Inside marriages where women must ask for every shilling
I grew up hearing about Ugandan women serving their men meals on bended knees.
What you need to know:
- I grew up hearing about Ugandan women serving their men meals on bended knees. It was respect, I was told. Tradition. The way things have always been.
- Nobody questioned why respect only flowed in one direction, or why a grown woman needed to kneel before a grown man in her own home.
Picture a woman kneeling to serve her husband dinner. She has done this every evening for 20 years. Her knees ache now, but she kneels anyway because this is what respect looks like in her home. Her daughter watches from the doorway, learning. Her son watches too, also learning. Nobody speaks about what is being taught in that moment, but the lesson lands with precision: some people kneel, others receive the kneeling, and we call this love.
This is not far from reality. I grew up hearing about Ugandan women serving their men meals on bended knees. It was respect, I was told. Tradition. The way things have always been. Nobody questioned why respect only flowed in one direction, or why a grown woman needed to kneel before a grown man in her own home. I later learned that it is not all Ugandans but the Baganda who practice it. I also recall, as a young adult, listening to conversations of Kenyan men speaking of marrying from Uganda because their women highly respect their husbands.
Years later, I have watched women trapped in marriages where they have no idea how much their husbands earn, cannot make a single financial decision, and must justify every shilling they spend on things including sanitary pads. Social media is awash with women confessing their frustration, and some people laugh them off. "That's just marriage," they respond. "Men are the heads. They know what's best."
We have become experts at renaming violence. Control becomes "protection." Silencing transforms into "maintaining peace." Economic strangulation masquerades as "the man providing." Forced sex within marriage hides behind "conjugal rights." Wife inheritance gets dressed up as "caring for widows." Early marriage claims to be "preserving our girls' dignity." Female genital mutilation insists it makes women "respectable." Bride price negotiations sometimes shade into transactions where women become property. When women dare to name their pain, we reach for our most trusted shield: culture.
The violence that has been normalised does not always leave bruises you can photograph. It lives in the everyday erosions. A wife learns that her voice irritates her husband, so she swallows her words until she forgets she ever had thoughts worth sharing. A man believes that providing financially entitles him to make every decision, own every opinion and control every outcome. Marriage becomes a space where "submission" means one person's humanity is perpetually bent to accommodate another's ego.
Questioning these arrangements gets labelled as disrespectful to the man. Examining what we have inherited becomes framed as betraying our roots. Yet the evidence suggests that authentic culture, in its truest expression, never intended for love to resemble domination. What gets packaged as tradition is often just old power structures, someone's privilege from generations past, rebranded as sacred and untouchable.
The tragedy is how early the conditioning begins. Little girls absorb the lesson that their brothers' comfort matters more than their own. Little boys learn that emotions signal weakness while control demonstrates strength. By the time we form adult relationships, the script runs so deep that we perform it without conscious thought. We marry the violence we witnessed and recreate the silences we inherited. Then we pass it along, baptised in the language of culture and tradition, to the next generation.
What are we so afraid of? Why does the idea of a marriage where both people have voices, where decisions are shared, where money is discussed openly, where neither person kneels; why does this prospect unsettle us so deeply? Perhaps because equality in private spaces threatens the entire architecture of patriarchy. If women are fully human at home, they will expect to be fully human everywhere else.
Violence thrives in silence and withers under scrutiny because we can’t scrutinise what we refuse to name honestly. Change requires calling things what they actually are, not what we have agreed to call them to keep the peace.
Culture has always evolved, shedding what no longer serves us. We stopped many practices our grandparents considered sacred. The capacity to examine our inheritance and choose what to keep is not betrayal; it is wisdom. Not every tradition deserves preservation. Some things need to be laid down, no matter how long we have carried them.
The question is not whether we can afford to change. It is whether we can afford not to. There are glimmers of hope in programs like 'Becoming One', working quietly through faith communities to help couples unlearn harmful patterns and rebuild marriages on equality and respect; efforts that deserve to expand beyond Machakos and Makueni counties, to each every corner of our country.
