To the absentee fathers, how is your baby mama raising your kid?

“We should empower women,” one of my editors told me the other day.

And my mind flew back to one Saturday afternoon, a couple of months ago; and a conversation I had with this Swahili woman called Ruka, the proud mother of five kids – three girls, two boys.

How does anybody, who is seriously not in the monies, support five children in this Kenya?

I just came off paying Chelsea’s second term fees – (was just joking about buying a Saturn HDTV with the money instead, the other day) – and the total is enough to make anyone wonder why they didn’t enter the school business.

The late Kenneth Stanley Njindo Matiba, like the very much alive VP Moody Awori, had a point.

Mess around making money in breweries, hotels, prophylactics and prison construction, but at the end of the day, retire into the School Business.

Ruka is 40, but does not look it because her face is smooth if hardened, like sugar marple (that’s a light-coloured hardwood, and not a crop, nor is it a tree – just in case you’re ever on Quiz Night).

Because of her petite frame, she also doesn’t look like the pop-outer of five children.

So there we were, coincidentally next to one another at the Ocean Sport Resort, waiting for some long bike race to be complete, and we got chatting about the odd drizzly weather, then our kids ( her – five, me – two, like Liverpool Vs Roma round one).

And I suppose because the sun came out, and she was drinking her Gin-&-Tonics pretty fast – and maybe because I have that (deceptively) easy journalistic air, face and Klopp-like spectacles that say ‘you can confide in me,’ I soon heard the life story of Ruka, and her five children.

Apparently she was married off by her peasant dad in Kilifi at 16 to a wealthy Giriama landowner in 1994, forcing her to drop out of school in Form Two. At the time her former classmates were doing their KCSE, she was popping her first child, a beautiful daughter.

But after turning 20, she fled Kilifi for Mombasa, leaving her daughter with her father (in his late 40s early 50s, she believes) and began the night hustle, looking for a mzungu.

She soon found one, a man in his 30s from Germany, who fell madly in love with her.

They got a son! But then his expat contract, which he’d never mentioned before, ran out after three years, and Herr returned to Stuttgart in the April of 2001. From there, he e-mailed (yahoo!) Ruka to confess that he’d been married all along, and had a family in Germany.

But he would send child support for their boy.

He did, every month – and the sum was generous enough to allow Ruka to party on in Coast.

But at 26, tired of the non-stop Mombasa raha club life, she accepted to be the third wife of some Arab importer/exporter from the Port, whom she had been seeing.

After a year of life with a (mostly) absentee hubby, Ruka was deathly bored, but a newborn girl renewed her purpose. Her half-German boy was now living with her mother, as she’d never told the Arab about him, let alone her first daughter.

When she screwed up the courage to tell him, he divorced her on the spot – although he now sent her money for child support. ‘Every month on Mpesa,’ Ruka says.

Single again in her early 30s, Ruka went wild once more, and at 34, got her second boy (and fourth kid) from a flamboyant Western-Kenya politician (polygamist) I cannot name here.

Her fifth kid, a two year old baby girl, is from an old Italian widower investor who chose to retire in Watamu five years ago, but who has recently dumped Ruka after her jealous pal snitched to him that she was cheating on him with a local club deejay.

A pretty young lady, in her early 20s, walks up to us.

Beside her is a guy, one hand holding hers, the other a room key, who looks twice her age.

‘Ow ya doan, mate?’ the mzungu man greets me, and I place his accent as Australian.

‘Meet my eldest daughter, Zuri!’ Mama Ruka tells me, as she slurps her G&T.