Kenyan actress hosts child marriage in Nawi

The 15-year-old star of a film about a schoolgirl forced to marry an older man is evangelical about her mission – even though her community in northwest Kenya may see her as a betrayal and treat her as an outcast.

“I want the film to spark conversations about this issue, because it’s really not something people want to talk about,” Michelle Lemuya Ikeny told the BBC.

She plays 13-year-old Nawi, a coming-of-age heroine set in Turkana County, a rural area bordering Uganda, where the UN says one in four girls are married before the age of 18.

“Many of my friends have had to drop out of school, or never go to school, because someone paid a dowry to marry them off, so their fathers made them marry them,” she says.

The film was shot in Turkana where Michelle, who grew up in Turkana, had these girls in mind when portraying Nawi’s emotions – a performance that won her the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Promising Actress last November.

Like all the local kids who star in the film, he never acted. When he signed up, he thought he was going to appear in a school drama.

“It has changed my life, but I don’t want it to change my personality,” says the teenager.

In the film, after 13-year-old Nawi learns that his exam results are the best in the region, he hears that his father is selling him to a rich man named Shadrack for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats”. “.

Rather than accept his fate, Nawi smears blood on his legs to fake a period on his wedding night and then runs away to pursue his dream of attending high school in the capital, Nairobi.

His father and Shadrack are angry and try to follow him, but he manages to outsmart him with the help of his brother.

However, he bravely returns home to Turkana to face them when he learns that his new sister has been promised to Shadrack as a surrogate bride.

There are many scenes that highlight how widespread child marriage is, and how it is tolerated despite being against the law. According to Kenya’s Marriage Act 2014, a person must be 18 years old to get married.

In one scene, when Nawi’s classmate Zawari doesn’t show up for his end-of-year exam, the boys in the class joke that he’s “busy making babies.”

The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, who won a writing competition launched by the German-Kenyan non-governmental organization Learning Lions.

According to Cherotich, his childhood was the inspiration for the script of his first feature film growing up in Turkana.

When asked if the story is based on a single person, he is initially too emotional to answer, but then tells how his sister was forced into marriage at the age of 14.

At the age of 15, her sister gave birth, but the child fell ill and died carrying her on her back.

“She ended up living a life that wasn’t hers. My parents and her husband designed the life. Those are the things I wanted to change,” Cherotich told the BBC.

Some backlash against the film is “highly expected” in Turkana, he says.

But to his delight, he has already managed to change one person’s perspective when he watched the initial screening of Nawi’s video links with his uncle – a staunch supporter of child marriage.

“After about 55 minutes, his eyes were watering. So he was crying. And inside I was happy because I was thinking, ‘At least one man has been touched now,'” she says.

“I realized the importance of storytelling, its power.”

Child marriage is far from a problem in Kenya: Girls in sub-Saharan Africa are at the highest risk of child marriage in the world, with one in three married before the age of 18, says the UN children’s agency Unicef.

As part of the UN’s sustainable development goals, 2030 was set as the deadline to completely end child marriage, but Unicef ​​says progress will need to be “significantly accelerated” to meet this target.

Prevalence is decreasing worldwide; today, one in five women between the ages of 20 and 24 was married as a child, compared to almost one in four 10 years ago.

The fastest progress has been made in South Asia, where a girl’s risk of child marriage has dropped by more than a third.

But a recent Unicef ​​report noted that West and Central Africa, the region with the highest prevalence of child marriage, had made little progress over the past 25 years. At the current rate, it would take the region another 200 years to eliminate the practice.

Toby Schmutzler, one of Nawi’s directors, says everyone who worked on the film was passionate about the project, but now the challenge is getting the film seen.

“The message can be very beautiful, but if no one sees the film, no one hears the message,” he says.

The film was screened at the UN headquarters in New York last month and was selected by Kenya for the Oscars, although it did not make last week’s shortlist.

However, the directorial team is happy to be in talks for an international release in the US, Canada, Europe, Central Africa and Australia.

The film was released in Kenya late last year, and had one of the longest runs ever for a locally produced film in Nairobi.

In Turkana, a Kenyan film director, Apuu Mourrine, has organized free screenings of Nawi in the Kakuma refugee camp.

He says the response has been largely positive, although the audience has been mainly young, so the team plans to organize a truck to show the film to the elders in local villages and get their reactions.

On the ground, in a joint initiative with Learning Lions, a new school has been built, where 300 boys and girls have already been enrolled.

Schmutzler says the Turkana community has welcomed her, as the school is free and even provides meals to the girls in an area that has experienced several droughts that have pushed many to the brink of starvation.

Michelle believes that if more people see the film, it will have the power to change lives.

“When you watch the film, try to put yourself in Nawi’s shoes, put yourself in the shoes of all those 640 million girls,” she says.

“When you’re young, you have so many dreams. I have so many dreams. When someone comes along and takes them away, it’s the worst feeling ever.”