Cultural bias against daughters still lingers

My good friend Ted Malanda reckons that this maneno of married women inheriting from their fathers is monkey business. “When you have sons, and you throw married daughters into the same shamba,” he says, “hio ni ulcers watu wanatafuta.”

To be honest, I can see his point. I see where he’s coming from because women are peculiarly positioned in African society. They are supposed to go and come at the same time. When you get married, you leave your parents' home and are welcomed into your husband’s boma.

You become the custodian of your husband’s property and any other property he may have been blessed with by way of inheritance. The home you’ve left becomes the property of your brothers (if you had any). Their wives are welcomed in, quickly filling that custodian position. I say ‘custodian’ because in the minds of men they are the owners of the soil; women just do the tilling. Men have been known to view women as labourers, not shareholders.

So it’s easy for women to feel like chattels who become part and parcel of their fathers' or husbands' property, gaining and losing value in any transaction, depending on if they are coming or going. But what if you only have daughters, and you throw their husbands into the same shamba? What is the likely outcome? I would wager that those daughters - as habitual custodians – would till, sell, or invest the hell out of that soil to the great benefit of their families as a unit, regardless of the gender of their own children.

Basic principle

Children are children whether they are male, female, intersex, or transgender, and every child has a genetic expectation to inherit their father’s lands. The complications that may arise later can be dealt with when the need to deal with them arises.

Before then, inheritance for all must be considered a basic principle, meaning that it should be built upon, not deconstructed. See, basic principles are truths from which other truths can be derived. In this case the truth is that when it comes to family succession it doesn’t matter if you are a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, married or unmarried, because the laws of our land require that ‘children’ inherit from their fathers.

Weirdly, the law is silent on children inheriting from their mothers. Weird because if we’re keeping it real, boy and girl children inherit from their mothers every day. The percentage of single-parent homes led by women bears testament to this claim. As an unmarried parent myself, with no immediate plans to increase the number of voters in my homestead, I can assure you that my daughter’s is my sole beneficiary. This applies no matter how she chooses to live her life; whether she decides to remain single or to get married.

Latest uproar

Herein lays my one reservation, also the reason I can see Uncle Ted’s point. At one point I could have a married daughter who will want to bring her husband into my shamba, and that’s an ulcer-inducing thought for sure. But hey, what’s a mother to do?

What’s any parent supposed to do but want the best life for their children? It doesn’t even matter what you have in your hands to leave a child, whether it’s the shirt on your back or the cattle on a thousand hills; what matters is the simple, and profound, blessing of passing on to your children what you’ve spent a lifetime building on their behalf.

The right of any child, whether married or unmarried, to inherit has been a feature of Kenya’s succession law for years. Therefore, the Nyeri ruling that caused this latest uproar about inheritance was a reassertion of a legal principle rather than an introduction. The ruling was made in favour of married daughters who faced the risk of being disinherited by their step-mother. In the step-mother’s mind these were women who had gone; disinherited because they had cleaved to men who should have had the means to provide.

End of day, even when you acknowledge greed as a factor, the cultural bias against daughters born among sons remains strong; so strong that even women use it against one another. Were this not the case, there would be no need for the Judiciary to intervene.

It should be common sense that all children are created equal, and self-evident that girl-children are just as capable as their brothers to steward the wealth of their fathers (and mothers). It should be, but it isn’t. So until the time comes when it is, may the courts continue to stomp the grounds where grown men fear to tread.

 

Ms Masiga is Peace and Security Editor, The Conversation Africa