Dead Beat Kenya? Not in my village

It is the latest craze in town, women publicly airing their cute, wild, little oats on Facebook. And aren’t scandal loving Kenyans hooked?

I know they lied to you that Kenyans don’t read. Balderdash. We are plowing through 1,000 comments on each Facebook post about a guy who scattered after knocking up a poor, innocent girl with the diligence of a Class Eight pupil.

This sort of nonsense (running away) simply never happened in my grandfather’s day. If you impregnated someone’s daughter, her father simply flung her out, that is if she didn’t make herself scarce before the old man discovered and slit her throat.

So one evening you would be whiling time at the local market, leaning on a shop pillar and admiring the undulating bottoms of women walking to the posho mill when your small sister breathlessly runs to you and says, “Papa is calling you.”

Those days, fathers were not the jokers you hear crying like babies on Maina Kageni’s breakfast show. When they summoned, you came running, even if you had three hairs on your chin.

demand dowry

When you arrived, you would find the old warrior sitting on a stool and caressing a walking stick. “Call her,” he would thunder. And out of your mom’s kitchen would pop the very Nakhumicha that you played adult games with one night in the banana groove behind the venue of a village dance.

“Is he one who gave you the akhasiko (small piece of luggage aka pregnancy)?” he would ask. “Yes, Papa,” came the whisper. “You (clears throat menacingly while staring coldly at you and pointing at your simba with his walking stick) will not shame this home.

Take my daughter to your hut. I will meet her people tomorrow and apologise. She is now a wife of the clan,” the old warrior would growl with finality.

Alternatively, she would simply give birth and dump the wailing thing in your mother’s house. Or her people would come armed with clubs, shove her into your hut and demand dowry. Uta do?