Do interracial marriages work?

While Alissa and Jim have defied skeptics and remain blissfully together two years on, interracial marriages are riddled with inescapable stereotypes.

The commonest stereotypes are that whites bring the money and Africans bring sexual athleticism and that white ‘pensioners of either gender prey on younger Kenyans.

Older, richer white men are known to keep child prostitution going. Older white women have equally sought after younger black men who frock the Kenyan beaches into the equation, with the whites being generally older than than their Kenyan partners.

In 2012, Austrian-born film director Ulrich Seidl produced a film Paradise: Love based on one such experience. In the film, a 50-year-old Austrian sexual tourist travels to Kenya on holiday in a resort.

She comes across younger men with whom she has sex, while afraid they may not find her attractive. With her friends, she hires a male stripper who dances for them naked to celebrate her birthday.

She also invites the bartender of the resort into her room and orders him to kiss her genitals. When he declines, she orders him out.

In 2005, the German movie White Maasai depicted an interracial love story gone wrong from the autobiographical book by the same title. The movie is about a German woman who leaves her boyfriend while visiting Kenya, choosing a Maasai man instead.

 She goes to Europe and comes back to settle in Kenya. The marriage proves rocky and ends bitterly when the two cultures fail to reconcile. The movie implies that interracial marriages rarely have a good ending.

However, Oliver Powel, a 60-something American married to a Kenyan woman believes that it is time the perceptions changed.

“We went through this in America for a long time. Black women with white men were regarded prostitutes and white looked at as people after physical gratification. I think people should be encouraged to think globally. The world has changed,” says Oliver, who  has been married to his Kenyan wife for a long time.

But still. It is possible for younger people of about the same age, to marry and lead sustainable marriage. But locally, there is enough anecdotal evidence that a good number of locals ‘fall in love’ with white individuals as a way to get out of the country to the presumed good life out there.

And there is more evidence that such marriages can go horribly wrong. Many younger women especially, have ended up in inadvertent or forced prostitution in cities such as Amsterdam, New York, London or Berlin.

When The Nairobian reported about civil weddings, an official at the Registrar of Weddings in the officer of the Attorney General told this writer that interracial weddings mostly take place in peak seasons April, August and December.

From time to time, Kenyans have asked the officials to communicate with them in Swahili, an indicator that they have ulterior intentions with their 'marriage.'

It is a long way towards a balanced approach towards interracial dating and marriages. Both parties know this. And Alissa and Jim say they have dealt with it and are confident their union will work.

Photo: Courtesy