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On the first of January 2008 we were still fearful. On that day, we were not open for business.

I worked at the Eldama Ravine shopping centre at Mama Faith’s Shop. We owned the shop. It was just next to my house – they are joined together.

But I stayed home that day because I was scared. We left the shop locked up.

At about 3pm that day, people came to my home. At the time there was only my husband and I at home.

My children had gone to visit their grandparents in Nyandarua. There were more than ten people who came. They were all men. They were dressed in coats and they had smeared mud on their faces so you could not recognize them. The mud was different colors on their faces – white back and red in spots -- patches all over their faces. They were armed. They had arrows, pangas and rungus.

The first I knew they were there was when I heard talking and noises outside. They were speaking in Kalenjin.

They said “we have come to finish you." The door was not locked so they just came inside.

My husband and I were in the sitting room. We were sitting down but stood up as soon as the men walked in. When they came in I began to plead with them because of what I had heard them say.  I asked them why they were doing this when we had lived with them.

They ordered me to shut up and said that the Kikuyu had migrated to the area and taken up their (the Kalenjin’s) property. They asked me to be quiet or they were going to kill me. So I just kept quiet then.

That is when they started attacking my husband. They began cutting him with pangas and pierced him with arrows. My husband he did go without a fight, the men, they struggled to keep him to the ground.  They crowded him – ten of them against him... they attacked him. I was scared.

With a panga they sliced his neck, and he fell to the ground. It was a serious blow. As if that was not enough, that he was lying on the ground, they cut up his body into little pieces.

After they cut up my husband, but before he died, one of the men came towards me and asked me what I wanted to be done to me. I asked them not to kill me.

One said "we need to know what she is like, now that she never talks to us".

There was another group of men who were looting my shop. I could see them from the door – it was still open. They were going past carrying property from my shop: sugar, cooking fat and other goods.

I was wearing trousers with buttons at the waist. The men tore at my trousers trying to get them open and the buttons came off. There were about four of them there doing this to me at that time.

They lifted me up and put me on the ground. They were arguing amongst themselves who was going to be the first.

Then one said that if I escaped from the knife and arrows, I would die of AIDS.

Some of them held my legs and some held my hands while they raped me. When this was happening my husband and I were both still in the sitting room, but by now I was not watching my husband but pleading my own case.

The last time I had looked at him, it was like he was dead. He wasn’t moving.

One man raped me and then the second one and the third. They put their penises in my vagina.

It was either the second or the third man who said they were not able to get inside me:  so they cut me.

I think it was the panga they were carrying that they used.

They cut my vagina.

As they raped me I thought about my children. I remember that when I had my children, my doctor had told me that I had a narrow opening. So both my children were born by caesarean.

They continued raping me. It was when the fourth man was raping me that I went unconscious…I next remember – and it is vague – that a Kalenjin friend of ours called Joseph was there and he was pleading with the men. He was asking them for him to be allowed to take the body of my husband and take me to hospital. The men started quarrelling with him and told him that he was in partnership with us.

They threatened to kill him. […]

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This a story of a woman in Kenya during the election violence. How tragic! How sad!