‘The other woman’ has always been there

When I was younger, many of my friends worked in Nairobi and other urban centres while their wives toiled faithfully at the rural homes.

We referred to such arrangements as “telephone marriages” in line with “telephone farming,” a practice that is still common with many urban wannabes who do not believe they are truly successful unless they can boast of a piece of land in Kitale or a pile of rocks in Murang’a or Machakos.

As I have mentioned before in this column, communication between the towns and many rural areas was rudimentary and unreliable, and these marriages were held together largely by faith. The roads were poor and the few telephones available in rural areas were to be found at the larger shopping centres.

Visits to the rural home were infrequent and in a year, you could count the number of family reunions on the fingers of one hand.

In some cases, you could estimate with a high degree of accuracy the number of times a man had been to his rural home over a period of five years by the number of children his wife had given birth to in that time. For the men, the infrequency of visits also meant that they had a way of vouching for the legitimacy of their children, and therefore the fidelity of their spouses.

Such was the uncertainty surrounding this particular issue, that in my village, the elders advised the visiting telephone husbands to spend some time in the bar at the local shopping centre in the hope that news of their arrival could precede them.

When the time came to go home, preferably well after dark, it was advisable for the man to break into song about his exploits and property such as cattle and goats. This would serve the dual purpose of alerting the wife to be ready to receive a returning hero and — just in case — to warn any unwelcome guests at his home to make their departure.

It is not that the men were themselves paragons of virtue wherever they worked and resided, far from it. I had a friend who had a wife and a string of children back in the village and a live-in white girlfriend in the city.

Visiting Rural Home

The young woman, a German, believed she was in a serious relationship that would one day result in marriage and kept pestering my friend about the two visiting his rural home so that she could get to meet his people.

He strung her along for a while by giving one excuse after the other why they could not go just yet.

Eventually he ran out of excuses and finally sat her down and explained that his parents were the traditional, conservative type and needed to be “worked on” first for them to accept a white daughter-in-law. This, he said, also explained the visits he kept making to the rural home without her. The lies obviously could not go on forever, and finally my friend picked a quarrel with the girl to give himself an excuse to dump her.

Another friend was the he-goat type and kept a string of live-in girlfriends.

His wife was a nurse at a hospital in the rural area where she lived with the children. She was strictly forbidden to come to the city except with express permission from the husband.

To guard against eventualities, the girlfriends were not allowed to keep any give-away items such as clothing or earrings for the period that they were in residence.

As often happens in these cases, the unexpected happened and the wife arrived at the man’s house one evening with a son in tow.

The man lived in one of those two-bedroom flats in Umoja Estate and luckily for him, his younger brother and a friend were in residence at the time. Quick thinking on the sibling’s part saved the day.

The live-in girlfriend was quickly transferred to the guest bedroom and locked in while the brother’s friend kept his sister-in-law and nephew busy with some yarn outside the door.

When the visitors were safely in bed and asleep, the intruder was shown out of the door and to the bus stage.