Wake up, wife’s wife

IMAGINE being barren in a society where infertility is a virtual taboo and carrying on the family line is all important. You have a husband ...

IMAGINE being barren in a society where infertility is a virtual taboo and carrying on the family line is all important. You have a husband and home, but feel worthless because when you die, your name will be lost. While the West looks to doctors and test tubes to overcome childlessness, many communities in Africa take an approach closer to home. Here, a woman who cannot conceive can simply marry another woman who is single and able to have children.

Anthropologist David Maillu describes the practice as a practical way of solving a social problem. ‘‘Where there’s an old woman who has no children, the option was to let that family continue by adopting a woman,’’ he says. ‘‘She is, to use the western world’s interpretation, an adopted wife.’’ The solution may be practical, but not always happy. It differs from polygamy in that it is a contract between the two women. The role of the ‘‘wife’s wife’’ is to provide children: who fathers them is irrelevant.

Syombua Ndwale, a member of Kenya’s Akamba tribe, was in her early twenties when the woman who is now her wife began negotiating their marriage. More than 40 years her senior, Ndwale Mutiso was married and barren. Syombua, living in the same village in eastern Kenya, was unmarried with four illegitimate sons and few prospects of finding a husband. After five years, the two families came to an agreement. In return for the promise of a dowry, Syombua moved in with Ndwale and her husband, becoming an ‘‘iweto’’ — or woman married to a woman.

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Ndwale, now 80, sits outside her home. Her face wrinkled from years of poverty, she explains why she married Syombua. ‘‘When I die, I would like to leave a name, a pillar, so that my name and that of the family lives on,’’ she says.

Syombua seems to have the rough end of the deal. Now 39, she has yet to see a cent of dowry. The aged couple are poor, and would have to sell land to afford the 50 goats and two cows promised to her parents. Though Syombua’s children call her inya — mother — they call her wife mwaito — mum — and it is Ndwale’s name they officially carry.

It is Syombua who carries Ndwale’s old husband and props his knotted back against a log as he stares ahead, oblivious. ‘‘What can an 80-year-old woman do?’’ she says, resigned to a fate she has not chosen for herself.

‘‘It is a lot of hardship because nowhere we can get support. My own parents are too old. They may get something as dowry. I may even get something out of it myself, but I am yet to meet an iweto who ever benefited.’’

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In a small field close by, a group of iweto gather to dance, sing and share experiences of what they say is a life of rejection. There are no figures for the number of iweto in Kenya, or in other African countries. As anthropologist Maillu says, there was never any need to rationalise something that was as much a part of tradition as polygamy or rites of passage into adulthood. (Reuters)