Report from Kenya #641 -- Where are the Weddings?
David Zarembka
Where are the Weddings?
Report from Kenya #641 – January 29, 2020
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Every Saturday from noon to 1 PM there is a program on TV called The Wedding Show. This is a reality show promoted by those who plan and implement elaborate, expensive weddings for the wealthy elite in Nairobi. These are pictures from one of the shows. As far as rural western Kenya is concerned this is fantasy TV.
Where are the weddings in western Kenya? Gladys and I have lived in Lumakanda for 14 years now and have attended exactly seven weddings, on average only one every two years. In comparison Gladys attends one or more funerals per month which would equal at least 168 funerals. I don’t go to quite as many funerals as I don’t attend unless I know the deceased. This lack of weddings is not due to lack of possibilities. We have loads of nephews and nieces, grand nephews and nieces, many other more distant relatives, the large population of Lumakanda Friends Church, and all the other people we know. People just don’t have weddings. I asked Gladys that, if a couple has not had a church wedding, are they married? Her answer was, “No.” This means that most couples are not married.
Let me go through the seven weddings we have attended. I need to note that weddings are large well-attended ceremonies with 500 to 1000 people, lots of dancing, singing, decorations, the ceremony itself including the exchange of rings, gift giving, eating the wedding cake and food, photography, and so on. They are not particularly different from a normal wedding in the United States.
Only two of the seven wedding could be what is considered usual – a young couple getting hitched. In one of these two cases, the bride was clearly pregnant and the other did not last as the couple separated, with good cause in my opinion, after a few years. The first wedding we attended shortly after we moved to Kenya in 2007 was for Gladys’ aunt – in other words for a person from the generation older than she was. The purpose for this wedding was that Gladys’ aunt wanted to become a pastor in her church. One of the major requirements to become a pastor is to have a church wedding. The couple’s children and grandchildren attended along with all the other guests.
The remaining four weddings were for the same purpose, all from Lumakanda Friends Church. In two cases, the grooms were youth pastors/evangelists who needed to have a church wedding if they wanted to continue in that role. The third case was for a potential pastor about forty years old who already had children. The last was for a couple who had been together for more than thirty years where the woman wanted to become a pastor, which she did. Their seven children attended as did their grandchildren. In this case, the groom who had already retired essentially made a joke of the ceremony. Can you really blame him?
These relationships are called “Come we stay” arrangements, i.e., common law marriages. While many are of short duration, some are lasting. Is this a new trend that couples don’t get married? Not at all. The generation older than Gladys’ did this as can be seen by the example of her aunt. This continued with her generation, the following generation, and since few are now getting married, the couples of the current young generation.
Another wrinkle in the system is polygamy. The second or third wife is not allowed to have a Christian church wedding, although Muslims are allowed to marry up to four wives.
Another indication that weddings are not appreciated is this: When a person dies, he or she is soon buried. Immediately on death the church appoints a committee to direct the funeral which includes developing a detailed budget. One of the expenses included in the funeral budget is the medical costs of the last illness. This can in some cases be considerable. If the funeral is on Saturday as many of them are, on the prior Thursday the body is brought from the morgue for viewing. In the afternoon there is a fundraising gathering and the money needed for the funeral is raised that day. This is how funerals are financed. In the one case at Lumakanda Church with the young couple – the groom was well known in the church – had great difficulty raising the budget. A certain allocation was assigned to every member of the church and the treasurer of the marriage committee spoke week after week encouraging, even haranguing, people to make their donations. The week before the wedding, they were still well short of the goal. This indicated to me that the members of the church do not value a wedding as they do a funeral.
What is the root of this disconnect? Clearly the concept of a church wedding was brought to Kenyans by Christian missionaries who considered the nuclear family as the basic structure of society. Yet the Africans did not consider the nuclear family as the valuable one, but rather the much larger extended family, in essence, funerals over weddings. This is a continuation of normal customs before the arrival of Christianity and Islam only a little more than a century ago in western Kenya.
Much is made about the custom of bride price in Kenya, where the groom’s family gives items to the bride’s family in exchange for taking her away from her birth family. Originally this included cows, goats, honey, beer, and other items, but more recently it includes a sum of money. But if there are no weddings, then there are no bride prices. Only once have Gladys and I attended a “pre-wedding” ceremony. This was shortly after we came in 2007 and in this case one of Gladys’ friend’s son was planning to get married to a bride of a different tribe. The pre-wedding was then a ceremony where the bride and groom families got to meet each other. While I don’t remember the amount of the bride price, I remember that I thought it was quite modest. In this case both the bride and groom were college educated professionals with good jobs in Nairobi. I don’t know how elaborate their Nairobi wedding was. The pictures above show an elaborate Nairobi elite wedding.
The lack of weddings and the underlying apathy to them indicates rural Kenyan society is based on a different concept of family structure. This, then, is another one of those inappropriate assumptions westerners make when they assume that the nuclear family is the basic unit of society. Again they misinterpret Kenyan culture.
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David Zarembka
Email: davidz...@gmail.com
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