Scandal that’s a Kenyan wedding, where friends, relatives are fleeced

There’s nothing like a good wedding to get Kenyans going. Weddings here are not just about a boy marrying a girl — or, as is often the case these days, a girl finally succeeding in forcing a boy to marry her.

No, our weddings are political events, they are social statements. They are, in their glory and their pretense, an apt synopsis of the social make-believe that Kenyan society has become.

The fiction, of course, begins with the bride and the groom. The people of old designed weddings to be joyous occasions at which young men and young women, both pure and untainted by the world, would come together to start a brand new family.

 Jealously guarded

Well, not in Kenya: we are the ultimate second-hand country. The groom probably sired a couple kids with random ladies out there, abandoned them and is pretending to be brand new.

The bride too, will likely be hiding one or two kids somewhere with her relatives, information that is jealously guarded by her folks so as not to jeopardise the amount of dowry to be collected.

Then the fiction moves on to the planning for the wedding itself. This is often hilarious. First, the groom will allegedly constitute a wedding committee of his friends. But this is only in theory, since these things are driven by the bride.

She decides who will sit on the committee, and who will not be allowed anywhere near it.

Social status

This is usually an exercise in advertisement: the bride simply wants as many people as possible to know that she is finally getting married. It is a social status thing.

The committee members are usually drafted in against their will, and they do zero planning — their real job is to badger and threaten their friends into paying up for the wedding.

You see, in Kenya we plan for weddings that we cannot afford, and the three Fs — friends, fools, and family — are then clobbered into footing the bill.

For a typical wedding, the couple will have barely a tenth of the money they expect to spend on their big day: the rest will be harassed out of unsuspecting friends and even acquaintances.

This is the wedding committee’s job, and they begin by printing tacky fundraising cards that are then distributed freely and rather menacingly by the committee members.

The money trickles in. A combination of outright blackmail — such as heading to a friend’s workplace and in a loud voice, repeatedly asking for a contribution in full hearing of his boss.

Plaintive pleading also works. In a couple months the lucky pair have the cash they need, or at least pledges of that cash, to proceed with the wedding.

The wedding day itself is, of course, a scandal.

X-rated movie

A few days before the big day, the groom will usually have a party thrown by his friends, to bid farewell to bachelorhood. This stag night is for all intents and purposes, a free-for-all orgy, with the groom allowed to partake of any of the many women present, all in the name of “celebrating his last night of freedom”.

The stag night pales in comparison to the hen night, the equivalent of the stag night but for the bride. Kenyan hen nights have been known to involve conduct that would not be out of place in an x-rated movie, and many a bride end up at the altar pregnant as a result of their exertions on that night.

If a bride gives birth almost exactly nine months after the wedding, you know what she was up to. And then the big day rolls along.

Fingers crossed, everything appears to work on the surface, the controversies — including the usually stern disapproval by both sets of parents-in-law of their kids’ choice of spouse — are quietly set aside.

And our couple begin life as a married pair, deep in debt and united by little more than society’s expectations of them.