By Jeanine Viau

After class on Thursday last week, each of the three classes prepared skits and follow-up discussion questions for a collective pastoral session. The skits were meant to dramatize and bring to life some of the issues being addressed in our respective courses. Interestingly, gender and cultural collision came to the forefront, both in the explicit issues presented and in the response/reception of these presentations. An initial moment of destabilizing discomfort came when the audience of students and field assistants from other courses laughed and jeered our skit depicting the silencing of women’s voices. We addressed serious concerns, including marital rape, female genital mutilation, severe marginalization and poverty, polygamy, unequal opportunities in education and distribution of labor, and the use of exclusively male language for God, and our colleagues silenced us, mocking our earnestness. When we raised concerns with the program director later on, he chalked it up to ‘nervous laughter,’ letting them off the hook. But in talking to our Kenyan cohorts and the field assistants from our class, there is a distinction between nervous laughter, as well as affirmative responses (which many of them claimed to be doing in retrospect), and outright disrespectful dismissal. Our Kenyan cohorts said that they had expected to be received this way; that they deal with this kind of treatment regularly as female university professors in their context.

An even more acute conflict emerged after the final skit, which dealt with polygamy vs. contemporary male infidelity as phenomena within the African cultural experience. Men and women alike laughed at various circumstances and encounters depicted in the dramatization, situations that a feminist lens observes with great unease and suspicion. Hearing the women laughing as the husband runs to meet his third mistress, while the wife is left economically responsible for her children and household, was disturbing. The skit was divided into two schemes – the first depicting a ‘traditional’ model of polygamy, the second a contemporary situation of male infidelity with multiple mistresses. The dramatization took on a normative stance favoring a traditional model of polygamy over accepted contemporary practices of male infidelity. This normative stance was further emphasized by the group’s proposed discussion question: ‘Which option is the way forward, polygamy or mistresses?’

Our uproar in response to this closed question was instantaneous. For the feminist minded, this question is normative in conception, meaning it asks for a discriminatory (arguably ethical) decision, and yet, it is closed, proposing that these are the only two possible choices. In the group discussion following the skit presentations, this was the first distinction we had to address: the difference between normative and descriptive claims. Many of those sympathetic to the practice of polygamy/mistresses and the question itself, with its closed frame, emphasized the fact of these practices within the Kenyan/African reality. However, there is a difference between acknowledging a cultural fact or a descriptive claim, and accepting this fact as normative, as a just and ethically legitimate mode of relating. Since the question was framed for a normative response, those of us reflecting within the feminist imagination had serious difficulties accepting these as the only two options.

Interestingly, as the discussion progressed, it was primarily the men in the group who affirmed polygamy as a just and ideal form of relating. Their primary arguments had to do with the affirmation of traditional African culture, the economic and labor advantages for women in polygamous households, and the protections and regulations supported in traditional African societies, which they attempted to show in the skit as the husband took his quarreling wives to the counsel of elders. But as the skit portrayed, as well as the reality of women in polygamous homes, the protections do more to protect the interests of men than women. The only reason the council of elders was consulted was because the husband’s desires and routine were interrupted; and the resolution simply involved the women ceasing to act jealously and the husband spending equal time with each.

Although some of the Kenyan women in the group discussion supported their male colleagues, most of them expressed the desire to have one husband only, that this was their ideal situation. If the choice is between a second wife or infidelity with mistresses, one of the women said she would prefer a polygamous relationship, particularly since she has no recourse if her husband is economically able to take a second wife or has to take one for the sake of having children. The men in the discussion tried to emphasize free choice as an element of traditional polygamy, that a woman consents to this arrangement; but hearing from the women, it seems that the only reason they would enter into such a relationship is in the absence of choice.

As a Western feminist, I am required to acknowledge my socio-cultural location, check my cultural assumptions, and authentically evaluate the arguments before making normative judgments and claims. However, this should not exclude me from the debate, particularly when I hear competing perspectives coming out of the host context. Women are not satisfied nor is justice normally served in polygamous familial structures. Not only am I aided by insights born out of my own cultural location, I stand in solidarity with women from the Kenyan (and other African) contexts who are oppressed by certain cultural assumptions and desire more for their daughters and themselves.

Our instructor, Anne, sheds light on the particular injustices for women in polygamous situations and the collapse of traditional arguments supporting polygamy in light of a feminist theological critique. She demonstrates how research has almost exclusively relied on the perspectives/testimonies of men to support claims of justice in polygamous relationships. In talking to women, men’s claims to women’s satisfaction and wholeness break down. For Anne, an authentic Christian vision of human relationship provides a powerful source for women’s liberation: “Polygamy is one of those systems that legalize the inferiority and subordination of women to men. Christ’s message is one that gives full life to all and mends the brokenness of our humanity. Polygamy reflects the brokenness of our humanity, and as such cannot be accommodated by Christianity. The Christian message recognizes that women and men are equal sharers in humanity and that both are made in the image and likeness of God. It carries within it a radical vision of human mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation” (Nasimiyu-Wasike, 116). This seems to be in line with much of the fieldwork I have done; Christianity becomes a source of empowerment and resistance for the women in this context.

Looking at this issue in concrete practice, and considering Anne’s critique of polygamous marriage structures, one of the interviews I had yesterday sheds light on the oppression of young women who are trapped within unjust cultural matrices. I interviewed a woman deputy at a girl’s secondary school in one of the rural areas of Ngong district just outside of Nairobi. A deputy is like a disciplinary dean in the US context.  She identified traditional cultural structures and obligations, particularly related to marriage and sexuality, as the greatest challenges facing young women in this community. This community is predominantly Massai, one of over fifty particular ethnic groups within the Kenyan context. The Massai have, in large part, maintained their traditional culture, including polygamy and traditional gender norms and divisions of labor. The deputy said that within this community, the education of girl children is not a priority. Young women are valued for their marriageablility, the bride wealth they are able to bring to the family. Many of the girls in this context are married right out of primary school (around 14 or 15). Others, who make it to secondary school, end up dropping out, forced into marriages, and/or succumbing to societal pressures because their families cannot and/or will not pay school fees. For community sponsors who would help with the cost of education, again, the education of girls is not valued, so those resources more often than not go to boys.

The question for me continues to be: Are women making these decisions freely? Are they empowered agents? I asked the deputy if these situations were often consensual, the marriages, sex and adolescent pregnancies. She said, “How can they be?” These young women are under extreme pressure to accept their cultural fate as women, which exclusively means marriage, child bearing, and difficult domestic labor (often the entire economic responsibility for the household falls to them; and this is when they are between 14-18 years old). These women are culturally programmed to think that this is their only option, that they are not really women until they are married, and if they don’t have children, they are dead ends. Many are married into polygamous households, in the context of which they are considered property, extensions of male immortality, economic success, and status. Those coming out of polygamous home environments, particularly the daughters of second and third wives, are that much more victims of cultural and self-devaluation, as they witness the dehumanization of their mothers.

In light of these insights from the ground, I stand with Anne and the deputy in deploring these cultural conditions. Just because a traditional practice constitutes a cultural fact does not mean it is life healing, life redeeming, or life sustaining. The entrapment of women in these mazes of injustice, without knowing there is an option to try their luck on the open planes of agency, beyond the walls of the cultural prison (as the program director calls it), is always tragic. It is not sufficient to practice cultural justification without adequate interrogation and evaluation. So I join the deputy in calling for victory (as in Josh 1:7,8), a notion absent from the minds of many young women worldwide. I lend my voice to Miriam, and Hannah, and Mary’s prophetic calls for justice and transformation, their embodied challenges to cultural conformity and systemic oppression.