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Health & Fitness

Dowry and Blessings Kenyan Style

Some traditions are poetic, others unfair...at least to outsiders. But I would learn from them and the lessons they would impart for my own personal sense of peace.

Kenyans live lives steeped in tradition. In addition to the all-important harvest times, work-life calendars revolve around weddings, graduations, births and deaths, and circumcision ceremonies. One night when Mama Patie’s friend, Elizabeth, a nurse in the Loitokitok hospital came for dinner, she recounted her own experience with the practices of “dowry” and “giving blessings.”

When a Kenyan man wishes to marry he must provide his intended’s father with a dowry gift of livestock or money. The dowry can be paid by a lump sum or in installments made throughout the length of the marriage, as Elizabeth’s “husband” had promised to do. But though they’d had two children together, Elizabeth and their children’s father were never formally married in a church. Another wrinkle was that they’d separated before he had paid off the last dowry installment. So at the end of the month, Elizabeth explained, she was going to travel to her father’s home to ask for his “blessings” to legitimize the union and take care of the unpaid dowry.

“It’s okay,” she said, noticing my dismay. “My Baba told me, ‘bring only what you have and that is enough.’”  But the whole concept seemed... well, wrong.

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“But your husband left you,” I wanted to say. But this was just one of so many other cultural norms and traditions in Kenya: complex, historically and culturally ingrained, and seemingly illogical to outsiders. Outsiders like me.

There is a whole ceremony involved in “giving blessings,” a rather poetic process that I wished I could have seen myself. Elizabeth would arrive at her father’s home from her eight hour bus ride and be made to stand outside his locked gate, singing songs and performing other ceremonial gestures, before even being allowed in the front door. “Only in this way – by receiving his blessings properly and assuming the dowry on behalf of my husband – can I qualify for the dowry for my own daughter, paid by her husband,” she said. “And prevent bad luck from coming upon me and my entire family forever.”

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For support, Mama Patie had agreed to accompany her. In fact, these brave women had formed a support group with other similarly situated women in town. Mama Patie’s own husband, Joseph, died before he could pay off the dowry; now she, like Elizabeth, would have had to pay her father in his stead.

It seemed unfair that the requirements of paying of dowry and seeking “blessings” should fall upon the shoulders of these hardworking and dedicated Kenyan women, particularly when they weren’t to blame for the abandonment or death of their men. But then, so much of the cultural life in Kenya – indeed, in all of Africa – seemed to burden the backs of women.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons Kenyan women are so strong, as one of them would soon teach me.

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