Single parenting without the social support system
When Eve*, regained consciousness, the only thing she was remembering was the cold repulsive feeling of touching a lifeless limb. Soon after, the shock blurred her vison as everything kept turning dark.
How long had she been unconscious, and where was she? All Eve* (not her real name) could tell, was that she was around individuals wearing long faces, a police-like outfit and mumbling strange words, with cluck to the accent. Wait, could she be in a police cell? But why?
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If these people were police, they didn’t resemble the mean-looking boys-in-blue that menacingly run the streets of Nairobi scurrying for bribes.
She painstakingly tried to prod her mind on how she found herself here. But, the only memory that kept popping up was that of the lifeless limb, which her mind stubbornly tried to bury like bad trauma. She started worrying that perhaps this insidious piece of memory was somehow connected to this secluded room…Wait, was she under arrest?
And who were these police people in the next room whose clucking chatter animatedly slipped through a word or two into what was now her holding cell. She could not place their words or accents in any of Kenya’s myriad dialects, it was a strange language, almost foreign. She must be in a foreign country, she thought. But what about the lifeless limb?
Police accusing Eve of murder
Its cold almost snake-like crawling feeling racked her mind as she sought for answers. A lady strutted into the room interrupting her efforts to put together her now derailing thoughts. She sat accusingly across the table, pouring out a stream of questions to her that left little doubt that she was in custody.
At first it was all scary and confusing to her, then her memories started taking form. Suddenly, streams of hot unchecked tears flowed down her cheeks as reality sank in. She was far from home. Yes, in South Africa. And these people were the police piecing up a case of murder against Eve!
She had to admit to herself the trail of events that led her here. She could still not tell how long ago—hours, days or weeks—it had been since she caught the flight from Nairobi to Cape town where Makena was studying finance for her undergraduate degree.
But she recalled that it all started when Makena went for days without getting in touch with her. Although Makena had her days where she would hibernate into ball of isolation owing to her ‘condition’, it was unlike her to ignore Eve’s messages for days.
So she went to Cape Town to find her, having visited her severally before. When she touched down at OR Tambo, Eve went straight to Makena’s house but somehow could not explain why heart was throbbing in her mouth with trepidation.
A daughter kills herself
Makena lived in a one-bedroom house in an apartment that was less than 30 minutes’ drive from the airport. It was already dusk when Eve was arriving at Makena’s apartment in the South African city. To her shock, the door was locked from inside. ‘She is inside sleeping,’ she comforted herself as she kept knocking. But, the door was not opening.
Overwhelmed by a strong feeling of fear mixed with uncertain anxiety, she decided to break into the house. Shock unto her because there was no sign of recent activities in the house. The room was unusually unkempt and badly lit. This was odd as she knew Makena as one who was exceedingly into neatness.
Her lips quivering, she shouted, “Makena!” only for the boomerang of her voice mock her. She rushed to the bedroom, hoping to find her in bed sound asleep, oblivious of the trouble she had caused her mum. But she was not there either.
A panicky Eve then dashed to the kitchen. It was even darker here. With her palms turning wet and shaking, she fumbled for a switch on the wall but could not trace it. As she desperately groped around, she stumbled on something cold, the lifeless limb of her only daughter who had killed herself.
The painful reality hit her like a tonne of stones. She sat upright in the chair in the interrogation room, letting the pain spread evenly in her body. She is dead! And these foreigners think she had killed her own daughter? She felt perhaps she was actually guilty of her daughter’s death, not so directly but by her choices.
The curse-and-blessing of the 90s
I first met Eve in 2018 in one of those laid-back evenings in Mamba Village, off Langata Road, Nairobi. On that day, she was in the company of her psychologist. It appeared to me that after several therapy sessions, the psychologist and the patient had become the closest of friends.
Eve’s social circle, especially when at her Kileleshwa home would include some of her late daughter’s friends. It was interesting how she effortlessly blended with these young girls. Most of them, she told me, were confusing like Makena. Eve, too, was of two minds, hence the psychologist.
The second time I visited her, in the company of another of Makena’s friends, they shared with me bad news. Unfortunately, one of them had taken their life. As fate would have it, the group was becoming smaller and smaller.
I did not pretend to know about mental disorder. This was a new territory for me. As a business journalist I often wrote boring stuff like equities and derivatives. I had never delved into the stories of real people with real problems such as schizophrenia, confusing, and anxiety disorder.
Plus, I just thought discussions around mental health crisis had a touch of middle class exclusivity, which as a boy raised in the military-grade life of Nairobi’s ghettos, I struggled to appreciate.
Our parents used to beat us badly. We didn’t sulk, never described them as being cruel for the corporal punishment. We never shouted, “I hate you,” as American kids we saw on TV shouting at their parents after being grounded. That was just how discipline was meted out. Perhaps we had normalised the abnormal.
The cause of suicide is mental disorders
But I paid attention to their stories nonetheless. Over time, I learnt a great deal about mental health. But not enough to pretend to be an expert on the subject. It’s complexity was better elaborated in an Atlantic Magazine article, where I read wealthy kids with a bright future from the Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto were taking their lives.
The author didn’t give straight answers on the cause of this phenomenon. The crisis, where kids would take their life by throwing themselves before a moving training, was so huge that it caught the attention of the law enforcers.
In Kenya, 6.1 people out of 100,000 kill themselves annually, data from the World Bank shows. The common cause of suicide is mental disorders such as depression. Suicide rates are higher for men at 9.1 for every 100,000.
Suicide cases have alarmingly been increasing among teenagers. These youngsters are taking their lives for a myriad reasons; most of them feel rejected. Their parents shout at them, so they feel unwanted. They feel inadequate for not being as beautiful or intelligent as their friends.
When I first saw her, Eve was as attractive as she was repulsive. She wore a seductively short mini skirt, which for her age, seemed to scream YOLO – ‘You Only Live Once.’
A family is of a father, mother and children
But I could also not help feeling that the girlish outfit belied the many creases of old age in her face. Her facial creases were so deep. The thick smudge of makeup that she wore was not able to mask them.
Later as words tumbled out of her mouth, forming a dark fountain of a heart wrenching story of loss and grief, I thought she was refreshingly bold to still have the energy of continuously lift the middle finger to a world that was pushing her daughter on the cliff edge.
I know she loved reliving memories of her daughter. One day in early ’90s, a furious Eve accompanied her daughter to her primary school, Makini School, she told me. Muttering under her breath, she vowed to give that insensitive teacher a piece of her mind. “How dare he suggest to her daughter that a family is one which is made up of a father, mother and children!”
The day before, the teacher drew a picture of textbook illustration of a family: Father, mother and children. And this caught the attention of the six-year-old Makena. Following the graphic illustration, Makena berated her Kenyan single mother with questions about the whereabouts of her father, for the umpteenth time. Sadly, Eve didn’t seem to have satisfactory answers for her inquisitive daughter.
Instead, she chose to confront the inciter. “I told him (the teacher) things have changed. There are so many families with only one parent,” she told me.
A traditional institution
But perhaps Eve was just living ahead of her time. As Kenya was coming of age in the 1980s and ‘90s, it had very few templates to shape the imagination of young people. If you were fairly well off and liberal like Eve, then you owned both a radio and TV. You were even enjoying listening to such avante gaurd American musicians like Madonna’s material girl in a material world.
In those days, fewer Kenyans imagined or even worse, lived in their own world. Not many women had the guts to snub marriage and afford to live the rest of their lives happily as Kenyan single mothers. While society reveres marriage, divorce borders on taboo.
Sex, the church decreed, was illegal if done outside of marriage. Every so often, any product of illicit copulation earns illegitimate tag. Ideally, every child had to have two parents. So most kids grew up knowing that a typical family comprised of a father, mother and siblings.
Although African tradition plays a huge role in shaping the value system, the society is increasingly organising along imported Victorian puritanism from Britain, Kenya’s colonial master.
Children born out of wedlock, according to Victorian Puritanism, were to be frowned upon as bastards. The triumph of Oliver Twist in Charles Dicken’s novel was not because he made it in life despite being loathed by the British society for being a bastard but because eventually the society was proven wrong when Twist finally re-united with his family. So he had a father, after all.
Violence in marriages
There are parallels with our very own. The late Ken Walibora, in his classic novel Siku Njema, he ends when Kongowea Mswahili, the protagonist, learns that he had a father after all. This was after fighting ‘mwanaharamu’ tag on him.
But the times were changing. An increasing number of women in the early 90s, spurred on by egalitarian developments such as the Beijing Women’s Conference of 1995 that called for gender equality, gathered courage to go it alone in life. The reasons were varied, including violence in marriages, quitting toxic relationship or just out of choice. Even so, single parenting in those days was not as prevalent or even popular as it is today.
Divorce rates then were low. And interestingly, compared to their peers in Sub-Saharan Africa, divorce rates in Kenya remain low even today. What has been rising is the number of Kenyan single mothers (and that awful matter of dead beat fathers). And this is getting the attention of policymakers.
In his last Madaraka Day speech last year, former President Uhuru Kenyatta warned of the threats of the surge in single parenting. Single parenting, most of which is due to pre-marital sex, risks destroying the fundamental character of Kenya and could hurt children, warned Mr Kenyatta.
Single parents families have grown from 25 percent in 2009 to 38 percent in 2019, according to the census results of 2019.
“If unchecked, this trend shall destroy the fundamental character of Kenya and reap untold harm onto our most vulnerable and precious members of our society, our children,” said Kenyatta.
Who’s your daddy?
It was not only the teacher’s drawing of a typical family that disturbed Makena. She was wondering why her best friend was always dropped to school by her father while she was not. “Why didn’t she have a father of her own like other kids?’ she wondered loudly.
As she grew older, and her sensitivity to reality heightened, the unanswered questions about the identity of a father weighed heavily on Makena’s consciousness. So much that in 2016 she “freed herself” by killing herself in her room in Cape Town.
Since then, Eve has been fighting urges to also let go and follow her daughter. “There are days when you are driving and you just pull over and cry. You just feel like ending all the pain,” she says. Then there are days when Eve just wakes up and drives through the cold night to Lang’ata cemetery. Here, she will stand in front of her daughter’s tomb, a solitary haunting figure surrounded by white-washed crosses.
I wanted to ask Eve why she didn’t bury her daughter in her rural home but decided against it. My friends from Western Kenya don’t understand why someone would bury their best friend in town. In Lang’ata, a land that to them does not give life. A land which derives its identity from grotesque lifeless buildings that vainly rise to the skies. My folks from Western Kenya say, “that one was thrown away”.
The cost of financial freedom
But Eve was a wolf, who had risen above the opinion of lambs. Equal economic opportunities has meant women have more autonomy over their affairs. And Eve is what we adoringly describe as an independent woman. She didn’t need financial support from any man to raise her daughter. Please, perish the thought of archaic tribal opinions! She had a well-paying managerial job. She could afford her a decent life in the city under the sun.
In our first meeting, she came in a trendy Sports Utility Vehicle that put her in a good stead in the society. I soon learnt that she lived alone in a nice studio apartment in Kileleshwa. Before her late daughter left for further studies in South Africa, they lived just the two of them. Two friends—Mother and Daughter. No Father.
I remember very well that was my colleague—a photographer—who let me know Eve. When I asked him how he came to know Eve, he told me that she used to come over to the studio for photos. The photos always made the cut in the entertainment pages in one of the national dailies. Despite her age, she was strikingly gorgeous.
The menace of mental health
What’s more, she loved a good life. I could tell by the rounds of beer she ordered when we first met. I could tell that she knew something about the importance of living for the moment. This encounter quickly turned into a plan for me to organise for her a column in the newspaper that I worked for.
I politely declined this and asked her to contact my editor directly. She wanted to sensitize Kenyans on how much of a menace mental health had become. She had started a foundation in the memory of her daughter.
Eve told me she was hurting given how the society, right from the government, was not seeing the magnitude of this menace. Imagine, she wondered, derelict Mathari Hospital is the best we have for treating people with mental disorders!
But the more she talked, the more I realized that she was blaming everyone else but herself. Also, like everyone else, she seemed obsessed with addressing the symptoms. She wasn’t, even remotely, attempting to fix the root cause of the mental health crisis. In Kenya, there is a never a day that will go without reading about “what-not-to-say to people with mental disorders.”
And while it is true that we need to be sensitive to individuals with mental disorders (that is if we already know they are suffering from it), in the world of information and faceless social media, it is almost impossible to isolate them from triggers to depression. We need to prepare our kids to confront unpleasant surprises in the world. And that includes the social media. Hiding them from reality will never help.
As increasing number of teens are taking their lives. Articles are coming up on how the government should declare mental disorder a national crisis and allocate more funds in addressing it. I am not an expert, but I feel strongly that we need to start confronting mental health crisis. This will not be possible by viewing it as a psychological defect but also a breakdown of the social support system. No one wants to admit that the destruction of the family as a basic social unit is somehow to blame for this crisis.
A vicious cycle
If there is one experience life has taught me, it is that if you come from a broken family, you are most likely to end up in a broken family yourself.
The family is fighting from two fronts. First, with increasing urbanization, an increasing number of Kenyans are separating from their larger extended family in the rural areas. Our rural folks in the villages offer children a wide network of support even when one of the parents vanishes.
Kenyans, and Africans generally, have moved to cities and towns to look for better economic opportunities. In urban areas, both parents go to work to tackle the high cost of living. They often come back home late when the children are already asleep, or in some cases, where the kids are in boarding schools, they only meet when schools are on recess. Parents and children barely know each other. Sadly, this is the uncomfortable truth in our homes.
Second, is increase in the number of single parents. Notably, young kids are increasingly indulging in unprotected premarital sex. Yes, some cases of single parenting are attributable to divorce or separation or widowhood, but most cases are due to pre-marital and extra-marital sex.
Read also: Forgotten Covid-19 pregnant teens
Sex before marriage
Part of the reason for the high premarital sex is that the strong morals and norms dissuading teens from having sex before marriage no longer stand. Today, people are idolizing sex for its mere pleasure. It is no longer a revered act for its solemn power of procreation.
Even worse is that despite knowing that kids are sexually active, we just can’t agree how they should be provided with contraceptives. The government has decided to rely on theocracy.
Essentially this denies teenagers access to contraceptives despite the facts saying something different. The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey shows 15 percent of women and a fifth of men aged between 25 and 50 had their first sexual experience at 15. Nearly four out of 10 Kenyan women gave birth before 18! Sobering, isn’t it?
And with a Constitution, which states that life begins at conception, elective abortion is criminal in Kenya. The result is a lot of single mothers due to unwanted pregnancies.
Then there are Kenya’s single mothers by choice. Those who have romanticized single mothers as a symbol of feminine power. These ones will sleep with a man with the sole objective of getting his seed and then hide the kid from him. They can even get the seed artificially.
A deadbeat gap
Indeed, there are Kenya’s single mothers, who have done a splendid job of single-handedly raising their kids. These are the mothers we celebrate for having four hands, four heads and four legs. They have done a good job of being both a father and mother.
Yet, the role of a father in the upbringing of a kid remains vital. A study at the London School of Economics by Dr Berkay Pecan found that children do better when biological father joins the family.
Erich Fromm in the Art of Loving explains how we develop our outlook in life based on how we refer to the primary humans in our lives—our parents. He explains they appeal to different and important perspectives. While father’s love comes by the child proving excellence, mother’s comes in unconditionally.
In 2021, Mutuma Mathiu, Nation Media Group former Editorial Director wrote a controversial article that seemed to blame weakening of the boy child on over-protection by their mothers. In the ensuing online backlash, Mutuma apologized to single mothers profusely and unreservedly.
As controversial as the article was, there were some truth in Mutuma’s assessment. He reckoned that mothers ‘innocently’ tend to shield their boys from taking risks. And this is part of a mother’s love.
Demanding upkeep money
Yet it is by taking risks that boys will shape into men. It is by taking risks, and failing repeatedly, that boys are imbued with vital life lesson chief being fearless and managing failure and rejection.
I recently read a story of this woman demanding huge amounts of upkeep money for the children she had with an unnamed tycoon, JG. It is not the Kes413 million she was demanding that struck me, it is the reason the lady gave for not taking her three kids to school. She was opting for home schooling, an option that left me convinced we are shielding our kids from reality.
The woman told the court that she sought the luxurious lifestyle her kids got from the want-away tycoon, restored. That included the kids going to the high-end schools paying as high as Kes600,000 per term.
“The three minors are used to a certain kind of lifestyle and that needs to be maintained to ensure their emotional needs are not compromised,” the woman said in court. Could it be that we are not preparing our kids to be ready for the seesawing life serves us?
Quite often, we get and lose jobs. Today, you are rich and tomorrow you’re seeking support. Some girl or boy will accept you today and cheat on you the next day. Sadly, s/he cheats on you with your friend. The world is not your mother to love you unconditionally.
Sensitive (wo)man’s disease?
A lot of girls, most of them friends to her late daughter and who also suffered from the condition, were part of Eve’s foundation. Curiously, virtually all of them were from wealthy families.
“This condition does not affect foolish people. It affects people who are sensitive to the realties of life,” one of Makena’s friends, who had also studied in South Africa, told me one day on our way home from Eve’s house. That statement got me thinking about my life. Perhaps it is true as author Jackson Biko said, “writers are just too sensitive”.
I thought of this talented professor who used to recite for us beautiful poems with themes of African liberation and whose death I happened to stumble upon later. He had killed himself when he realized his wife was busy with a man, who was in amorous disposition.
American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his French counterpart Thomas Duma (of the famous “Three Musketeers”) and many others doused themselves in alcohol until they met their deaths. Truly, ignorance is bliss.
As much as I admired Eve for being a contrarian, I found her naive in believing that everything starts and ends with her personal desires; that the path to happiness is not paved with discomfiting experiences of compromise and sacrifice.
Her failure to realize that the pursuit of individual freedom has its limits even in a liberal society that places the individual above the community, just amused me.
Pingu za maisha (handcuffs of life)
The need for a lot of people to exalt personal desires above everything else was better exemplified by the story of the late tycoon Chris Kirubi. To Kirubi, everything, including marriage, had to fall within the dictates of his desire to be free. A free spirit, Kirubi saw marriage as a form of enslavement.
And marriage has been a prison for a lot people. Especially, poor women like my mother. For better, for worse, they have stayed. That is how some, unfortunately, have met their fate. Despite all this, marriage is perhaps people’s best invention that has ensured its survival into the unpredictable future.
Of all the chains around man that philosopher Jean Jacques Rossoue talked about, marriage-the union of man and woman—is the largest.
I have admired Eve’s stoicism ever since I met her. And after a while, I thought that she was just a rich version of my mother. My mother, like Eve, also had the option of being a single parent.
Perhaps, it is only poor women like my mother who choose to stay on even when marriages morph into slavery. As Eve’s story took shape, I came to the conclusion that this was also my story. Show me a sane man, and I will cure them for you, said the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. How reckless was I?
My Story
Makena and I shared nothing except an acute curiosity on the identity of our fathers. Yet, unlike Makena, I invariably grew up in a house with a father figure.
Growing up in a house that doubled up as a chang’aa den, my only dream was to liberate my mother from this ignominy. I dreamt of later on in life having sitting room for my children and wife.
But more than anything else, I swore to always be there for my own children. I am married and I admit that it has not been as easy as I thought. But the lessons I have picked up in life have carried me through tumult of marriage and parenting. Haggard-looking drunkards hurling expletives were ruling our home during the day.
Across our poor estate along Nairobi’s Jogoo Road, there was a popular pub that occasionally played live band music on weekends. It’s name was Trafalgar. I remember one boy I used to play football with mocking me… “Si huyu kwao ni Trafalgar?” he told the other kids before bursting into a mirthless laughter.
At night, the single room was turning into a boxing ring. Fights would break up, pitting my mother against my stepfather. Often times, the fights were about us, my brother and I. The outsiders in the bloodline!
My mother’s two marriages were in tatters. The first, from which my brother and I were born, failed.
My mother was only 14 when she married my father as a second wife. My father, by then a civil servant from Siaya, then Nyanza Province, was working in the border district of Busia. He met my mother as a young girl hawking mandazi.
Memories of tragic experiences
I don’t remember much of my childhood when my biological father and mother lived together. My brother, who was born and briefly lived in Siaya before my father bought land and moved to Busia, carries some scant memories. His are memories of a tragic experience of hate and utter mistreatment in a polygamous family. It did not take long before my mother got fed up. And she walked out. Because I was young, she left with me. And my brother in Busia.
When my mother remarried, I lived briefly with them in a railway estate in Nairobi before I went to put up with my auntie. My auntie lived alone in one of the Mukuru slums in Nairobi. She, too, was not living with her husband.
Growing up in the slums of Mukuru Kayaba, I could scarcely conjure up memories of my father. So, I grew up knowing that my auntie was my mother. But I kept wondering who my father was. My mother, my auntie (who has since died), and everyone else, thinking that because I did not remember I could not understand kept the identity of my father a secret. They were wrong.
In 1990, my auntie and I left for their rural home in Busia. I joined my brother in one of the primary schools there, and my auntie went back to Nairobi.
The classes were boring. Instruction was in Luhyia. I didn’t understand this lanugage well. Earlier in Nairobi, I had developed a liking for English. But here it was only Maths which they taught in English.
A stranger knew my name
In the morning, I would walk for three kilometres with my brother to school. So often, carried cow dung wrapped in banana leaves for smearing the floors and walls of our classes.
We lived with my uncle, a disciplinarian with a penchant for using his stick whenever a child made a mistake. One day, I made a mistake and my uncle asked my brother to look for a stiff stick to whoop me. My brother pretended as though he was looking for the stick, and when he noticed my uncle was not looking at him he ran to the entrance of the homestead. From the safe distance he shouted, “Let go of my brother.” I got free, but not before a hard kick on my back side.
I wondered why my brother had taken such a risk. Where were we going? My mother and auntie were both in Nairobi. We walked until we reached the main road. We debated on whether we should hitch a bus to Nairobi where my mother and auntie were. Eventually, we hitch hiked a matatu towards the border of Uganda.
We got off just a kilometre from the border and walked for a few miles before my brother stopped beside a tractor. One of the men on the driving seat of the tractor spoke to him. He asked my brother, rather casually, whether I had eaten.
I barely saw this man
And I wondered how this stranger knew my name. Then it hit me, this was my father. My brother, who knew better had brought me home.
But this fantasy blew over fast, in the few months that I lived here until my mother came for us with the news of the death of her mother, I barely saw this man. I was then only six years like Makena when she agonised over the identity of her father.
Yet for me, that experience alone would soothingly remind me that I had a father. That I had an identity. That no matter what happened to me, my children could trace their roots. My mother quit her second marriage, and then we re-united, again.
After primary school, my brother, with whom we had moved to the city, and I went to live with my mother and stepfather. It was around this time that my mother started selling chang’aa to supplement the meagre income from my stepfather who had also married another wife.
The fights between my mother and father continued, but as big boys now we often intervened. The intervention went on until one night when my stepfather told me, “One day, you will have your own home just like me. And you will know how marriage feels like.”
No matter how bad things got between them, my mother never asked us to repudiate our step dad. And my step dad never disowned us. He was our father.
Nag mother to tell me of my father
Around this time, I had gathered enough courage to nag my mother to tell me more about my biological father and her experience in that marriage.
She said that the marriage was tough, but she did not deny the existence of my father. She kind of left it to us to decide. It was our choice to reject or accept him. “You will go to your father when you are mature and have your own job,” she once told me.
Before we got home he would ask me whether I was hungry. When I said yes, he asked us to get into one of the roadside eateries. “When you are hungry, don’t think about the food at home. Just eat first,” he would tell me.
He spent his last days at his rural home. When I visited him, we sat together and talking politics or the condition that had immobilized him. He was hopeful that he would not succumb to this condition. He had faith in the advances in medicine.
It did not take long before he died, and it did not take longer before re-uniting with my biological father. Now an old man. I counted myself lucky for having two fathers.
Nothing romantic about single motherhood
Makena was not as lucky. Was it too much to know her father? Article 53(1) of the Kenyan Constitution says: “Every child has the right to parental care and protection, which include equal responsibility of the mother and father to provide for the child whether they are married to each other or not.”
Every child has a right, to a father and to know what part of their origin is in the loins of a man.
I agree that deadbeat fathers, who deliberately abandon their children, deserve a call out. Boys, who are not ready to be men, should not become fathers. And men, who are fathers should take care of their children. That is a rule of life.
But there is nothing poetic about single parenting.
Story by Mtaaskika
Mtaaskika is a media organization that gives voice to the voiceless in our communities. They bring you the untold stories of everyday people in our mitaa (communities)
