By Ogova Ondego
Published June 7, 2023
“African husbands beat wives not to harm them but to discipline them. It is our way of bringing a wife back into line when she strays,” says Murimi Njoka, a sociology lecturer at University of Nairobi. “African husbands discipline wives, they don’t batter them as wife battery is a middle class European practice.”
“I only beat my wife when she provokes me or when she misuses money and answers me rudely when I ask for an explanation. You can’t blame me. She asks for it,” says a cattle seller in Ngong Hills on the outskirts of Nairobi.
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“Some men beat up their wives because they want to assert their authority over them.. Call it what you may, but such men derive pleasure from wife-beating,” says Keriako Tobiko, a lawyer.
A Nairobi pastor who argues that wife-beating is an accepted by-product of marriage worldwide says it is wives who transform loving husbands into demons then start complaining that they are being beaten.
Chris Mwalwa, a family counsellor who contends that “even Christian husbands are known to beat their wives in an attempt to hide their insecurity as men have always felt insecure in the presence of women throughout the ages.”
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Battered wives stick with their abusive husbands because they fear they fear to be considered failures should their union break up, says Emmy Gichinga, a clinical pyschologist.
“Some men have the notion of wife-beating ingrained in their minds as they grew up in homes where they saw their fathers beating their mothers,” says Pastor Dennis White of Nairobi Pentecostal Church.”Such men will not think twice before meting out violence on their own wives.”
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The police, prosecutors and even magistrates and judges don’t always view violence committed by husbands against wives in the home as a crime, contends Ewe Pawelski, writer of The Relationship Between Domestic Violence and Women’s Political and Economic Empowerment report for United Nations Development Fund for Women.
“Men who do not know how to reason out easily resorts to wife-beating as they think the only way to end an argument is by beating up anyone whose views they don’t share,” says Kamau Karuri, a lawyer.”There can be no justification for beating any one, let alone a wife.The law gives adequate protection to wives. We only need to enforce it.”
