Tables have turned in my village; women now call the shots

By BENSON RIUNGU

KENYA: If Kanyonga, the patriarch of my Uturine clan, were to come back to life today and surveyed the goings-on in the village he departed from almost a century and a half ago, he would angrily demand to be immediately reunited with his maker.

He would find a place where the natural order he knew had been violently overthrown and replaced with a sick society. At his prime, Kanyonga was the proud husband to 16 wives, each of whom knew her place and for whom the patriarch’s wish was a command.

So submissive were they that whenever he met one, she would obediently kneel and proffer a shaven head for him to touch as a way of greetings. He would be aghast to find that these days it is his male descendants who act upon the whims of their womenfolk. In short, they have given up the pants to their wives in exchange for their skirts.

Cock

Take the case of Baba Ndenda, the local corruption for Deda, short for Dedan (In the land of Njuri Ncheke, everyone from the governor and senator down to the lowliest member of the community have the habit of inserting ‘n’ where it is not needed and removing it where it is required, eg ‘India’ comes out as ‘Idia’.)

If you went to his home and asked where Mama Ndenda was, in all likelihood he would not know. It is a long time since he tasted his wife’s food, and it is rumoured conjugal rights are a foreign concept in that home. Indeed, it is rumoured that it is many a year since he shared a bed with Mama Ndenda and that these days he shares the floor with the family cat, their two hens and a cock.

Had of family

Perhaps even worse, Baba Ndenda has lost his place as the head of family in the eyes of Ndenda and his siblings. If the boy is sent away from school because his parents owe money (forget about free primary education, it is a government propaganda tool that is unknown in the village), he knows that the holder of the purse is the mother.

The source of this filial revolution is a practice known as kibuchio, which is an enterprise involving the buying and selling of bananas at markets that have sprouted at virtually all shopping centres along the Embu-Meru highway. Nowadays, women who once depended on their husbands for all needs requiring money have not only been freed of dependency; with economic empowerment they find that they no longer need to depend solely on their hubbies for sexual gratification.

The transformation of Mama Ndenda has been nothing short of astonishing.

The days when she used to wear a long blue dress and cover her head with a white headscarf as a member of a religious sect are long gone. So apparently, are her morals.

Her day starts before dawn, when she dresses as one would expect a woman taking bananas to the market. But once she is done with selling bananas, something strange happens. She heads to the back rooms she and a number of fellow market women have rented at the shopping centre where the grime from bananas is quickly washed off.

Also discarded are the mud boots and dowdy dress of the market woman. Baba Ndenda would never recognise his wife is the worldly woman who eventually emerges from the back rooms.

She is not only bewigged, but her lips glisten with glossy lipstick. Hanging from one shoulder is an expensive handbag while her feet are clad in expensive high-heeled shoes.

From the shopping centre the apparition will head to the bus stop where she catches a matatu to distant towns such as Nkubu, Chuka or even Meru town. Whatever happens there only she and her maker know.

Offspring

Come evening, she heads back to the local shopping centre where things happen in reverse. The wig, handbag and high-heeled shoes quickly disappear. So does the lipstick and fancy dress. The person who emerges is the banana seller of earlier in the day.

The upshot of these clandestine goings-on is that Baba Ndenda can never swear on a gikama, the red hot iron ball by which Merus swear and which sears the flesh of their hands if they lie, that any of the little fellows who bear his name are his biological offspring.