Husbands and partners, it reported, account for the largest share of technology-facilitated abuse against women in Kenya, at 61 per cent, according to the 2025/2026 Kenya Mini Demographic and Health Survey.
The survey found that partners use digital tools to track women’s movements, monitor their communication and restrict their online interactions. We also learnt that the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics report is the first to include a dedicated component on technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
The story has many elements, but for anyone who studies how traditional African societies controlled women (or who reads old West African literature or watches contemporary Nigerian films), the most striking is the modern, tech-enabled surveillance.
The ancients were regressive in many ways, but no serious man would have been caught dead disgracing himself by hiding in the bushes to spy on his partner, quizzing the neighbours about what mischief she might be up to, or trailing her to the well or the market out of suspicion of infidelity.
Such conduct would have been looked down upon as weak, despicably insecure and undignified: an admission that another man was superior.
Word would soon spread around the village, and people would laugh at him for lacking control over his emotions and for having “lost control of his household”, a charge still thrown at hapless men today. He would soon find it unbearable to join the local chang’aa drinking parties because the mockery would be too much.
The contempt for men who stalked their wives in those days was rooted in what men were supposed to be doing. They were busy hunting game, and many never returned, killed by their prey. They were warriors, raiding neighbouring clans, chiefdoms or kingdoms to seize land, plunder food and cattle, and sometimes kidnap brides. Or they were clearing land for the next planting season, attending village council meetings, or drinking with fellow warriors in the village square and grumbling about the chief’s unfair levies or colonial taxes.
A man not occupied with these great tasks and instead stalking his wife could only be idle, paranoid, or possibly “bewitched”.
It would be wrong to conclude that they were entirely unbothered about what their wives were up to, or immune to jealousy. They kept tabs on them without humiliating themselves. They were a devious lot.
First, the suspicious husbands of that era did something very modern: they subcontracted the spying to a trusted young cousin or nephew, with very vague terms of reference. They could not afford to be as precise as someone hiring a private investigator today, because the risk to their reputation from a leak was too high.
A warrior general, though, didn’t need to be subtle. He could afford to be direct. He would summon elders from his family, his in-laws or clan heads, and accuse her to her face. The maternal uncles, female in-laws or family heads would then investigate, report their findings and decide on punishment. Aunts and grizzled elders were involved because, in those days, marriage was never really a private affair between a man and a woman. It was between families, or clans.
The punishments were not secret. They were public, sometimes including the flogging of the woman (these were pre-human-rights days), but heavy fines were often imposed instead: cattle, goats, 15 chickens, the year’s harvest and the like.
To save the warrior’s honour, the wife might be sent back to her family in disgrace and the bride wealth refunded in full. Or a sister who promised to be more upright was offered, because losing the dowry (which would long since have been spent anyway) was too much for families to bear. And if the cuckolded man was a prominent chief, it was considered a show of strength to take his male rival to the edge of the forest and spear him to death.
Smarter traditional societies found less extreme ways, devising a basketful of taboos and spiritual deterrents rather than relying on physical surveillance. Several African communities believed that a woman who committed adultery (it is striking how few such rules applied to men) and then cooked for her husband or children would fall gravely ill, go mad or bring a curse upon the household.
The spiritual cost was so high that it kept would-be sinners in line; no morality police were needed. But those societies also knew that marriages could be deeply unsatisfying, and in the interests of peace and harmony, couples were sometimes allowed to “graze” beyond the compound. That, however, could only happen within the extended family, as it were.
It was not a perfect world. Soon the colonialists arrived with European legal and moral codes and biblical morality, and things really got messed up. But that’s a story for another day.
The author is a writer, journalist and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X (Twitter): @cobbo3
