Report from Kenya #640 -- What Westerners Get Wrong on Women’s Economic Customs in Kenya.
David Zarembka
What Westerners Get Wrong on Women’s Economic Customs in Kenya.
Report from Kenya #640 – January 29, 2020
If you want the URL for this report, contact me at davidz...@gmail.com
This is Clare’s fruit and vegetable stand where we often buy bananas and other items. In front are our grandchildren, from left, Rembo, Faith, and Brian. This is one of the largest, most successful kiosks in Lumakanda. She has a large clientele as people are always coming to buy some daily need. Since most people do not have refrigerators, they need to shop almost every day of their fruits and vegetables.
This is the second article on how Americans and other westerners misinterpret or misunderstand culture in Africa, as illustrated by western Kenya where I live. The first article was last week’s Do American Children Cry more than Kenyan Children? This article discusses a significant missed fact of women’s economic customs here in Kenya.
If one studies the United States pre-Civil War era (1861), legally at that time the husband owned everything including his wife and children. There was a long term struggle in the United States, led initially by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to give property, financial, and other rights, including the right to vote, to American women. This battle in the United States continues. In their divorce, Jeff Bezos received three times as many of the family shares in Amazon as his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Scott, even as she was instrumental in the success of the company. In other words, the family finances were tied to the couple and the male received significant preference over the female at the dissolution of the marriage. This is not equality. Nor is it an unusual example in the United States. The history of women’s economic subornation in European countries is similar.
When westerners come to Kenya, they assume that this historical experience of women’s economic subordination that occurred in the United States and western Europe must be occurring in rural Africa. Economists who are mostly men, often white, and mostly living in urban centers often in Europe or America, have no experience with the reality.
The key issue is that women in western Kenya, and perhaps much of the rest of Africa, never had their finances controlled by their husbands as occurred in Europe and America. If a woman cultivates some crops, when she harvests them, they belong to her to do whatever she wants with them – keep some for family consumption or sell some. If she sells some, the money she receives is hers alone and her husband has no control of the funds that she has earned. Likewise when a woman earns money by cultivating a neighbor’s field or developing a small scale business, she controls the funds. Women control their own finances independently from their husbands. This is also true for a teenager who earns some money – it is his or hers to decide how the money is spent.
Here is the entrance to Lumakanda market place. In front you see women who have just brought their items for sale – cooking banana, carrots, tomatoes, greens, roasting maize (corn), second-hand clothes, and other items. These women come around four o’clock in the afternoon to sell their goods, including perhaps items from their farms – probably the case with the woman in front selling the cooking bananas. In the background you can see a row of shops which extend over a large area as can be seen by the far away shops on top of the hill. There must be more than 100 small kiosks in this marketplace and almost all of them are rented by women.
For example, there is a term mama mboga, meaning “mother vegetables”, whose occupation is the marketing of fruits and vegetables. There are well over a hundred of these women in Lumakanda alone. Some have large established kiosks while others just do this as a side “hustle”, as the people in Kenya call this activity, late in the afternoon. They sell not only their own produce, but that of their neighbors, or from buying the produce wholesale in the Kipkarren River market every Thursday and Sunday. In order to succeed in these endeavors, and clearly most women do, they must control their finances because what to buy that will sell and its wholesale and retail prices are all extremely complicated. The woman herself must make the determination of what to buy and the price to sell it. The husband cannot participate because he will have no knowledge of these transactions. He then has no knowledge or control of the surpluses the wife makes from her business.
This is not the only business that women do in Lumakanda. They own the many hair salons, second-hand clothing stores, tailoring shops, and hoteli (small restaurants). At least four women fry and sell chips (“French fries” for Americans).
This women-based economy is extremely active. One way to observe this is, if I go to buy bananas from one of the mama mboga and I need change, I usually get a very old, crumbled up, sometimes torn, bill. This means that the money has been used in many transactions in the informal economy and has not been withdrawn from circulation by the bank in the formal economy. The fast flow rate of small bills in town is an indication of how vibrant this economy is.
Since it is all outside of the formal economy, this economy is extremely hard to study with accurate statistics. My feeling is that it is many times larger than usually given credit for.
Some of these market women become extremely successful. In the late 1960s when I was principal of the Mua Hills Harambee School in Machakos district, one of these very successful woman sent her child to the school. She was wealthy owning businesses and building in Machakos town. She was wealthier than her husband who had just a routine job with a monthly salary. She is not the only woman I know who has been successful via her own endeavors.
One of the factors that leads to this female entrepreneurial spirit is that, if the husband is employed, he can work in any part of the country. Many, of course, end up in Nairobi which is the economic hub of the country. At best the husband comes home once per month when he is paid, or at least during the Christmas vacation. This leaves the wife most of the time completely on her own. On the one hand, the husband is not around to “control” her finances and on the other hand, she needs to have an income of her own to survive.
Many husbands are slow or delinquent in supporting their wife and children. Men are noted for spending too much of their money on drinking, partying, gambling, and such non-productive activities. In addition, successful men frequently have more than one wife. Contrary to this, women spend most of their earnings on food, clothing, school fees, medical care, and other household expenses. Of course, there are also many husbands who do contribute appropriately to the household budget.
Some women, these days, have employment in formal sector, particularly, as teachers, nurses, secretaries, domestic help, and now even in more traditionally male occupations. In these cases, as in the informal economy, the women control the expenditure of their salaries.
Contrary to the conventional assumption from America and Europe, how do I know this is the custom in Kenya? In 1969, I married a Kenyan woman, Rodah, and in 1999, I married another Kenyan woman, Gladys. It was clear to me from the get-go of each marriage that I could not control any income earned by my wife. If I had tried to do this, the marriage would have been full of financial conflicts with the wife refusing to be employed.
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David Zarembka
Email: davidz...@gmail.com
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