Daughter of the Leopard

A stubborn, precocious young girl is caught in the front line of the clash of cultures, as her remote tribe confronts new modern possibilities.

In 1970s Kenya, modernity's edge has finally made it up the hills to the Samburu tribe's secluded highland home. As her family reckons with new challenges to their ancient ways, young Monique chases belonging and her dreams. She sees her path ahead: towards independence, and away from being sold in young marriage. But with danger all around, it will take all of her grit, allies, and luck to stay on her chosen path, and to survive.

Real-life stories of a remarkable childhood, filled with humor, beauty, calamity, and strength: featuring pre-electricity traditional village life, outlaws and bandits, magnificent wildlife, a crazy cow, a traditional healer grandfather, rescues and escapes, mean "Granny Ears" and her rhino-hide belt, Catholic boarding school, and much more.

Ages 14+ : some mature themes, some cursing

. . . .

The Samburu, a group of the Maasai, live in Kenya's cool northwest highlands, near the Great Rift Valley. They take much pride in their traditions and ancient culture, which is rich in heritage and skill for surviving via the Old Ways. For centuries they have been quasi-nomadic pastoralists: herdsfolk who move around when it's useful to help their animals, traditionally cattle, thrive.

Monique's childhood was at a unique cultural transition point, but the issues she struggled with still challenge many families. This is especially so for the most remote and poorest, and for women and girls, who often still face enormous misogyny, abuse, FGM, and forced marriage. Traditional society is rigidly organized, and strictly controls women and girls, seeing them as mainly supports-or commodities-for men, and for raising children and doing most of the village labor. Samburu girls have often faced great difficulty if, like Monique, they aspire to a different path.

Modernity and climate change have placed additional strain on the already-difficult highland pastoralist life, causing rapid change. The ancient village-based cattle-keeping ways and the traditional medicine practiced by Monique's grandfather, for instance, may not last much longer. Her stories are also a useful record of some of those rapidly-vanishing ways, seen through her eyes; and a record of what it was like to live-as a girl-at the point when the hammer hit the anvil: when great change came for a culture that had long been seen as, and indeed regarded itself as, unchangeable.

Her stories also raise several big questions:

• Do we have to follow what our culture has planned for us, just because it has long been upheld as excellent?
• What do we do when the multiple aspects of our identities-ethnic/tribal, national, religious, gender, human-place conflicting demands on us and our rights and desires?
• How do children who face great difficulty and lack of support survive? How much can they thrive without that full support?
• How do you face intolerable control, hostility, and prejudice and escape to build your own life?

Names have been changed for privacy and dialogue and scenes reconstructed, but the story is told within the limits of standard memoir and creative nonfiction practice.