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When your last name prevents you from marrying ‘The One’
What you need to know:
- Who doesn’t know that a Luhya man will marry, as a minimum, two or three wives, and father two or three children outside, before leaving you for the love of his life at 74?
- And isn’t it public knowledge that a Kikuyu woman, the matriarch, in the event of a failed marriage, will always leave with the children, who will also bear her name?
We are deep in murima. E— is here to pay dowry or homage or whatever it is called nowadays. He only told us about this last week, “Unado nini next weekend? Tokea.” He wasn’t really asking, and if he was, I wasn’t going to say no.
E— has been with this girl for some time, and when he first introduced me to her, I didn’t think she would last the weekend. It is always the ones you don’t think, innit? She runs a strict regime, that one. All the girls who used to comment or “like” his Instagram pics vanished. She is like Idi Amin Dada, who, when once asked why people keep disappearing during his regime in Uganda, said, “Because if I don’t make them disappear, they will make me disappear.” My boy E—, once a jihadist, is now a political prisoner, exchanging his campus six pack for a dad bod, wearing those gauche married-man-Nairobi-mall-flower shirts, and when you ask him if he is okay, he smiles, strangely. Hat’s off to the babe. It is just as well she is called Eve, because he, E—, ate the apple and gave in to temptation. He didn’t want to stop eating the apple; he wanted to own the orchard, which is why we are here. A line from Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” comes into my mind, and I chuckle to myself: “When Adam left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life.”
It is a strange thing this ruracio. Sh20,000 just to ‘open the gate’. Ngai! We are only three of us accompanying E— yet the girl’s side has invited everyone, from the pope to the piki piki guy who “used to take Eve to school.” Here’s another damning statistic. None of us is married, and I wonder what Baba and Mama Eve are thinking. No need to wonder, because as soon as they can, they let us know immediately.
“Na nyinyi mmeoa?” We say no, or not yet, that we will not consider marriage before we get good jobs, or stabilise in careers, or actualise Wantam in New Singapore, but money is not everything—except it is everything. We realise that our excuses are thinning when Baba Eve points at the “flowers” in his garden and says, “Niko na wasichana wazuri. Wameokoka.” We nod in agreement; the girls are indeed pretty—what are they putting in the water here?—and we imagine them all busy weaving sturdy nets to catch big fishes like us. “Ama hamtaki kuguza murima?”
He cracks at this obligatory joke, and we join in the laughter, as a sign of respect, because elderly men still hold proprietary views on what should be called respect and what should be called—well, not respect. He is purring now, and he reminds us that he too was once a young man, but he decided to marry early, no “hadithi mingi” or mchezo wa paka na panya, that even now he is still strong, and that he still eats githeri and mukimo every day, not this KFC and rice maneno of nowadays. That is the secret, he says, to producing beautiful children who look like they bathe in milk. Githeri and mukimo? Yes, he says, but you vijana just eat mchele and Weetabix and sit in traffic jams, which is why you are not performing. Even now, he says as his brown eyes hazed by cataract clouds skip across the three of us, if I got one of your girlfriends, she would see. Perhaps this is the true Kenyan dream. To still be a battering bully in the bedroom at 60-something. Because what else is there?
The need to buy belonging
He asks us where we are from. K— is from Marakwet, D— and I are from Western.
Oh, he says, nyinyi ni Baluo na Jaluhya?
He gets it wrong, but we nod, because, respect.
He asks which part of Western we are from, how many we are, who our parents are, and is it true that Luhyas eat people? He straddles delicately the line between asking and prying, but he would prefer it very much if you would answer him. I tell him in my community we don’t count women and children, I tell him who my parents are and where they are from—either Kakamega, Bunyore, or Mumias, one can never be sure—and as for eating other people, well, it depends on how you define ‘eating’. I don’t tell him that last part.
He is pulling at the seams now, and picking at the nerves, and we are reminded that tribe or where you are from, as you age, moves from the rear-view mirror and becomes more pronounced. All the stereotypes feel at home in this flower market. Who doesn’t know that a Luhya man will marry, as a minimum, two or three wives, and father two or three children outside, before leaving you for the love of his life at 74? And isn’t it public knowledge that a Kikuyu woman, the matriarch, in the event of a failed marriage, will always leave with the children, who will also bear her name? When we say that a Kalenjin woman would date you but will eventually settle for a Kipchoge or Kipruto or Kipchirchir, do you think the wires in our brains have crossed? It is only when you are about to marry that you realise your last name is a concrete slab around your neck. Some things don’t change, I guess. And this is the true legacy of Britain's violent colonial history. A virulent inferiority complex, fake accents, an enduring awe of mzungu expats, and inter-tribe vitriol to the nth degree. These are facts that no Kenyan can pretend not to know.
Many things in life are circulated and recycled. Language is one of them. Belief is another one. We believe what we believe because it offers us security against the unknown, probably because it plays to our worst, most basic human fear – uncertainty. Beliefs fill up the empty places, they shine in the shadows, but it is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself through uprooting any doubts, and doubt is uprooted by blinding you to the way things really are. True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore. Belief, tribe, marriage—all these are currencies of belonging, bills in our wallets. You can buy anything with them, but they themselves hold no meaning. This is the hiccup of relations in Kenya.
Indeed, one's fate is determined by what he is not allowed to have, rather than what he possesses. Among my people, we say when an arrow kills a game, the hide is for the shooter, but the meat is for all, and that when we marry a person, you are also marrying his people, his community, his tribe. I am amused that this is a rod people still use, so much so that any declaration of any tribal identity has become in itself a kind of tribal act, tribalism. I sneer at this as Mzee leads us to the house for lunch, and I fight the urge to ask, “Mzee, may I pluck a flower too? I promise not to eat her.” Well, depending on what you define by ‘eat’.
