My dear mother I write this letter to you, because I know my escape will break your heart. I have been your strength and hope, but I must go. I know you will suffer mother. Father will blame you when I leave. He will batter and hurl insults at you. His other wives will mock you. There will be no one to cry with you. Mother you have no son, there will be no one to speak for you. The chief will not listen to your case and the elders will not come to your defense. The village gossips will say it is no wonder that the gods did not give you a son. That you couldn’t even bring up your daughter well. Forgive me for not asking your permission first, but I know you would never let me go. You will be sad and lonely. There will be no one to help you with all your chores. You must travel a long distance to fetch water alone, fetch firewood by yourself, cook alone and clean the compound with no one to help you. Nobody will plough the shamba, plant, weed and harvest with you. There will be no one to massage you ailing back from all those beatings and many years of laborious work. Not a soul will sit sadly with you when you cry and pray amid pain. I know you will wish I didn’t go, but our eccentric village is no place for me.
Mother, I do not want to live like you and my sisters. You are a strong and enduring woman. Thoughts of you will motivate me every time I find difficulties. But my sisters’ plights do not inspire any admiration in me. Is it not enough that like me, they watched you suffer to bring us up? I know you sold my eldest sister to the travelling traders for a sack of maize during the drought of the year I was born. That father married off one of my sisters without informing you. And you aren’t even allowed to milk the cows he got for it, all because you have not given him a son. My twin sister bled to her death when we were forcibly circumcised. My younger sister who is not even two years in her marriage already looks older than her real age. She is only thirteen, yet she has already had three miscarriages because of her tender age and the severe beating she gets from her husband. They all say that like her mother’s, hers is a cursed womb. Father despises me because I refused to marry the elderly chief of our village. He is still angry with me for stabbing one of those men who came to carry me to the home of that old chief. He says I am an evil girl. When he heard that I had been raped, he did not sympathize with me, instead he said that I had asked for it. He even beat you for daring to console me when I cried.
I heard that in the city there are people who campaign for fair treatment of women and that even girls go to school. I must go through the forest to one of those places where girls are educated. If I reach there I will spare no effort to succeed. Then I will come back for you, and my sisters. It will be risky and am afraid of been killed by wild animals or hunters in the forest. But mother, I would rather die trying to be free than live in hopelessness.
