Christine Makena Njeri is perhaps the most famous lesbian in Kenya. Her troubled past with her family is now thought to be the reason she was pushed into homosexuality.
Makena opened up about her family about two years ago, back then she was not as famous as she is today.
In a candid interview with Grace Msalame on NTV’s talk show Unscripted, Makena revealed some other dark family secrets including her father’s alcoholism, infidelity and violence.
The former Tahidi High actress left many Kenyans in shock after she revealed how her father was abusive to the whole family.
Makena grew up in Nakuru and she has one brother. Although her parents were well-off, her childhood was full of pain.
Her father struggled with alcoholism and was very abusive to her mother. The first day she witnessed her father’s violence was during her 5th birthday.
She had waited all day for her father to come so that they can cut the birthday cake together. When he finally came back home at night, he was drunk and took the cake and smashed it on the wall. He then started beating her mother.
According to Makena, that was the start of 20 painful years of seeing her mother being beaten silly by her father.
Makena used to share her bedroom with her mother to protect her from her father’s beatings. Her bedroom door had been broken on several occasions by her father trying to get her mother so that he could beat her.
Her father was not only violent to her mother, he also used to cheat on her as well. Makena even used to bump on him in Nakuru town with different women. Her father’s actions made her hate him so much.
“My dad cheated a lot on my mum. I would bump into him in town with different women,” Makena Njeri said.
Makena said that when she learnt her mother was secretly taking HIV/AIDS medication, the sad news broke her heart and totally changed her life.
“She went into severe depression and got a nervous breakdown. So those are the things to date I still think about, she didn’t have to go through that. She would take medicine (ARVS) and say it was for the nervous breakdown. That’s what we knew,” Njeri recalls.
She added that;
“When I was cleaning, I pumped into the medicine that she used to take, I opened the leaflet and started reading, the first line crashed me, my whole life came to a standstill.”
Makena’s mother died in 2013 and she chose not to speak to her father for two years until 2015 when he was on his deathbed.
She never visited her father in the hospital for a longtime until one day when her brother succeeded in convincing her just days before he passed on.
“He couldn’t talk, he was very sick and I told him, ‘Daddy I forgive you for everything you took us through. I set you free’”, Makena Njeri said.
Although her mother died in 2013, Makena said she was still going through stress due to the bitter past.
It’s thought that her father’s alcoholism, infidelity and violence is what caused Makena to hate men and pushed her to be a lesbian.
Related: “She’s A Fire Human Being” Kibe Reveals Why Women Keep Falling For Makena Njeri
