Opinion post: Why you should marry from your tribe

They also decided that men from my community were descendants of cannibals and bolted. I was devastated. The same devastation I saw in some young beautiful lady’s eyes as she narrated her ordeal to me recently. She is from Western Kenya.

She loves a man from Central Kenya with all her heart, body and soul. But her parents have stood their ground - that if she gets married to the lad, she can kiss them goodbye. She loves her man. And she loves her parents. You do not want to be in her shoes. I know two other women about my age, rushing to beat the much spoken about ‘get-married-or-get-a-child-by-30-deadline.’

One from Tharaka Nithi is pregnant by a chap from Western and her parents are livid. The father in particular has stated he will never recognise the grandchild. Another, also from Western Kenya, is pregnant by a chap from Mbeere and are likely to marry, but their respective parents have told them not to be optimistic about getting any blessings.

It is a familiar ground. No matter how we pretend, marrying across tribes in Kenya is still a big problem that gets complicated with every discredited election. I am not one of those soft-brained, middle-class types who think cracking tribal jokes is responsible for the strained ethnic relations that get worse as elections draw nearer.

The same unthinking class posits that identifying yourself by tribe is retrogressive and speaking in English is the height of civilization. Very disappointing. See, some of the coolest, most progressive people I know, born city no less, ditched their girlfriends from other tribes and married their tribeswomen without any sense of guilt. And who can blame them?

Marrying from your tribe has its merits. Besides the cultural compatibility, when things backfire, no one can gloat, “we warned him/her” that tribe is “unmarriageable.” I know a million broken marriages within my tribe. Some have been mended. Most of them are dead. The couples live together for the sake of the children. But we will invariably bemoan those that fail to work, if it involves marrying from another tribe.

However, the education policy is about to change this as sticking together for the sake of children is unlikely to be a valid reason to stay in a dead marriage. Our generation and those after us have been raised to pursue individual happiness. Marrying across tribe is often touted as what will end negative ethnicity. I doubt it. Each tribe is engineered to preserve and perpetuate itself through marriage. It is an evolutionary calling. Of course, there will be more diversions in future since younger people think better than us, but in Kenya, we are looking at 50 years from now. For now, if you want peace, just marry from across the ridge. We all know some communities are so culturally and politically immiscible that any marriage between the two is always beset by untold challenges from the word go. No matter how the parties will pretend to be progressive, some cultural idiosyncrasies often emerge. In some communities, men own children. In others, it is the women. I know many men from my county who have died childless because the women they married in the heady days of campus love ran away with their children.

And they serve as enlightening example to young men who think with their hormones. We cannot change who we are or how we think. A few often do. Even fewer succeed. So, just marry from your community and pardon me today. I wrote this from a cave circa 18th century.

@nyanchwani [email protected]