Marriage is as political and as complex as a coalition
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I ASKED a friend to write an article for an International Women’s Day special edition. I still laugh whenever I recall her first sentence. “Marriage sucks,” she wrote. The rest of it was just as colourful: The worst part of it is that your mother, who should know best, is the first to push you in that direction. And when the going gets tough, she is the one who will pressure you into sticking with it.
She might even resort to emotional blackmail, telling you that you would never have been born had she walked out of her own marriage. The message finally sinks in. It is the destiny of women to suffer bad marriages. You do not ship out, whatever the provocation. You put up.
The worst part of it is this: As you age, you morph into your mother. You complain about this and that aspect of the man’s conduct — men are never right, as all women since Eve know — but you stay on “for the sake of the children”. Joy’s story came to mind this week with the news that the Cabinet had been pondering new laws that might well give a new definition to marriage in Kenya.
As expected, the proposals have kicked up a storm even before they get to Parliament. In an ill-disguised attempt to pass the buck, the Cabinet meeting last week deferred a decision in favour of further consultations. I don’t blame the ministers. At the best of times, external intervention in marriage is like walking on quicksand. Crafting laws to govern it calls for Solomon’s wisdom, and it is not given to many.
Marriage is as political, and therefore as problematic, as any coalition government. Some of the worst crimes are committed within that setting. Women, who tend to hold the shorter end of the stick in these matters should be jumping up and down at attempts to bring sanity into the oldest institution.
There is a king-sized problem to contend with though: Real life rarely fits into convenient pigeon-holes. Take this woman, whose husband died in the 1998 bomb blast. Only then did she discover that she had been in a love triangle all along. Every time she had a baby, her secret rival dropped one too. What use is the law in such instances?
It is supposedly illegal to marry a second wife without divorcing the first one if you had a church wedding. Yet the story is told of a top-flight pair of legal hawks that has lived together for decades and had children without bothering with the due process of ending one marriage before proclaiming another.
INDEED, THE WOMAN IN QUESTION — a tough cookie when it comes to human rights — is said to have once arrived at the doorstep of the wedded wife and demanded her “husband’s clothes”. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, she has the upper hand and the wife’s rights have been reduced to legal fiction.
The Marriage Bill, Matrimonial Property Bill and the Family Protection Bill are collectively a hybrid that is enough to give any right-thinking Kenyan a grand headache, let alone the notorious Cabinet. Matrimonial territory is difficult enough to navigate behind closed doors.
It presents a nightmare scenario for the prosecutor who wants to stick out their neck: Just consider the number of domestic violence cases that fall on the rocks despite clear evidence of injury and the risk of death.
What this legal cocktail gives with one hand, it seems to take away with the other in some instances. It just goes to prove how hard it is to create a marriage of convenience between the law and human feelings, which don’t respect the straight line.
We are told, for example, that wife inheritance and arranged marriages will be a thing of the past should the law be passed. But who will police it all? In the next breath, we learn that come-we-stay marriages will be recognised as long as you have been in the relationship for two years, and then dowry (do they mean bride price?) is given the nod.
I like the idea of a minimum marriage age, which would be 18, to negate traditions that allow parents to sell off daughters who might not even have reached puberty. But then many young women are sexually active before that age and may even be mothers.
In what appears to be a nod to gender equality, the better-endowed partner will be required to provide for the other. What if your man is one of those who just cannot keep it zipped up? Will you end up financing the lifestyle of a freewheeling maniac who makes a career of seducing anything in a skirt? You were right all along, Joy. Marriage is just too complicated. No wonder the Cabinet chickened out.
