Mystery Of Sleeping Arrangements In A Polygamous Home

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It is amazing how small children can bring things into perspective with a few simple questions.

Here is a conversation that took place yesterday between a 6-year-old child and an adult. I listened in to it and was amazed.

Child: Is Lucy the president's wife?
Adult: Yes she is.
Child: How many wives does the president of the whole of Kenya have?
Adult: (Hesitantly) Two
Child: Why?
Adult: (Confused) I don't know
Child: But grown ups know everything
Adult: Nobody can know everything?
Child: Who is the real mummy of their children?


This whole fascinating conversation got me thinking. In all our efforts at constitution making it has never crossed anybody's mind to address marital law, even as our society clearly falls apart. Amazingly no Kenyan wants to link family stability, or rather the lack of it, to the current escalating crime wave. What would you expect bringing up a child in a conflict zone as is every polygamous home, more so where the wives live under one roof as is the case with many polygamous families across Kenya?

This is an issue that no politician can dare touch with a 20-foot pole because it can lose a candidate a lot of votes. So that means that we will forever avoid the hard choices that have to be made. Which means we are just postponing a problem, postponing a huge explosive disaster waiting to happen. Nay, one that is already happening before our very eyes.

The Kenyan constitution which was carbon copy of Westminister with a few alterations here and there, mostly from the American constitution allows for only one wife. But it deliberately leaves a loophole that allows a man to marry even 100 by customary law.

Not that our leaders have not led by example. Kenya's founding president Mzee Jomo Kenyatta had no less than 4 wives whom he lived with at different times of his long life. President Moi was even worse as a senior bachelor with no wife. His supporters would have us believe that he was hardly human and therefore did not have any of those feelings ordinary mortals have and was able to ignore the inevitable that happens when a powerful man has no spouse. And that is women tend to literally throw themselves at them.

Once in my life when I was down and out I lived in a Nairobi suburb with my then-growing family in a tiny mabati (corrugated iron sheets) house that had only three rooms. There were about 7 houses all squeezed into one small compound. The facilities (nothing more than a pit latrine) were naturally outside so woe unto you if you had a running stomach one night. My immediate neighbor had 3 wives, actually four, but he lived with 3 at a time in those cramped facilities. The fourth one lived in his rural home and took care of the tiny shamba. In fact all wives did shamba duty on a rotational basis. What would happen is that the wife who displeased the man of the house would be "disciplined" by being "exiled" upcountry where they would relive the one who was there who would happily head for the city and that tiny 3-roomed house.

The sleeping arrangement in that house was the subject of heated and sometimes hilarious discussion and debate in the whole neighborhood. It was known was that there was one large king-size bed in the man's bedroom and of course the children's double-decker where all their four children slept. The eldest was about 14 years old (a girl).

Some kinky friends of mine with some rather wild imagination were convinced that all wives slept in the king-size bed with "the king". This is not realistic and neither is it African. The much more likely scenario was that the "wife of the evening" slept with "the king." And the other wife slept on the sofa while the other squeezed in with the children.

But the even bigger question was the mode of "daily selection".

You can imagine the man reading the Nation in the sitting room and one of the wives approaching him meekly to ask him which of them it would be for the night. And then the man still behind his newspaper muttering a name: "mama so and so." Really hilarious stuff.

But the joke is not funny for the women who have to put up with it. I have absolutely no idea how they do it. Every woman wants some space in her own house to do things her way. And every woman has her own way of doing things. Recently I accommodated a relative and his wife and child in my house for a brief period and although the house is huge, there were fireworks because the man's wife is a cocky know-it-all young girl in her early twenties who attempted to over-step her mark and take over the household. I often wonder how Asians manage to all live under one roof and retain their sanity.

Now just imagine a situation where three women are living under one roof and they are all married to the same man.

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