There is nothing sacrosanct about a traumatic marriage

It pays to reject oppressive social norms and conventions. To be free is to be happy. The Kenyan woman especially should boldly reject conventions that chain her to murderous unions and affiliations. Every so often, we wake up to news of yet another woman murdered at home. This one is felled with an axe. The other one is stabbed multiple times. A third one succumbs to the machete.

These women are slain not by strangers, but by men they live with – or have lived with. Their neighbours go on to give narratives of estranged couples that have lived in strained and difficult partnerships. They have quarreled and fought all the time. Yet they must still live together. If they disengage society will judge them harshly – and especially the woman.

The woman must accept an endlessly demeaning and abusive lifestyle. If she goes back to her maiden home, her relatives coax her to go back. “Just persevere,” she is told, “Marriage is like that.”

Here in Emanyulia, her brothers and their wives become uneasy after she stays beyond a few days. If she should cross anyone, they ridicule her. “That’s why you cannot live in your marriage. You don’t belong here!”

They give her a basketful of maize flour and chicken. They tell her to go back to her man. She packs up her rags and leaves; back to her tedious life of cats and dogs. If they should get a report that she has been hacked to death, they will roll allover the ground in loud tears. Yet they pushed her into the slaughterhouse.

It is all a factor of placing artifice above nature. For marriage is itself an artificial thing. The Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in the volume titled A Discourse on Inequality, “While it is decidedly advantageous to the human race that there should be permanent unions between males and females, it does not follow that such unions are established by nature.”

In his Second Discourse, Rousseau drives this point home where he says, “The family is a creation of human will and agreement and not of human instinct.” Is there one good reason why people should be forced to live an artificial thing that is not working? Must they remain there even when they stare at certain murder?

Matrimony in Africa has been mystified to the extent that it is a licence to commit outrageous things. If a woman reports domestic battery to the police, they will dismiss it as “ugomvi ya nyumbani,” which is to say an insignificant domestic quarrel. They advise the woman to “go back home to resolve the issue.”

Now this thing is getting out of hand. Boys do not even wait to get married to the girls before they can begin clobbering and killing them. They do it right in the courtship phase that ought to be the age of romantic idealism. Others are even composing obtuse songs that tell girls to get ready to be hacked down with axes. And these obscene things are played on radio. This is also the kind of song they dance to in drunken nightclubs. And you expect the girls to get home alive?

In the Christian world, marriage is sacred. There is no qualification about whether the marriage is happy or not. In Kiswahili, they use the metonymy “lifetime handcuffs” to mean wedding. You are hence chained to oppression and misery. The Christian Good Book tells us that the Lord himself divined that marriage shall not be dissolved, “except for unchastity.”

We read in Matthew 19:8, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”

Elsewhere, in Matthew 5:32 the Lord says, “I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

The divorced woman is outlawed. She “unchaste.” She must be ostracised, stigmatised and traumatised. Because of this, the battered woman must remain in the permanent prison that is marriage. There is no escape for the single woman either. Beyond a score of years, her relatives begin meddling in her life. “What is happening?” they ask her.

They want you to get into the death trap that is today’s companionship between men and women in Africa. On your wedding day, they come to celebrate the entrapment of yet one more prisoner. A few sessions of battery down the line, they will be telling you to hang in there, “for the sake of the children.”

It is questionable that any child could lead a wholesome life in a traumatic domestic environment. You do that child more harm than good. What’s more, we are today witnessing the slaying of such children together with their mothers. What is the point of locking them in there? Going forward, the Kenyan woman must now reject outmoded social conventions. There is nothing sacrosanct about a traumatic marriage. It does not matter who wants to blackmail you about sacraments, social correctness and the lot. Your peace, health and happiness should take precedence.

Get out of that thing fast if it is not working. Better still; don’t get into it in the first place, if you can avoid it. After all, St. Paul of Tarsus says of marriage, “Now to the unmarried and widows I say this: It is good for them to remain unmarried as I am. (1 Cor. 7:8).

- The writer is a strategic public communications adviser.  www.barrackmuluka.co.ke