Swahili Wedding

Swahili weddings are a fascinating mixture of Islamic tradition and Western style. While the brides must be virgins (complete with virginity testing), they are allowed to wear spaghetti strap white wedding dresses straight out of American pop culture. Because there are no men at the all-night disco, women come scantily clad in their best dresses sans bui bui, despite the fact that the entire male population of the town voyeuristically watches from behind 4-foot tall potato sack fences. The entire wedding—disco, lunch, and ceremony—is divided by gender. Not only do the bride and groom not spend the wedding together, they actually don’t partake in any of the festivities, only the ceremony. On the day of the wedding, the guests gather for dancing (an interesting mix of traditional Swahili music and Shakira, Akon, and Beyonce (pronounced with a silent “e”)), lunch (communal plates of dead animals), and hours of sitting and waiting for the bride (or in this case, brides) to show up. Meanwhile, the groom goes to the mosque to get married, while the bride waits at home. Once they are officially married (the groom agrees to the marriage at the mosque), the bride shows up to the party, where she stands on a dais decorated for valentine’s day and waits for her husband to come fetch her for the wedding night.

There are very few things about western culture that I find outright superior, but I have two words: honeymoon suite.

It’s one thing to sit through an hour long cultural discussion about traditional wedding practices and entirely another to share a wall with the awkward-and-uncomfortable couple on their wedding night. It’s funny how sex is so taboo, but having witnesses to the virginity testing is entirely acceptable.

Living in a Sexist State

Working for a women’s empowerment organization often makes me forget how destitute women really are in the world. Obviously, women are of lesser status in the majority world, but it’s easy to forget when working alongside wonderful, independent, powerful women.

Machismo is not the norm in Kenya. Men are polite and accommodating, even chivalrous. Honestly, my only friends here are men, but only because the women spend 18 hours a day boiling water for bathing, cooking three meals a day, sweeping dirt floors, working on their shamba (the Swahili word for farm), and raising hoards of children (the average in the village is between 4 and 7, but I personally know one family that has 19 children).

The men are not bad people. They aren’t subjugating their wives and daughters for fun (or so I’d like to believe); sexism is so deeply rooted in the cultural mores and religious practices that even the women believe that they are less worthy. While women are expected to be strict Muslims, wear their bui buis and hijabs, and pray five times a day, they are not allowed to enter mosques. Men must always be served first, even if that means that the women and girls must go without the food that they grew, gathered, and cooked.

A friend of mine, who is a nice, down to earth, friendly guy who refuses to let me pay for anything despite the fact that he makes about $12 a month. I recently went to visit his house where I met his entire family. When I suggested that we could do our own dishes, he guffawed as if I had suggested that he should attempt to give birth to quintuplets. Sincerely, he explained that when there are no women around, he was at the bottom of the hierarchy and had to do the family’s grunt work. But as long as his sisters were there, they must do everything. He laughed about how sometimes he has to beat his sisters. When I asked why, he replied, “If they don’t do everything I tell them to, I have to cane them. Otherwise they’ll never learn.”

I am trying to be a cultural relativist. But seeing women treated like dogs is difficult to stomach. And attempting to improve their situation by giving them education, jobs, and birth control is only making it worse for some of them. How are we supposed to reach gender equality without becoming cultural imperialists?