For better, bitter or worse

• Joseph Njuguna and Hannah Gathiru have been married for 55 years. Their friends and relatives prophesied doom as they battled abject poverty. They were determined to prove everyone wrong until Mzee Njuguna was hit by the ‘polygamy bug’ that should have sent Hannah packing
  

Joseph Njuguna was fresh from his teens when he realised that he only had eyes for Hannah Gathiru, a pretty girl, in his Nginduri village.

While he often dreamt of walking over to her and declaring his love – or infatuation at the time – he was sure his poor family background would have been a turn off for the lovely lady.

Still, each time the two of them met at Thigo, the village dance, Njuguna’s heart would be restless.

“The dance nights, which were arranged for young men and women, were meant to discourage misdirected sexual desires. They were always preceded by serious counselling sessions,” he says.

The sessions cautioned girls to against accepting sexual proposals and the boys were equally warned never to force themselves on them.

If either of them compromised, then they would have stripped themselves of the village’s respect and would never have been considered as possible marriage partners.

And so, Njuguna knew that he had to carry himself in a respectable manner if he was to ever catch her attention and the approval of her parents as no family would knowingly accept bride-price from a philandering young man.

Although some young men and women engaged in unwarranted intimacies in such occasions, Hannah was different.

“She had a strong character, discipline and evoked good reports from our neighbours,” a nostalgic Njuguna, 78, now says of his wife of 55 years.

Njuguna had joined a missionary school in 1947, from which he later dropped out in order to support his younger siblings.

“Since my mother couldn’t support us all, I decided to work in construction sites in the early fifties for a monthly salary of Sh40…all the while, keeping one eye Hannah who was five years my junior.”

By this time, they had been just friends, but Njuguna was dying to tell her how he really felt.

“In 1954, I finally gathered courage and told her of my intentions concerning our friendship,” he says, but Hannah was a tough nut to crack.

“I was very reluctant because he came from a very poor family. I felt that he had not done much to improve his financial situation just by looking at his tiny cube of a home,” she admits.

And so, Hannah played hard to get. She knew that her father would quote quite high for her bride price. But Njuguna, she says, was patient and persistent.

“Eventually, I accepted, because I knew that I loved him.”

Back then, a man would inform his father about the girl you were interested in.

He would then find about her clan to make sure that the marriage would be culturally right as there were certain clans from which they could not marry.