rolling green fields outside. I no longer feel like a stranger here. I leave the house whenever I feel imprisoned. I take a book, walk down the slope past the tea fields, past our neighbours’ homes to the river running across the valley. We used to swim here as kids. The water is clear, the crickets loud, myself free.
I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I start listening to the rain dancing on the iron sheets and know I am home, on my father’s land. I promise myself to not bury my dreams like my father was buried. I re-read I am Malala. My brothers and sisters are in school. I will be back in school soon and will start writing this between lectures, a job at the library and assignments. I cry less. But before I get to school, I wonder if I’ll perhaps escape again, to where I don’t know. My mother’s health is failing. The whispers grow stronger. ‘‘Run away from me now’’1. I refuse to think of the future. I am free and alive. Nothing else matters.
