Some topics, such as the one I covered last week about men wishing they had the type of wives their ancestors had, cannot be covered in a single piece. Even two articles are not enough, but it will have to do. For now.
Today I shall focus on another archaic belief that floats around like a bad smell, that if you want a submissive wife, also wrongly known as a good wife, the best place to find her is the village. Women in big cities and towns like Nairobi have been adulterated by modern living, usually referred to as foreign concepts. Even before I delve into it, I repeat that it is ridiculous to cherry-pick what you can or not borrow from the West, unless it matters spiritually.
I am here to poke holes into that notion. Fact; there is no major difference between city and village living, except that the latter is healthier, quieter and friendlier. Village and city people get the same education, they get the same world exposure through the internet, and the days of promising village girls a trip to the city so they could soften up, are over.
Everybody knows someone they can visit in a city. Information is pretty much accessible from everywhere with a little phone data or Wifi. The village girls can dress the same way as city girls because they all source clothes from Gikomba market. Both sets read the same articles online, and they are both as woke as the other. The only difference is geography.
Case in point. Over the holidays at a village party, my sister and I shared a table with two women. We all knew one other in that village way that you know everyone who lives within a ten-kilometre radius of you. Naturally, my sister and I had more to say to each other, and they had more to say to each other. At some point, as you do when you are sitting close to others, their conversation flows to you. I am also a very active eavesdropper, and some keywords quickly pique my interest, like ‘I showed him’.
So I pinched my sister and with my head indicated there was hot gossip. One of the women was recounting how she had beaten up her husband the night before. My sister and I shared a perturbed look because of the casual manner the story was being relayed, and that she was petite. The other woman, one we learned was a sister-in-law by marrying brothers, as petite, said that since the last beating she gave her husband a few months earlier, he had started behaving.
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My curiosity has a mind of its own so seconds later I was asking them questions. It turned out that the husbands whose father beat up their mother, used to beat them as well, until one of the wives stumbled on a post on social media about a girl who beat up her physically abusive husband, and that was the last time she was beaten. The two sisters-in-law plotted and the next thing, the men were on the receiving end. Marry a village girl at your own risk. They are as awake as the city girls.
Case two; a dude living in America decided he wanted a village girl to marry because the Americanised women were untameable. He travelled to America with his new wife and showed off her submissiveness but she left him as soon as she could stand on her own. It turned out that all along her plan was to leave Kenya, and the dude was the ticket, literally. Do you still want a village girl?
A village girl I know who desperately wanted to escape an abusive family got married to a city man who was actively looking for a village wife. She played the perfect wife for a few years, then she left him because he did not respect her. I could go on and on, I have enough data, but there is just no space.
My point is not to discourage men from marrying a village girl – love knows no boundaries. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the type of wife some of our brothers are after no longer exists.