Woman accuses son-in-law of’shooting blanks’

By Boniface Gikandi

A woman tired of waiting for her daughter to give her a grandchild recently confronted her son-in-law and issued an ultimatum: Give me one quick or else.

The incident attracted great interest at Kangari township, in Kigumo District, and has been the subject of spirited debate on one of the vernacular radio stations.

According to the man, his mother-in-law visited him in the morning and announced that there was something troubling her that needed to be resolved urgently.

Without waiting for her to state her problem, he assured her that he was working hard to raise the outstanding Sh15,000.

"I assured her that by the end of May she would have the money and even promised her the gift of a dress for her patience," he adds.

He was taken aback however when his mother-in-law countered that the money was not important.

Strange talk

"My mind was in a whirl and I tried to think of what might have triggered this strange talk from my mother-in-law," he says.

"For a brief moment I even thought that my wife had reported me for a small misunderstanding that we recently had regarding a rumour that I was seeing another woman."

The man’s wife was seated calmly as he tried to make head or tail of this confusing exchange.

"Then all hell broke loose. My mother-in-law’s voice adopted the tone of a military commander and she started giving me a stinging lecture."

She berated him for embracing Western values and disregarding their traditional customs.

She also accused him of being selfish and failing to meet his obligations as a man.

"She asked me whether I had drunk myself into impotence, the reason I was not siring kids," he recalls.

Three years

At this point the man demanded to be told the reason for all the accusations.

"She yelled that I was so lazy I had failed to make her daughter pregnant in the three years we had been together," he says.

The man begun suspecting that his mother-in-law, who is well past 70, had gone senile.

She demanded a commitment from him on when he would get her daughter pregnant so that she could give birth to a baby daughter to be named after her.

At this point the man lost patience and demanded that she stop the ridiculous spectacle or travel back to her Nyeri home.

"That’s when she went berserk and ran outside shouting that I had insulted her grossly She even started weeping," the man recalls.

Fellow tenants and outsiders gathered to listen to the old woman, who was cursing and ranting about impotent men who had no clue that a fertile woman should get pregnant repeatedly until she runs out of eggs.

She accused her son-in-law of insulting her when all she had done was remind him of his marital responsibilities.

"See, his laziness means I’m going to my grave without a life from my only daughter’s womb named after me," she screamed