Widow Inheritance: Throwing out the Baby With the Bath Water

By Adipo Sidang'

The cremation of the remains of Kibra MP Hon. Ken Odhiambo Okoth contrary to the Luo culture elicited public debate reminiscent of the S.M Otieno case in the late 80s, where the widow, Wambui Otieno battled in court with Umira Kager clan over where to bury the body of the then renowned lawyer. Wambui had wanted to bury her husband at their Upper Matasia home while the lawyer’s clan insisted he had to be buried in his ancestral home in accordance with Luo culture. The wishes of the clan carried the day.

Whereas the cremation of the Hon. Okoth’s remains was contested, it is the pronouncement by a splinter group of the Luo Council of Elders led by Nyandigo Ongadi that drew public opprobrium and approbation almost in equal measure. These elders demanded the inheritance of Okoth’s widow, Monica Okoth, by one of the late legislator’s brothers in line with Luo culture. Social media went ablaze with mixed reactions; those that opposed it caricatured wife inheritance as primitive, immoral and irreligious while those who supported the call felt the practice is an important component of Luo culture to be preserved. Mainstream media joined the bandwagon with sensationalized reporting of the matter that bordered on a mischaracterization of the practice of wife inheritance.

For starters, wife inheritance – also known as levirate marriage, is a customary practice that entails that upon the death of a husband, his brother or a male relative equivalent to a paternal cousin assumes the role of the deceased man by stepping in as the new head of the deceased’s home. The term “levirate” comes from Latin word “levir” which means a husband’s brother. The brother or the paternal cousin of the deceased thus becomes a wife inheritor; the two cohabit and culturally validate the arrangement through consummation which usually happens in the widow’s house. In some situations, the widow has the liberty to identify the man to inherit her from within the clan, while in other cases the widow has little or no power to decide who inherits her thus must remain acquiescent to the voice of the wise elders who make the decision. It is assumed the directive is in the interest of the common good and therefore has a utilitarian function of preserving the name of the deceased, especially if he died without having children. This explains why the Luo elders demanded ex cathedra that Hon. Okoth’s widow must be inherited. Whether this demand was justifiable in the prevailing context is a totally different matter.

For starters, wife inheritance – also known as levirate marriage, is a customary practice that entails that upon the death of a husband, his brother or a male relative equivalent to a paternal cousin assumes the role of the deceased man by stepping in as the new head of the deceased’s home.

The social media reactions relayed the disturbing misrepresentation that has for long perpetuated the narrative that African cultures were or are in some way defective and backward and many Africans have obsequiously submitted to a superior foreign culture. Australian social critic A.A. Philips coined a term for it – cultural cringe, the collective inferiority complex that makes the natives of a country dismiss their culture as inferior to other cultures. The West has largely become the source of our cultural validation. Cultural cringe impairs our ability to question, without feeling inferior, some of our practices, including wife inheritance, from a lived experience that is only unique to ourselves.

It is this inferiority that somehow makes a society peddle falsehoods, fallacies and exaggerations about aspects of its own culture. Therefore, when the debate on wife inheritance heightened on social media, it wasn’t surprising that some views were outrageous and bordered on bastardization of the cultural practice in question. These views are representational of the effects of the cultural servitude we were conscripted to by the West.

Wife Inheritance in the Bible

Wife inheritance, like any other “controversial” aspects of African cultures, is characterised as non- religious and satanic. However, wife inheritance is not exclusive to African traditional or non- religious for that matter. It escapes the critics that the practice is recorded in the Christian bible existing among Hebrews and Jews. Religion was and still is a function of the culture that creates it.

Deuteronomy 25:5-10, for instance, commands a brother to marry the widow of his childless brother to perpetuate the name of the deceased brother. Some of the examples from the Bible are the marriage of Boaz to the Moabite widow Ruth (Ruth 4:9) and the marriage of Onan to Tamar, Er’s widow (Genesis 38:6-10).

The West has largely become the source of our cultural validation. Cultural cringe impairs our ability to question, without feeling inferior, some of our practices, including wife inheritance, from a lived experience that is only unique to ourselves.

Wife inheritance was for centuries practiced among the Nilotic Luo peoples of Western Kenya, Northern Uganda and the Mara region of Tanzania as part of the metaphysics of their cultures. Like other practices, it echoed the unwritten laws of the ancestors who acted as the interceders to the gods. The Luo of Kenya for a long time termed the practice “tero” or “lako” to mean the rite of inheriting a widow. Wife inheritance also obtains among other Nilotic groups such as the Dinka, Nuer, Atuot and Anywaak of South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The practice was also common among Bantu tribes of East Africa such as the Abaluhya (Maragoli, Bukusu and Samia) and Abagusii of Kenya and the Bagwere people of Uganda. It was strongly present among Southern Bantus of Zimbabwe and Mozambique and South Eastern Bantus of Malawi. All these tribes in their separate ways regarded wife inheritance as an institution of widow care chiefly established to protect the widow and children of the deceased.

In Malawi, for instance, the Sena people practise kulowa kufa in which a widow is married to another man or brother of the deceased husband to protect the name of the deceased and care for the widow and children.

In West Africa, wife inheritance was practised by the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria and the practice is still common in rural areas. Customary laws of the three tribes require that upon the death of her husband, a widow must be inherited by a male relative of the late husband. In Yoruba culture, if a polygamous man died, his youngest wife would be inherited by the eldest son of the deceased man. This arrangement was also common among the Luhya of Kenya even though the practice has principally been abandoned, unlike among Yoruba people where it is supposedly still in force. To a non-Yoruba, this would look like institutionalized incest, a practice that was fairly common among European royal blood lines only that in the latter, marriages happened between first cousins.

An article appearing in National Geographic magazine in 2010 titled “The Risks and Rewards of Royal Incest” delved into the reality of inbreeding among royals like the Bourbons of France, Hawaiian royals, Hohenzollerns of Prussia and the British royal family. In the British royal family, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married her maternal first cousin Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia then later married her paternal first cousin Duke of Hesse, in line with the wishes of her grandmother Queen Victoria who happens to be a great-great grandmother to Queen Elizabeth II. Incestuous marriages led to the end of the Spanish Hapsburg royal family with the death of King Charles II in 1700. King Charles II, popularly known as El Hechizado or the Hexed (Bewitched), was practically a sickly king with serious mental and physical health disabilities as a result of centuries of inbreeding.

Ironically, while the colonialists were quick to label African practices and tribes as retrogressive, inbreeding among European royals was labeled more as a health risk than as a retrogressive practice.

Communalism or Patriarchy

It is pure ignorance to claim that wife inheritance as culturally practised by various African and even Asian tribes, like Hunnish tribes of Central Asia and Pashtuns of Afghanistan, was retrogression. Just as inbreeding sought to keep the royalty within families, wife inheritance sought continuity of one’s bloodline. The caring for widows and continuation of the bloodline of a deceased man is guided by an underlying philosophy and is part of a governance structure of a society.

In the Luo community, two things stand out which are common in most communities that practised wife inheritance and African communities in general; the first is patriarchy. The directive by the Luo Council of Elders to Hon. Okoth’s family demonstrated the extent to which elders created social and political order and defined the economic structures including control of property. Among the Luo community, elders were revered as the decision makers on most cultural affairs; they monopolized wisdom and guided their people and protected the interests of their people first. Whereas the community was patriarchal, widows (and married women) inherit land rights by virtue of marriage and farm land nearly in the same manner as matriarchal African societies like the Owambo people of Namibia or the Serer people of Senegal.

Just as inbreeding sought to keep the royalty within families, wife inheritance sought continuity of one’s bloodline. The caring for widows and continuation of the bloodline of a deceased man is guided by an underlying philosophy and is part of a governance structure of a society.

With the corruption of the institution of wife inheritance, there has been increased hostility towards widows. In the 90s, wife inheritors among the Luo of Kenya became popularly known as “terrorists” – a pun curved out of the word “tero” (the practise of wife inheritance), and which symbolized a casual bravado by male relations who had abused and corrupted the hitherto cultural institution of caring for the widow’s welfare and the family of the deceased.

As a result of this, wife inheritance has been treated as one of the legacies of patriarchal dictatorship among the Luo community and feminist scholars have launched their campaigns against the practice from that viewpoint.

Secondly, the Luo community – like most African communities, had very strong clan structures that influenced how communalism was interpreted. For Luos, communalism inspired a unique social welfare system that transcended the living world to the ancestral. Communalism not only guided kinship and relations but also how the living viewed and related to the “living dead” and the ancestors. Life was a shared experience driven by cultural truths that inspired collective consciousness for the other. It is this cultural organization that partly inspired the institution of widow care among Luos. When you married a woman, she became a daughter of the community in the same way her husband was a son of the community.

Racism the Root of Cultural Colonialism

While advancing their Western patriarchal values, the West significantly disrupted African communal systems. This agenda was driven by the patronizing colonial view of Africa, as a cultural space inferior to Western culture. Western scholars went to the great extent of intellectualizing this racist ideology. German scholar GWF Hegel (1770-1831) without ever traveling to Africa, fascinatingly described that Africa (South of Sahara) was “Africa proper”, “a land of childhood…enveloped in the dark mantle of night”, and without any relevance to world history because Sub-Saharan Africa was characterized as having neither a history nor civilization. According to Hegel, Africa had no history because to have history is to have reason – a capacity deficient among Africans. These radical views influenced the growth of the racial ideology that bedeviled Africa and Africans across continents and devalued the significance of our cultures in the eyes of the world.

Through deliberate restructuring of African cultures to adhere to the modern (read European/American) dictates of civilization, some African cultural practices like wife inheritance were declared immoral, and as a result have been targeted on the grounds that they are immoral and backward. Thanks to neo-liberalism – the “new world order”, the rise of secular democracy has significantly re-organized the socio-political and economic structures of African societies as it tramples upon any cultural considerations. Religion and colonialism enhanced the slavery narrative that Africans were inferior. Religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian religion, established an anti- culture evangelization project to overthrow cultural practices conveniently labeled Satanic. More specifically the Christian ethics of Protestant tradition is partly responsible for the capitalist economic (dis)order due to its emphasis on individual achievement and the religious adulation of the same; Max Weber extensively speaks about this in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Colonialism, on the other hand, reinvented African societies by dismantling and destroying the existing socio-cultural structures then supplanted them with a new set of cultural ideologies. The result was a disintegration of communal structures which has contributed to abandonment of our communal values. The individualistic-cum-capitalist Western culture invaded our communalism and consequently post-independent African societies have since been atomized as people seek individual survival and happiness over communal welfare and social values. This atomization was enhanced in the 1960s and 1970s with the abandonment of the idea of common land ownership, among other things, and later in the 1980s and 1990s people began to migrate, like everywhere else, from rural to urban centres away from their communities.

Cultural Gigolos and HIV Prevalence

Social critics have portrayed wife inheritance as a form of subjugation of women but this must be viewed within the context of wife inheritance as practised today which continues to defy the relevant cultural expectations of the community. In fact, it is contested that what is practised today cannot pass for wife inheritance as it is contrary to the very idea of widow care. This is because the corrupted version has become synonymous with plundering of the wealth and property of the widows.

Under this corrupt regime of wife inheritance, in place of responsible brothers-in-law are “professional” wife inheritors who gallivant from one funeral to the next in search of bereaved and vulnerable widows. This crop of men mostly are opportunistic individuals not only without the means to take care of themselves let alone the widows they intend to inherit but also devoid of a reasonable sense of direction that adulthood affords normal human beings. They abandon their marriages – if they have any, to become “cultural gigolos”. In the process, they infect or re-infect the widows with HIV, or get infected or re-infected, before they move on to their next victim.

Colonialism, on the other hand, reinvented African societies by dismantling and destroying the existing socio-cultural structures then supplanted them with a new set of cultural ideologies.

This cultural sleaze can be attributed to weak communal structures, coupled with poverty and ignorance, which have enabled people to exploit cultural loopholes to their own immoral benefit. A clan like Uyoma along the shores of Lake Victoria, Siaya County, has witnessed all sorts of “terrorists”; most if not all cases do not meet the widow care threshold. Men come from across the lake as far as Uganda in search of greener pasture only to retire as serial wife inheritors in this or that village.

Studies show that societies where wife inheritance is practised have recorded high HIV prevalence, whether or not practices align with cultural requirements. A 2018 Government of Kenya HIV/AIDS prevalence report showed that counties in Nyanza region of Kenya where wife inheritance (safe to say the corrupted version since the institution of widow care has since died) is still rife recorded a prevalence rate ranging from 7.7% to 21.7% which was way above the national prevalence rate of 4.9%. In 2004, a UNDP report dubbed “Human Development Report for Nigeria. HIV and AIDS: A Challenge to Sustainable Human Development” found that the practice of wife inheritance was one of the leading causes of HIV in Nigeria. In 2006, Women UN Report Network observed there was high HIV rates in Mzimba District, Malawi North due to chokolo (wife inheritance). HIV/AIDS prevalence rates are high in other cultures where this practice is still rife including the Congo, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda and Tanzania.

The only thing that these studies don’t tell us is that the institution of widow inheritance has since been overthrown and what reigns is the corrupted version of wife inheritance. Whereas some stakeholders have registered reservations about the veracity of statistics, it is vital that we assess from a cultural point of the utilitarian value of widow care from a health risk perspective now that what is left of it is an imitation of the institution.

Under this corrupt regime of wife inheritance, in place of responsible brothers-in-law are “professional” wife inheritors who gallivant from one funeral to the next in search of bereaved and vulnerable widows.

In my view, the health risk arising from the corruption of the practice would be the only sound argument against the traditional institution of widow care; and we lose nothing really because the institution has largely been abandoned and, in its place, an unfortunate debauched practice installed. I would, and actually have advocated the end to wife inheritance on grounds that as it is practised today, it has increased HIV prevalence; but I wouldn’t push for its ban on the flimsy premise that it is antithetical to Western cultures and the Judeo-Christian omni-God, or because it doesn’t fit within the philosophy of radical feminists.

On utilitarian grounds therefore, the Luo community and other communities that practised wife inheritance, should assess the challenges the institution has gone through in light of the needs, safety and security of widows at a time where HIV prevalence is growing. It is my proposition that our communities can replace widow care with widow empowerment initiated by a communal support system that involves the support of government under a National Safety Net Program which I believe would go a long way in enabling young widows with little or no income to become independent. Both county and national governments can work with clan elders to build priorities around supporting poor and uneducated widows as a strategy of combating HIV prevalence. Widows should then be free to choose to whom they get remarried to without being victimized or discriminated by the late husband’s relatives or even by fellow women. It must not be lost on us that a majority of widows in our communities are semi-literate and struggle to eke out a living increasing their sense of vulnerability and unlike Monica Okoth, their individual plight may never generate social media debate in their defense and or in defense of culture.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. Widow Inheritance: Throwing out the Baby With the Bath Water

By Adipo Sidang'

There’s something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy. – Aminatta Forna

Our parents are an example of two things: What marriage should be like; What marriage should not be like.

I met the husband I never married when I was sixteen. He became the biological father of my child a few years later and he was proud to call me his wife. We never had a wedding albeit living together … in theory – as he often travelled meaning we did not really spend much time together. And by the time we reunited, we had spent so much time apart that we felt like strangers. We had become accustomed to making separate decisions in separate countries and over time, our worldviews evolved in divergent directions. As I had become a mother at a very young age, I started, as many women might, feeling a little empty. My child was growing older and being a mother could not define my whole identity. What happened to all the things my younger self-thought I would one day do? My parents, who are card-holding members of the Baby Boomer generation, modeled to me as a child, that in a marriage, one stays put until death do us apart. You may hurt and drain yourself, but in the end, you will have done the honourable thing by staying wedded.

Later in life, parents resting in their graves, married to death, you look back at old photos and realise they were once possibly happy. They had good times. They kissed, loved and laughed. Then I mirror that against my own relationship that did not stand the test of time.

Old photos with your former partner, only tell one little part of the whole story – the part that is most hopeful and happy.

Happy … that little word people have written hundreds of books about because we are socialised to seek happiness all our lives. These popular notions do not really capture the full spectrum of the human experience but they continue to prevail over the choices we make and do not make.

I did not choose to be born to a Kenyan father and a Russian mother. Yet, they informed a large part of the insecurity I both consciously and subconsciously developed around love and marriage. They informed the choices I made and they informed the choices I did not make.

As a woman in her 30s reflecting on my parents’ complex marriage, I have developed a curiosity about what really built their union; why did they stay together, despite the unforgiving conflicts?

I do not have any easy answers but in the process of dissecting the complexities, I came to realise how daring my parents were. They ventured outside the bonds of their culture, and, merged to find solace in each other, creating new identities in worlds that were distinct from the worlds they were born into.

My father was an intellectual, who studiously worked toward a success he had defined in his mind. He was among the privileged Kenyan Baby Boomers, from his hometown, Kuria, and from the country in general, to travel abroad for higher education circa 1965. Not only did he travel overseas, he travelled into the tensions of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war.

I have tried to recreate the past in my mind. What was life like for a young black African man in my mother’s hometown, the southern city of Krasnodar, close to the Black Sea – the warmer part of the country. If only I was older during his final days, we might have had these conversations, and I would be better informed. There were times, as a child, I felt he wanted to tell me more but he did not know how too. We would sit and stare at each other. He would murmur something incomprehensible to my young mind about his regrets. Years later, I hold vague memories of what might have transpired. He wanted to speak of the hardships of his past. He wanted to talk of the racial hardships in the USSR. The Soviets, who had been isolated from the rest of the world found African people completely alien and projected all manner of negative stereotypes. In my view, it was not an overt kind of racism with a historical context common in the West. It stemmed from a profiling of the unknown given that exposure to black people was nearly none existent. The name- calling took place mainly amongst the men, who over a few drinks could become fast friends. This is not to say grave and violent incidents did not occur, more so among the less educated or jobless. Being the studious man he was, he persevered through it all and gained the respect of the Soviets, going on to earn a PhD in Agricultural Engineering.

I also heard he handled quite a number of substantive projects and began to earn money that distinguished him from the rest of his peers. In time this made him something of an outlier and an exotic catch for the Russian ladies. Many women of the time harboured dreams of any ticket out of the USSR. They were told of a tropical location with succulent mangoes and sunny days throughout the year. The commonly viable escape was the West and Africa in its remoteness, held a certain allure for the adventurous.

The alcoholic addiction that afflicted the troubled Soviet men further made the foreign men a more appealing option regardless of race. The strong Soviet women kept the homes going and the broken men found solace in war songs and vodka shots. The contrast in modest behaviour and disciplined lifestyles displayed by African men made them objects of curiosity for many women. They were hard- working and appeared to have clear visions for their future. They all dreamt of the big things they would do back home. Mixed-race children like I came to be known as ‘mulatos’. But it was not that simple. While my grandmother was against the idea of mixing blood and polluting the purity of their race, the Baby Boomers dared to be different. Not all had the courage to do so, as my mother did. Several women would end up aborting their mixed-race babies. My mother bore my sister in 1980, and as normally happens, the family grew fond of the baby. Although my sister recalls having a happy early childhood there, it was deemed not the most suitable option to raise a mixed-race child in the Krasnodar Krai.

Among the Africans, the Kenyans were deemed reliable and quite a number of them proudly brought their dainty Russian brides home. My father was fluent in Russian. So fluent that if someone spoke to him on phone, not having seen his face, they would assume that he was white and possibly blue or hazel eyed. I know he was also a charmer, for I recall him fondling my mother in front of other guests at parties, who themselves were too conservative to do the same with their partners. He was a man defined by his zeal, swinging between extremes of utter joy and frightful bitterness, as if he embodied two different people.

His public displays of affection toward my mother embarrassed me. Compared to the restraint of his peers, he seemed inappropriate. I questioned the authenticity as well. I would normally walk away from the scene thinking of it as a short-lived façade. By the third day of the week, they would be throwing unpleasant curses at each other. This was my normal, outside the fixed smiles in the family photos.

My mother was also an educated woman with a Masters degree in Economics and a beautiful cursive handwriting that I worked hard to emulate. The quality of the education, for all men and women alike, was high; the one thing the country did not compromise amid the chaos leading to the fall of the USSR was educational standards. While the men were burdened by the trauma of the cumulative conflicts of the time and the patriotic duty as the state’s soldiers, who put their lives forward for their country – willingly – many at a steep price, the women ended up filling the ranks as the brains of their institutions. It was common to have a significant number of women in varied fields from accounting to aeronautics. The first Russian woman in the world to fly to space in the 1960s was Valentina Vladimirovna – coincidentally, my mother was also a Vladimirovna.

There is a subtext to this inclusivity. The legal equality of women and men in Russia came circa 1917 under Lenin, who believed that women had a crucial and economic role to play in the communist revolution and need not be tied down to domestic roles. For about a decade (before much was reversed) not only was abortion legalized, but marriage was separated from the church and children born out of wedlock enjoyed equal rights. It always positively baffles me that the likes of my mother were born into Women’s Rights and still prioritized domesticated roles and motherhood above other pursuits of self.

My father, on the other hand, had been away from home for about 15 years. Through his hard work, the young family moved to Kenya around 1985, to start a new and supposedly free life under the sun. There were high expectations placed on my father, having been a pioneer of high education and interracial marriage in his community. He felt obliged to come back with a family, look settled and successful, with several not-so-well-off relatives waiting for the ‘benefits’ of his achievements. As Yvonne Owuor wrote in Dust, they would, “show up in every inconvenient season with a long story, one thin dead chicken – stolen – and hands outstretched to receive alms,” from him.

To his community, he was a new man. He returned wearing his one of a kind velvet suits, reading Russian books and playing vinyl records from our very large collection. I clearly remember Donna Summer among them. Mother blended into the Kenyan workforce and even joined a Kuria women’s chama. Her outward calmness, elegance and dedication to being a homemaker, disguised her actual bravery. She had rebelled against a system; left her homeland, found ways to sink roots in a new land and raise a family. She spent occasional nights missing Mother Russia- when she’d sit in the verandah after dinner, the glass door shut, looking out into the darkness in deep thought, having a cigarette whose puffs took her back home – the only times I saw her smoke. I would watch her silently from a corner of the sitting room, out of her line sight trying to read her pensive mood.

Like the round leaf and a lily flower that floats on the surface of the water in a pond, my parents sustained each other. A symbiotic relationship, picturesque on the surface and turbid below. So they floated, one upon the other, content in regiment, solid in growth only to be fragmented in loss.

Is that what marriage really is? A deep-rooted binding institution, further complicated by our heritage, nurturing, beliefs; something that I misunderstood while I fixated on my parents’ photos? How could I trust this institution?

So a few years into my own, so-to-say, customary marriage, the union finally came to an end. It was not a one-day affair. It was a steady decline; an airplane preparing for landing in bad weather accompanied by a series of drastic actions, and regret that it could not have gone any other way. It was not a smooth landing.

I began rebuilding the parts of me I had shattered. He too left to pick up the parked parts of his life before my existence. I was the interlude that gave it an ideal neither of us could live up to. I once thought leaving was strength until I realised the strength was in the staying. I did not have the courage my mother had to stay. Neither can I be certain that she should have.

UNBOWED

Having made peace with the paradox of choice, I went through a period of exploring life stories – memoirs and autobiographies. Among them was Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed where she explored what I would call a traditional childhood, girlhood and transition to womanhood in the context of her Kikuyu upbringing.

Roles were defined, expectations were clear – no surprises. Family and marriage were a communal affair necessitated by the need to organise life, retain values and manage the community’s resources. You could not wake up one morning and decide to unlove someone. Neither could you voluntarily neglect your role.

Her parents were of a time when polygamy was a norm. Co-wives were friends and the children played together, calling all the wives ‘mother’. Wangari writes that she did not sense any discrimination and if her parents had any problems they were kept out of it; she never saw them argue. Perhaps it was not acceptable for a wife to be confrontational with her husband. Nonetheless, roles and expectations were not ambiguous. It was not about the individual, it was about the community. Marriage was an expectation and families in the same homestead often married from the same community, expectedly grooming certain young men and women for marriage. This generally meant you married someone with shared communal values. You learnt to love and respect each other. We cannot ascertain that this would always be the case, but longevity of marriage was in some way guaranteed.

Wangari herself, who pursued her higher education in America, never witnessed the traditional longevity of her marriage. Her husband called it quits. She said her husband claimed that she was, “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.” But rather than defend these reasons (of which I suspect were traits she was, in fact, proud of) she beautifully captured the fragility of contemporary marriages when examined objectively.

“When we go through profound experiences, they change us. We risk our relationships with friends and family. They may not like the decisions we have taken or may feel threatened by our decisions. They may wonder what happened to the person they once knew. There may not be enough space in a relationship for aspirations and beliefs or mutual interests and aims to unfold. For a couple, this is particularly so because most people marry young and are bound to grow and change in their perceptions and appreciation of life.”

Regardless of this opinion, she wanted to keep her marriage for social reasons but did not wish to give up any of her aspirations for a more traditional role. Her marriage was officially annulled in 1979 but her bigger picture still stood as, “I was still the chairman of the National Council for Women of Kenya and I was still developing the Green Belt Movement.”

Influenced by the American school of thought, she needed to accomplish what she felt was her mission in life. “I also took America back to Kenya with me … There is a persistence, a seriousness, and a vision to America: it seems to know where it is going and it will go in that direction, whether you like it or not.” Wangari held onto her aspirations, my mother held onto her family- both strong choices for women who came from family-oriented communities. Wangari showed her strength overtly, my mother held it silently.

So I say to myself, let bygones be bygones as I examine contemporary marriages in search of role models to follow. In this new age, many of my millennial peers have had the opportunity to study abroad, subscribe to western notions of love and romance and have bought into the idea of one’s individual aspirations as the epitome of the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. Those I looked at for hope in marriage have not survived the institution. Some are living in the same home-like ghosts, at the brink of sanity. Others settled for companionship and neglected the institutional commitment of marriage. Others, like myself, have developed a phobic awareness of the responsibilities of marriage, and have acceded to the idea that it is bound to fail.

Marriage comes down to choice: the choices mama made, the choices Wangari made, the choices I am making. Their choice to leave or stay, evolved into my choice to marry or not, on the backdrop of my reflections and attitude toward their marriages. In as much as I judged their choices harshly in my younger years, I now look at them with empathy – an empathy that does not seek to explore that path. An empathy that looks at my modern life as an advantage in the freedom we think we hold and in how we navigate our lives. An empathy that elevates the value of companionship in our chaotic urban lives and dismisses the idea that marriage is crucial for its attainment – for after all, their stories show the loneliness their marriages hid and the irony of committing to a life partner but craving freedom. So much for the myth of Happily Ever After.

In retrospect, I feel I have found a new (but detached) appreciation for the institutional and dutiful nature of marriage in a world where choice has become narcissistic. Everything depends on the individual. Your happiness depends on you. Your misery depends on you. It is your fault for attracting a flawed partner. We continue to await the unattainable, The One. These are the egoistic ideals we ruin our communities chasing. We forget that by the very act of holding an identity card, we represent civil principles, we forget that marriage is supposed to give us certain rights in how birth, death and resources are organized, besides the traditional legitimacy within our community.

I take comfort in my choice to refrain from binding myself to the institution only to let it down. A comfort bred in the art of singlehood, while subconsciously in the search for that which I know I will never find – the Happily Ever After. Something my mother already knew when she chose to stay.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Widow Inheritance: Throwing out the Baby With the Bath Water

By Adipo Sidang' If a doctor were to diagnose millennial marriages, he would find them diseased, plagued by forces of nature beyond their control. These three anecdotes illustrate the three biggest challenges that millennials are grappling with in marriage.

In December 2014, I accompanied a friend to Embu, in Eastern Kenya for a ruracio (A traditional Agikuyu and Aembu wedding ceremony). It was a well-attended ceremony that brought together two traditions (Luo and Aembu) with a dash of modernity, given my friend had defied his family rejection of the woman’s position (due to her ethnicity) – reveling in love and idealism of the youth and urbanization, to marry across ethnic lines.

The two had been living together since graduation, two years before, and the ruracio had been accelerated by an inevitable pregnancy, so the man had to ‘make things right.’ But they were married in every sense of the word upon the blessing of her parents after the Christmas Eve ruracio.

They were meant to live happily forever. However, forever did not last six months.

In a dramatic, if not disturbing discovery, it turned out the child was not his. The DNA results devastated my friend. They ‘divorced’, with no chance of remarrying.

At 27, life had served him one of the most brutal blows. My friend went into depression, taking to alcoholism, sleeping around, seeking solace in church before he could sober up a year later.

Not sure what became of the woman, except that she was 26, and was to be a part of growing number of single mothers under 30 in the country.

Is that the end for the two? We can assume that they may attempt to get married in the future.

A few years back, one of my closest friends fell out with a woman he was cohabiting with (more like kicked out of the house).

They were about the same age; however, the girlfriend joined the university earlier by going through the ‘parallel program’. My friend waited for two years and a government stipend before joining the public university. She graduated way ahead of him, and by the time my friend was finishing his undergraduate, she was through with her masters. A parallel program averaged two and half years compared to a regular program that took four or five years and could be imperiled by a strike by students or lecturers.

She got into gainful employment, rose through the ranks in her organisation, and continued to support her man for two years before she got tired of the man’s jobless status and dumped him. My friend is not the first man to be dumped or left because of his dim economic prospects.

Lastly is the case of Jeff Nyongesa*. When his wife requested his indulgence and permission for a night out with the girls, he grudgingly consented. They have a six-month-old baby, and the agreement was that she would be home by 11 pm. She was not home by midnight, and on calling her she didn’t answer her phone, and worse she switched it off (or it ran out of charge). Seething, he called her mother and all her authoritative relatives and raised a storm, spelling it out in black and white that he was not happy with ‘their daughter’s’ conduct. He says gleefully, this ‘tamed’ her.

***

In the first instance, the problem is adultery gone wrong. The second instance is an increasingly common problem, as we are hit with economic recession; many young men are jobless, underemployed—stuck in jobs that can hardly sustain them, let alone a marriage. It has aptly been called a mancession-where more male-dominated jobs are lost compared to female-dominated ones during a period of economic difficulty.

Understandably, men can provide for their unemployed wives, but for women, the support often comes tethered to an expiration date. And there is enough anecdotal evidence to support this. Undeniably, there are exceptions, but largely found among the ranks of older women with cultivated patience and not so much among the younger peers.

Women world over, while empowered and economically secure, are socialized to still desire a man who can provide, and the male status is linked to the role of a breadwinner. So dire, that in America, Trump’s election was largely attributed to the scores of unemployed men in America’s Rust Belt, who have lost their jobs to technology, or factories having been shipped to China or Mexico.

In a poll conducted in the US and published by the Harvard Business Review, ahead of the 2016 American elections, it emerged that even the thought of earning less than their spouses made men vote for Trump. Intuitively, men know what it means when a woman earns more.

A study done more than a decade ago and published in the journal of Biology Letters confirmed as much:

Men prefer younger women due to their higher fertility, while women prefer older men due to their wealth and high status, which makes them good providers for the offspring.

Nyongesa’s case is a barometer of shifting cultural mores. As millennials, we are in a contradicting transition. As an Anthropologist, Paul Omondi (of the University of Nairobi) pithily puts it…

“A modern, educated woman can go to her job during the week, attend a chama meeting on Saturday, go drinking and dancing on Saturday night, go to Church on Sunday, and still make time for the family.”

All her aspirations are antithetical to traditional African socially prescribed expectation of a woman’s place in marriage.

We are stuck with an outdated ideological construction of gender. Men have resisted conformity to conventional feminism ideals that preach: what is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander, hence the false sense of emasculation.

For all the progressive nuances and liberalism millennial men may have cultivated and displayed, if a poll is run on what men expect in women they want to marry, their expectations will correspond to the traditional expectations their fathers’ generation. Women want a better version of their fathers for husbands: sensitive, available, liberal and preferably financially well off.

Both sexes are disappointed that neither is living in the traditional paradigm.

A brief history of Women Empowerment

Nobody should fault women for wanting it all. It was a necessary moral choice to empower women so that they can be active participants in the economic development.

The journey to gender equality started in 1975 at the UN Conference on Women. National governments acknowledged women as the missing link in national development and economic success. The authors of this paper, argue the intentions to empower women were good, the opportunity cost of not empowering women without involving men had socio-economic and political risks. The plight of the boy child in Kenya was not part of public discourse for nearly three decades until about a decade ago when Maendeleo ya Wanaume led by a dubious Nderitu Njoka surfaced and tried to articulate the problems of men in the wake of the gains accrued from women empowerment.

The Eurocentric education we inherited after colonialism altered our indigenous worldview in favour of the Western way of life. African women long suppressed by patriarchy would benefit from this education, and 40-odd years later since we started involving women in economic development, our country’s GDP grew from $3.25 in 1975 to $ 75 billion in 2017, but not without socio-cultural consequences.

In education the gender gap reduced over the years to 59 percent for men and 41 for women by 2015, according to the Nation Media’s Newsplex investigation. The gap is still shrinking, and career levering courses such as nursing, medicine, dental surgery, environmental studies, biochemistry and pharmacy are attracting 57 percent women compared to 43 percent men. And the Constitution of Kenya 2010 empowered women even more, with the two-thirds gender rule, giving them access to more opportunities both in the private and public sector.

Education has had multiple benefits, shaping societal attitudes to an extent vices such as gender- based-violence, female genital mutilation, deadbeat dads are actively discussed in society and the law, while slow, is now responsive, bolstered by the civil society mainstreaming of human rights issues.

Our mothers and their predecessors were forced to endure abusive marriages, some getting infected with HIV by promiscuous husbands, forced to stay by societal expectations, their choices limited by poverty, since men were the privileged breadwinner wielding all the social clout.

Education helped the society to stop frowning on single mothers and divorcees as it happens to the forerunners like Wangari Maathai and Martha Karua.

It has created an environment where women can thrive and have a bright future where their choices are not dictated by marriage.

Enter Kibaki

In 2002, Mwai Kibaki took over as Kenya’s third president and the following decade witnessed an unprecedented growth, and expansion of the Kenyan economy, opening doors of educational and career opportunities to a wider previously ignored female demographic.

Following the adoption of self-sponsorship in higher education, in the 2000s, the expansion and the proliferation of several universities, more students previously cut off from university admission pegged on bed-capacity (notoriously at 10,000 for more than a decade.) This has churned out nearly 50,000 graduates each year in the last decade according to the Ministry of Education. Nearly 40 per cent of these graduates are female.

The jobs markets that exploded after Kibaki took over, were mainly in academia, marketing, banking and real estate (and the expansion of the Civil Society which addressed some of the most pressing issues affecting women and children) creating a friendly job environment for female career progression.

Coincidentally, throughout the 1990s, the Structural Adjustment Programs killed the manufacturing sectors as many industries were privatized, often subsequently run down. Examples are abound such as Kenya Railways, several textile industries grounded by the importation of second-hand clothes that sabotaged the whole chain of production. The postal service, Telkom, Public Works, farming lost out to privatization and once vibrant towns such as Kitale and Kilgoris in Transmara all but died.

Women may have joined the workforce, but they still lag in formal employment. According to the Kenya Bureau of Statistics, efforts to bridge the gap have been paying off. As of 2016, men still hold 65.5 % (1.68 million) of the workforce compared to women, 34.5% about 880,000. The gap is being closed considering more women than men are taking up Masters and PhDs, according to the Ministry of Education. One MoE official said the affirmative action had helped women access education and this presently reflects in the workplace in the corporate sector as more women take up managerial jobs.

The Impact

As millennials, we witnessed our fathers losing their jobs and their breadwinning roles and the logic of two-income families sunk in properly during the SAPs years. Indeed women aspiring for education was with the hope of bringing something to the table and among millennials a job (or the prospect of getting one) is usually a key consideration in marriage.

And we have education to thank for opening doors to more women, making them eligible for marriage in the present tough economic times.

But education had other effects.

Education in its socialization effect also exposes women to limitless choices their mothers never had. Urbanization creates an environment for a woman who was under a tight leash of patriarchy to excel in cities. And with the liberalization of the media in 2002, access to the internet, pornography and Hollywood, it meant millennial women were no longer chained to the constricting and narrowly defined roles of their mothers’ generation.

With procreation no longer a pressing priority of marriage, women are free to chase academic and career dreams, or even their passion, until they are ready. Technology has enabled In-Vitro- Fertilization that has saved couples who can’t conceive, or those who are too busy. Further options of adopting, surrogacy, freezing of eggs, are all sipping into our society and those who can afford are already embracing these new approaches to parenting.

Men, maybe out of moral consciousness or fear of being exposed as deadbeats on social media or legal coercion have become more responsive to the children of their estranged wives or exes. And many modern men are open to the idea of co-parenting. This makes single parenting less of a stigma.

For those averse to marriage, getting a child ‘out of wedlock’ is not the social crime it was two or three decades ago. Older women who find it hard to find a spouse can go to a sperm bank or can get into an arrangement with a man to supply the sperm and support, if needed.

Nowadays it is no longer what the children need, but what the parents want.

When women do not have to be economically dependent on men, and they have options of conceiving a child, not necessarily in the confines of marriage and this choice can change relationship dynamics completely.

Traditionally around the world marriage was a logical arrangement for procreation, economic and social cohesion.

The present economic, social and cultural environment for the first time since Industrial Revolution means we must alter that definition. Women want an equal footing in marriage and men have to readjust accordingly. Marriage now, according to Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel in an Atlantic article, is based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.

And millennials prefer life in the cities and towns to the villages. This too has western implications on our societal mores. Life in the city affords one anonymity and access to sex, food, security in their terms.

In cities, women have a bigger pool of sexual and sensual talent to pick and choose. Sexual liberalism is evident.

In the bygone era, where most women were destined to be housewives, there were binding social conventions and women were expected to practice uncompromising fidelity. But at the workplace, with frequent traveling to conferences, business-related excursions sex has become casual and transactional. Now, everywhere women look, there are available men, who can offer everything they want, but not necessarily in one package.

We live in a time and in a society that has embraced the romance idealism defined through the Western cinematic universe. The relational power men held is no longer absolute and these societal changes are redefining gender relationships at a rapid speed. The ground has moved, the old ways have fallen apart and we know not where to turn.

From sex to money, men no longer have the monopoly to the things that they used to ‘control’ women. This means in the future marriage will become a contest for equality, with no spouse hoarding the power to control the other.

Choices Millennials have to make

Millennials marry on need basis. Women have choices; they can go to school, pursue career without the encumbrances of marriages. When they marry young, they still have a choice to navigate, despite the obligations of motherhood. With the leverage of personal income, most women now have the capacity to own property, changing the dynamics of matrimonial property ownership that are often the subject of ugly succession woes. As this Nation article and many others have shown more and more women are players in Nairobi’s real estate market.

Me, on the other hand, will take longer to marry as long as their economic prospects are dim. Presently, the age of marriage has risen considerably to 28, tittering towards 30.

Most men still pine for the good old days of control and women can no longer conform to old gender order. Women want freedom, are ready to break the rules (if only to revenge on their adulterous husband) even as societal rules are kinder to a cheating man, as opposed to a woman. In fact, in my opinion, even women are finding monogamy to be too constricting. Millennial women have a higher likelihood of abandoning a marriage that does not serve their interests, as they tend to make more individualistic decisions that alienate them from obligations to the extended society.

What does the future look like for the millennials adulting?

Serial monogamy might make sense. Polygamy is not economically viable anymore and proselytizing Christians have made monogamy the only moral choice. More marriages will be undone by infidelity and the dwindling economic fortunes of men. Women no longer have to stay in an abusive relationship or one that is in emotionally or sexually unfulfilling relationships. Men will find themselves being thrown out and will have to learn to either shape up or pack up.

Single-motherhood will cease to bear the social stigma previously attached to it. And the rising age of marriage means individuals will be looking for companionship as opposed to the material or procreational aspirations of the youth.

But serial monogamy is predicated on experimentation. Once the first marriage is broken, people are afraid of the second trial, but will nonetheless experiment until the idea of a right person shows up.

“These days, many of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages,” predicts psychotherapist Esther Perel.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.

Widow Inheritance: Throwing out the Baby With the Bath Water

By Adipo Sidang' Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. Widow Inheritance: Throwing out the Baby With the Bath Water

By Adipo Sidang'

During the early 1800s, the Nuer of South Sudan began pushing out of their traditional homeland and increased their territory four-fold at the expense of their Dinka and Anuak neighbours by the late 1880s. The anthropologist Raymond Kelley described it as one of most prominent cases of tribal imperialism in the ethnographic record. According to his analysis, the Nuer expansion, which involved the acquisition of resources far beyond that required to satisfy their normal material needs, was driven by the rising cost of bride price.

Today we are witnessing a variation on bride price inflation of a different order. The institution of marriage has given rise to a new economic growth sector in the form of the wedding industry. For example, the wedding industry is now estimated to be worth US$ 60 billion in the United States and over $300 Billion globally. The global figures probably do not include Africa, where the wedding industry is a newer but even faster growing phenomenon in many African nations.

An ancient institution

Marriage is the most ancient and stable of human institutions. Anthropologists trace the institution to the need to avoid incest and establish the paternity of offspring.

Stone Age humans formalised the contractual bonding of husband and wife through the exchange of gifts, and most hunter-gatherer societies engaged in ritual courtship. We do not yet know whether or not mitochondrial Eve’s marriage was arranged, but we do know that the institution of marriage contributed to the competitive advantage of Homo sapiens over their non-marrying Neanderthal neighbours.

We do not yet know whether or not mitochondrial Eve’s marriage was arranged, but we do know that the institution of marriage contributed to the competitive advantage of Homo sapiens over their non-marrying Neanderthal neighbours.

It is not difficult to see how the institutionalised demands of maintaining a healthy gene pool could make a critical difference in circumstances where humans lived in small and isolated groups. Human bands invested in social networks and developed complex kinship systems, while the cavemen who mated by clubbing a woman and dragging her to his cave became dumb and dumber over time. In any event, marriage became a defining feature of human existence.

One scientific publication described the institution in evolutionary terms as “reciprocal exogamy including the exchange of mates, goods, and services, and involving multiple kin lineages often existing in multiple residential communities”. Anthropologists investigating the roots of the institution note that these parameters have remained relatively unchanged over the millennia.

With the rise of agriculture, marriage came to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood, conferring new rights and responsibilities in the process. The celebrations accompanying marriage played a fundamental role in fostering communal identity and solidarity. Before long, marriage was also key factor in building political relationships—a function that was elevated when the rise of royal dynasties saw marriage become an instrument of foreign policy.

This matrix of factors still obtains for marriage in African society. The institution is about much more than formalising the bio-emotional bond between two individuals, which now characterises Western practice. In most societies, it encompasses normative behaviour patterns and traits, including the wedding ceremonies and exchanges that formalise the contract. The marriage itself comes with expectations of relative permanence: shared residence, gender-based division of labour and management of resources, a sexual relationship oriented towards procreation and cooperation in child bearing and training.

While these factors, like the primacy of the nuclear family, are universal, the model based on the contract’s societal benefits has experienced significant attrition during the modern era. The wedding industry is the latest development to complicate the human dimension of marriage, and it appears to be racing out of control.

Conspicuous consumption

During the 1960s, weddings, especially the lavish high-cost version, came to be seen as effete. The contract was increasingly seen as a bond based on the relationship between two individuals. Divorce rates shot up and non-traditional unions between individuals of different backgrounds, including people of different religious, racial or social origins, proliferated. Pairing was about love. The resulting unions did not require an external religious or secular authority to legitimise it; the conventional ceremonial component was passé.

This encouraged the pursuit of innovative weddings, often held in unorthodox settings that appeal to the romantic ideal. The barefoot-on- the-beach wedding was popularised when Becks betrothed Posh in a sarong. The couple showcased several outfits, including bright violet costumes for the wedding party and a matching cowboy hat for baby Brooklyn. David Beckham later admitted that the garb made him look like “one of the guys in Dumb and Dumber” [the movie].

The prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, built a 20,000-seat stadium specially built for his seven-day, $100 million nuptials in 1981. The fashion among wealthy Indians is flying the entire wedding party consisting of several hundred guests to exotic destinations abroad.

The Beckham extravaganza came after Princess Diana’s 1981 “wedding of the century”, which made celebrity weddings fashionable. The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton set a new bar for the 21st century—although, as in the case of the Diana event, most of the reported cost of $34 million was spent on security; the cost of the bride’s dress, at $434,000, was modest in comparison.

In many places, weddings have always provided a stage for conspicuous consumption. The prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, built a 20,000-seat stadium specially built for his seven-day, $100 million nuptials in 1981. The fashion among wealthy Indians is flying the entire wedding party consisting of several hundred guests to exotic destinations abroad.

Such extreme examples underscore the meteoric rise of the wedding industry across the planet. Fashionable contemporary weddings across the world now involve a full complement dressmakers, florists, reception halls, event planners, photographers, caterers, limo firms, DJs, bands, and jewellery designers. Few people can match the glass coach, the 25-foot bridal train, and the estimated 750 million television viewers of Princess Diana’s wedding, but many are willing to go into debt to finance a ceremony that is becoming the nuptial version of the arms race.

The wedding industry is flourishing across continents and cultures. In China, the $57-billion industry is registering a 7.8 per cent annual growth, but this will soon be trumped by India where the industry is expanding by 25 per cent a year. In the United Arab Emirates, the average cost of nuptials is estimated to be around $80,000. In the US, the average cost of a wedding is equivalent to a year’s salary for many service-sector employees or a year of university education.

These numbers appear to reflect relative differentials in income. The most expensive place in the US to get married is Manhattan, where the average cost is over $76,000, or five times the cost in Utah where the typical wedding expenditure is $15,257. The fact that this state is booming economically points to the influence of culture as well—which may represent the best hope for mitigating the more ominous implications accompanying the commercialisation of marriage and sexuality.

The Big African Wedding

During a trip to Addis Ababa last year, I went to a studio to get some passport pictures. There were several picture albums in the waiting area. They were actually gigantic, hardcover ledgers showcasing glamorous pictures of wedding couples, bridesmaids, best men, and other sundry wedding participants conspicuously adorned in some of the most expensively elegant finery I have ever seen. During the remainder of my visit I began to notice the proliferation of large and small wedding shops across the city.

I initially thought it was an Ethiopian thing. Wrong. Once alerted to its existence, evidence of Africa’s new wedding industry started to pop up everywhere. In Zambia there are weddings that last two weeks. The wedding industry in Kampala has seen the ten event organising companies operating in 2010 to grow to more than a hundred in 2017. Televised weddings provide revenue for Ugandan television stations that now charge 1 million shillings ($330) to broadcast lavish weddings. Nigeria, true to form, is at the forefront of Africa’s new wedding sector. The industry that some say is fueled by Nigerians’ natural love of celebration probably owes more to their competitive nature. The CEO of one Nigerian wedding planning company explains: “People want their event to be the best. They want it to better than the next person’s so they won’t spare any expense to do whatever they need to do to get it done.”

This is a country where the wealthy elite once threw parties where they would impress their guests by displaying millions of Naira bank notes in glass cases. Now, “getting it done” at weddings includes stunts like “spraying” the wedding guests with US dollar bills. Although the currency on display under thick glass attracted the attention of Nigeria’s audacious criminal class, it usually ended up back in the bank on Monday morning. Spraying guests with dollars upped the ante in the country’s “go big or go home” stakes.

Kenya’s fast growing wedding industry has spawned hundreds of wedding planners and businesses offering everything from florists to high-end caterers and other related specialists. This service sector actually dates back to the Western infatuation with the wedding as an adventure theme, which has drawn couples from abroad to Kenya to tie the knot. The wedding-in-the-bush is a niche market that is still doing well, based on the number of Kenyan tour companies advertising diverse safari wedding packages. But it is small change compared to the new urban African wedding complex with its complement of service providers, magazines, television shows, and family brokers skilled at maximising the returns on nubile daughters.

This is a country where the wealthy elite once threw parties where they would impress their guests by displaying millions of Naira bank notes in glass cases. Now, “getting it done” at weddings includes stunts like “spraying” the wedding guests with US dollar bills.

On the one hand, the industry is a tech-savvy, Internet friendly economic sub-sector, but on the other, it is just another globalised neoliberal cash cow. At least in West Africa the industry is spawning a new fashion industry showcasing creative variations on traditional clothing. Fashionable African wedding attire has even added a few hundred boards to the 38 million and growing Pinterest wedding posts, and its pretty neat stuff. Kenya’s wedding juggernaut, in contrast, is driven by the couples’ marked preference for the Eurocentric “white” wedding.

“White” Kenyan weddings

Ngugi wa Thiong’o built a literary career by exposing the mentality behind many Kenyans’ inverted relationship with indigenous values and preference for the trifles identified with Western ways. The contemporary white wedding is the latest flagship for this mindset. This line of critique makes Kenya’s first Big Shot wedding a bit incongruous—it was actually celebrated in Maasailand.

Sometime around the mid-1970s, the expansive Maasai Minister in Jomo Kenyatta’s government, Stanley Oloitiptip, threw an exceptionably exorbitant wedding for his oldest son. Stylistically, it contradicted almost everything Maasai culture stood for. It was certainly as outsized by the more modern standards of the day as the girth of the physically immense politician.

The irrepressible Oloitiptip justified the spectacle as a testament to “the fruits of Uhuru”. This explanation focused public attention on the diversion of state resources to fund the affair, a concern further compounded by the fact that the Honourable Minister had sired 46 other children.

As it turned out, there was no happy ending for the Big Man. In 1985, he suddenly found himself in prison for the misuse of public resources. Like the overpriced wedding gowns at the centre of contemporary weddings, the five normal prison uniforms sewn together to clothe him were used for only one day: he was released on bond the following morning and passed away several days later.

Although the Kenyan public has been treated to the occasional high profile wedding since then, the new big wedding phenomenon is defined by its distribution and scale. This is why some commentators applaud it as a vibrant growth industry and others hype it as symbolic of middle class prosperity—even though a large portion of newly weds don’t have the money to pay for their weddings.

The moral of the Oliotiptip story dovetails with other qualities associated with the big wedding trend. Close to a quarter of the couples opting for these bling weddings go into debt to finance them, and the majority of them regret the expenditure soon afterwards. A more disturbing statistic: the bigger the wedding, the shorter the marriage.

Even so, the trend persists. One Ugandan professional stated that he has saved 50 million shillings for a big wedding. He says he only wants to have a wedding that befits his status as an educated man. If he can’t afford that, he’d rather not have a wedding at all. No wedding is now the norm for many, and no marriage at all is increasingly common. One regional study found that 50 per cent of young couples were living in free unions and another 25 per cent of women were raising children as single mothers.

Traditional communitas versus wedding bling

Weddings have long served as a vehicle for conspicuous consumption and the spread of consumer culture. The fact that both the rich and the middle classes now own fancy cars, TVs and designer handbags has raised the status-generating power of one-time social events like weddings. Wedding planners say that the industry is driven by women’s desire to be a Queen, and the center of attention albeit for one day. Men play along for reasons of status and prestige.

Traditional ceremonies were ritualised communal affairs imbued with layers of symbolism and meaning. The primary functions of many ceremonies, such as weddings, were to mark passage to a new stage of the life cycle and to foster unity within the community. The anthropologist Victor Turner’s classic study on African ritual and ceremony focused on the deep properties of these phenomena, and the universal role of liminality and communitas.

Liminality refers to the beginning or transitional stage in a process. The person at the centre of the transition is often regarded to be in a weak and dangerous or inauspicious state. Rituals based on the society’s spiritual, magical and religious traditions generate a state of communitas to insure the safe transition of the person in this liminal state.

The term communitas is associated with sharing a common experience that takes a whole community to the next level. Rites, rituals and ceremonies designed to temporarily negate differentials of rank and status create a social space based on homogeneity, equality and anonymity. This promotes a sense of group wholeness. Individuality is submerged in unity in a manner facilitating transformation. The way the spirit of a harambee fund-raising event induces you to contribute beyond your planned contribution is an example of the same.

The public ceremony is, in this sense, not an event, but part of a social process that facilitates the safe transition of the liminal individual, be it from girl to woman, boy to man, or candidate to group chief and leader. The state of communitas it engenders imbues the group with a lasting sense of unity and solidarity that allows society to function despite its internal conflicts and inequalities of wealth and status.

Turner describes how the process works in the case of the appointment of a new chief among the Ndembu of Zambia. After a period of sexual abstinence, the new candidate and is wife are housed in the specially constructed kafu, or death hut. They are dressed in rags and made to assume a submissive position. While in this state of liminality, elders revile the future leader: “Be silent! You are a mean and selfish fool, one who is bad-tempered! You do not love your fellows, you are only angry with them! Meanness and theft are all you have! Yet here we have called you and we say that you must succeed to the chieftainship.”

The couple are abused and forced to stay awake all night while commoners are invited to berate them for any misdeeds large or small. They are beaten and rubbed with special herbs. After this ordeal, the chief-to-be is instructed in his duties:

We have desired you and you only for our chief. Let your wife prepare food for the people who come here to the capital village. Do not be selfish, do not keep the chieftainship to yourself! You must laugh with the people, you must abstain from witchcraft! You must not be killing people! You must not be ungenerous to people! Today you are born as a new chief. If you were mean, and used to eat your cassava mush or your meat alone, today you are in the chieftainship. You must give up your selfish ways, you must welcome everyone, you are the chief!

The ritual results in the figurative death of the liminal candidate and his rebirth as a leader. Turner goes on to detail how many other ceremonial processes across cultures, including the coronation of Popes, display many of the same structural attributes.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o built a literary career by exposing the mentality behind many Kenyans’ inverted relationship with indigenous values and preference for the trifles identified with Western ways. The contemporary white wedding is the latest flagship for this mindset.

Traditional weddings are a benign version of this ceremonial process where two individuals are reborn and transformed into a legally recognised husband and wife sanctified by the higher powers. The passages on marriage in the Quran, Bible and other religious texts underscore the sanctity and spiritual quality of such unions, and most cultural and religious weddings display similar dynamics to sanctify and bless the marriage contract.

In my own case, prior my own wedding, the idea of getting married was a remote and distant prospect. I was living in Lamu, and the process started as an idea suggested by close friends who told me, “Marrying is easy and since you are here you should give it a try even if just for a week.” The idea evolved into an experimental possibility that in turn led to a proposal to marry, arranged in the usual manner.

The only request from my side was that the marriage ceremony would be a small, private affair. Swahili weddings, in my view, were carnival style affairs that did not fit my style. I wanted a closed personal ceremony to go with the already exotic circumstances.

“Sure, we will do it that way if that’s what you want,” my future in-laws told me. Although I did not know it, at the time, I was totally out of my depth, in a liminal state of ignorance, weakness, naiveté, and vulnerability.

I also did not realise that the coast was home to the region’s most developed indigenous wedding industry. As the time approached, I was informed of a series of unanticipated developments: a bus arrived with furniture and other trappings; the next day another came from Mombasa with a posse of musicians, a boat arrived with guests from the islands, and so on. This build-up countered my expectations of a small intimate wedding.

A week before the actual event, people started addressing me as Bwana Harusi. Lamu’s normally shy ladies began to accost me with propositions, and several times women dragged me into their homes as I passed through the town’s narrow alleys. My “handlers” told me that as Bwana Harusi I was fair game for such mischief until the formal marriage; it was best I stay indoors. They were otherwise helpful but not very informative. Among other things, they did not explain that a proper wedding is mandatory for a girl’s first marriage, and that the arrangements were the exclusive province of the bride’s family.

Three days of robust wedding celebrations ensued. I became caught up in the spirit, and consented to options for the groom’s side, like holding the kirumbizi stick fighting dance and the all-night kesha party. My father surrogate arranged for the kirumbizi, which coincided with the district secondary school sports tournament. The presence of the archipelago’s most athletically inclined youth insured it was the most fiercely contested kirumbizi stick fighting in Lamu’s modern history. Swept away by the spirit of this communitas, I ended up splurging on food, miraa for my Somali friends, and a Bajuni msondo dance followed by what became a public party while the bride’s taarabu music echoed through the other side of time.

After sunrise I was married in the kind of simple ceremony I had originally requested, although there was still one last surprise.

I had paid the conventional dowry for that time of several thousand shillings. But when the actual moment came, I was confused when I heard the town’s most respected sheikh ask me the formulaic question: Do you agree to marry Safiya binti Mohammed Ali for the mahari of 50 Kenya shillings?

This was repeated three times. Though mystified and bewildered, I managed to utter “kabeitu, or “I agree” in Arabic. Only later did I learn that the small sum substituted for the dowry proper, often referred to as mahari ya Kiarabu, is designed to protect the family, which typically ends up spending more than the dowry on the wedding. The provision comes into effect if the marriage fails or the groom has legitimate cause for rejecting the bride and reclaims the mahari proper. The dowry proper, in any case, goes to the wife, and not her father.

In the evening I was escorted to the bride’s house where, according to the Swahili tradition of fungati, we spent the next week in the wedding suite where we were treated as royalty. We were both all so liminal at the time, although for different reasons. By the end of the week’s seclusion I was integrated into the extended family and emerged as a culturally validated member of Lamu society.

Traditional weddings are a benign version of this ceremonial process where two individuals are reborn and transformed into a legally recognised husband and wife sanctified by the higher powers. The passages on marriage in the Quran, Bible and other religious texts underscore the sanctity and spiritual quality of such unions

As individuals, my wife and I were and still are very different people from totally different backgrounds. I am not sure if our union would have survived if it began as the private affair I originally envisioned. It took a while, but I came to understand how the process of public communitas and internal family bonding contributed to the fact that forty-one years later we are still together.

There is a broader moral to this love story.

The impact of commercialised weddings

Victor Turner observes that liminality and communitas are essentially phenomena of transition. His analysis explains why many modern phenomena, from millenarian movements and the counter- cultural quest for alternative lifestyles to the rise of Nazism, borrow much of their mythology and symbolism from traditional rites de passage, either in the cultures in which they originate or in the cultures with which they are in contact. Turner documents many forms of these phenomena from once-a- generation ceremonies to the rituals of everyday life.

The same insights apply to the recruitment of jihadi terrorists, and the communal synergy generated by organisations like ISIS, Al Shabaab, and Boko Haram. The “Islamist problem” may appear far removed from the issues raised by the region’s wedding industry, but the two developments are more closely linked than it may appear. Lela Anwar, an administrator with the coast’s Donge Charity Network, offers the following commentary on Mombasa’s changing wedding complex.

A typical wedding in Mombasa now costs more than an average citizen’s salary, yet they are getting bigger and more dramatic. The Nikkah, the nucleus of any Islamic wedding, is a straightforward and inexpensive affair because it mainly involves a recitation of wedding vows followed by attendees sharing a quick repast of coffee and haluwa in the mosque. It is also a mainly male event, complemented by a smaller gathering of female relatives and close friends in another room. Even though the nikkah is the most essential part of the wedding, the reception consumes the majority of time, financial, and human resources. The reception, known as kupamba in Swahili, is an extravagant women-only event featuring an often evening of loud music, outlandish hairdos and makeup, jewel-studded dresses, and multiple servings of fancy food and drinks. Local women view the kupamba through the lens of social class: the fancier the reception is, the more status conferred on the family. Curiously, the kupamba celebration can exert more leverage on social class than actual wealth. A family that hosts an outlandish wedding is regarded as ‘high class’ even if the wedding was funded by loans and donations from extended family and friends.

Muslims are aware that the Prophet Muhammad recommended simple weddings yet despite the religious incentive for sticking to the sunnah traditions, the scale and costs of Swahili weddings continue to rise. This phenomenon is linked to attributed gender dynamics, and specifically to gender roles that are socially enforced in traditional Swahili societies. There are certain female social activities that are frowned upon even though it is fairly acceptable for men to go clubbing or spend long hours away from the family consuming miraa or pursuing other forms of entertainment. Swahili women who deviate from their prescribed roles are, in contrast, given negative labels and may be castigated as being promiscuous or prostitutes. Unlike men, you rarely see women spending hours with friends partaking in social activities outside the home. With almost no outlet or spaces available to women for entertainment, weddings are now the default venues where they can dress up and enjoy an evening of music and fun within a socially acceptable environment. Weddings are an outlet for self-expression; an opportunity for the traditional Swahili woman to morph into a glamour queen. They are a welcome respite from her daily, culturally prescribed cocoon.

Weddings are so important that now invitation cards are sold for as much as Ksh. 7000 by invitees unable to attend. The downside of this commercialisation is that increasingly large numbers of urban and peri-urban youth are finding it difficult to marry. This has provided an entry point for radicalisation and terrorist recruitment as two recent studies on the coast of Kenya have documented.

The wedding industry, as discussed in the first section of this essay, in many ways contradicts the role of traditional cultural processes. Weddings as events emphasise the conspicuous expenditure of resources for the sake of prestige and competition. Instead of transforming the couples to live in harmony and contribute to the public good, bling weddings condemn many of them to an uphill struggle to survive as a pair.

More traditional wedding ceremonies, as the passage above indicates, offer Swahili women a degree of gender-based communitas. The contemporary coastal wedding, however, also reinforces structural inequalities contributing to the radicalisation of both male and female youth. Sex is a powerful and dangerous force that easily leads one into a state of liminal danger. The wedding industry taps into this for material gain. Jihadi radicals effectively exploit the negative aspect of the same social change to recruit individuals who for various economic and ideological reasons fall outside the boundaries of mainstream Islam.

The role of such factors, including constraints associated with the commercialisation of weddings, have been documented by researchers on Kenya’s coast and elsewhere. In the meantime, it turns out that a range of high profile players in the West have discovered the value of communitas and other spiritual techniques that help merge the individual “I” into the collective “We”. Advocates include the top echelon of Google and other Silicon Valley executives, some of most decorated US Navy Seals team leaders, and other copacetic entrepreneurs like Richard Branson. The 2017 book, Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, reports how these players are seeking out ways of replicating the ecstatic sense of unity embedded in the African rituals studied by Victor Turner and others. In the words of the authors, “This feeling tightens social bonds and ignites enduring passion—the kind that lets us come together to plan, organize, and tackle great challenges.”

The same insights apply to the recruitment of jihadi terrorists, and the communal synergy generated by organisations like ISIS, Al Shabaab, and Boko Haram. The “Islamist problem” may appear far removed from the issues raised by the region’s wedding industry, but the two developments are more closely linked than it may appear.

For the techies, entrepreneurs and soldiers who have adopted pursuits from yoga and bio-feedback meditation to psychedelics and extreme sports, getting into this zone is about enhancing productivity and their cutting edge. It is hardly surprising that the bad guys have developed their own form of communitas to do the same. In any event, society needs more of the problem-solving passion the world’s top entrepreneurs are seeking to cultivate than the competition driven by the bling of the wedding industry—especially when it comes to some of the human surrogates now being generated by artificial intelligence technology.

The rise of the wedding industry bookends one side of a larger neoliberal trend of inequality and social polarisation; developments on the other side of the spectrum have given rise to the technologically enabled sexbot, first predicted in the original 1975 version of Stepford Wives and updated in more recent films like Blade Runner and Ex Machina. One blogger summed up the implications for marriage and the family as an existential threat to humanity: “This will blow up the world. It will make crack cocaine look like decaffeinated coffee.”

A return to the ritually-reinforced social bonds that made the celebration of marriage a universal rite of passage is needed to sustain the family unit as the most basic human institution. Creative variations on the modern wedding may yet provide a platform for adaptive cultural innovations on this front. For example, last December, Laabied Mohammed Gurcharan of the Donge Network established a new precedent for Mombasa’s wedding scene. Instead of the usual by- invitation-only event, he shared his wedding feast with the children of the Mama Dhahabu Orphanage.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter.