Meet the Grandmothers Who Rule Kenya’s Legal Drug Markets
AT SOKO YA Nadhif market in Garissa, Kenya, the ones who come to buy the drugs are men. They arrive early in the morning, sometimes before dawn, waiting in the hot dark air for a good deal. New white Land Cruisers pull into the market, kicking up clouds of red dust behind them. The ones who rush to offload the cargo are men, too. They toss heavy bags of leaves over their shoulders before sorting them into sections: Sareye, Khadija, Fatuma. Each bag is marked with a woman’s name. Because although almost everyone who comes to Soko ya Nadhif market is a man, the ones who sell the drugs are women.
Sareye Budul Shafat, 52, is a soft-spoken mother of 10 who favors neon technicolor hijabs. While she calls herself a businesswoman, her gold jewelry and poker face hint at something more illicit.
Shafat is the founder of the Al-Amin Women’s Group, a collective organization of 10 women—mostly single mothers and grandmothers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s—who dominate Garissa’s khat industry. Attacks on the industry come from all sides, so women in the khat business are evasive about how much money they make. Shafat claims to bring in 20,000 Kenyan shillings (about $193) per month. But her shoes, her accessories, and the size of her house, as well as the number of men and women who call her “boss,” suggest much higher earnings.
Khat—a stimulant leaf from the plant that is criminalized in the United States and most of Europe but) industry has deep roots throughout the region. In Somaliland, a self-declared breakaway state in the Horn of Africa, an estimated 72 percent of khat vendors are women. In Ethiopia, one of the country’s richest people, Suhura Ismail, turned a roadside miraa stand into an international business empire with its own fleet of charter planes that transport the drug between Jijiga, a city in the Somali Regional State of eastern Ethiopia, and Somalia itself. (Like a boss, Suhura named the airline after herself.)
