By Ogova Ondego
It is almost impossible to have your marriage dissolved in Kenya once you are legally united.
No matter how bad your marriage deteriorates, you and your spouse can’t just agree to amicably go your separate ways or ask the court to grant you divorce.
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The way to divorce is treacherously long, winding and torturous, forcing you to invent some of the vilest possible sins, crimes, wrongs or grounds against each other that you must acrimoniously argue out in an open court in a manner bordering almost on insult, libel, defamation and character assassination. In other words, marrying in Kenya seems to operate on the Kiswahili adage, “Kuoana Harusi, Kuachana Matanga.”
Is it any surprise that some couple opt to live together without being married and those who are legally married either stick in dead marriages or just ‘separate’ (move out to live separately) without being divorced?
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That separation or divorce isn’t an option in the traditional African worldview seems to be the basis upon which individuals and institutions such as law courts not only define ‘marriage’ but also make choices and decisions concerning this almost sacred and permanent union.
It is hardly surprising that separation and divorce are viewed largely as foreign concepts in Kenya where African traditions and customs rank higher than ‘modernity’ or western concepts. Here, only death separated married people.
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Social scientists argue that though many Kenyans subscribe to western standards and mores, most of them belong to neither western nor African world and that where there is conflict they quickly fall back on the latter.
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The view that African marriages weren’t based on ‘love’ but on other spiritual, social, economic and political factors still influence people’s perspective on the permanence of this union. That marriage isn’t an event but a process which involves not just a woman and a man but the living and the dead among their families, clans and communities makes it almost impossible to dissolve a marriage once the full contract has been executed.
#kenya #marriage #divorce #separation
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