Field Marshal Muthoni Wa Kirima (left) with former First Lady Mama Ngina Kenyatta at her Muthaiga home in Nairobi on April 20, 2023. The freedom fighter had visited Mama Ngina to thank her for her support.
It was said of Mama Ngina Kenyatta that in keeping with her famously frugal ways, she would wend her way through the narrow passages between kiosks and stalls that make up Gatundu market in search of her favourite condiments, engaging with the grocers in person.
As a lady of her generation, it may be surmised with reason that this was her opportunity to haggle, inquire about her old friends, ‘meet and greet' and generally keep in touch with the pulse of the local community.
Without a doubt, there must be countless people who appreciated these excursions, together with the performances which are indispensable for a vigorous social life; for that is the only analytical lens available for understanding the old lady's expeditions.
Deploying a financial or economic framework only leads to absurdity and frustration, which in turn leads to adverse yet incoherent profiling, inexplicable resentment and inordinate prejudice. To be honest, the economic perspective is, in this case, an irredeemably disastrous intellectual mess; an opportunistic yet inattentive and simultaneously naive and cynical endeavour in reductionist caricature.
Thus, Mama Ngina's haggling in the marketplace is derided as a spectacular instance of chronic parsimony because, of course, she is not only the daughter of a famous chief with famously wealthy brothers, she is also the widow of Kenya's founding prime minister and president, and the mother of its fourth president as well as the doyenne of a fabulously endowed estate that straddles the commanding heights of the economy.
The idea that this same personage patrols a local produce market in a relentless hunt for bargains for the most basic subsistence is supposed to be outrageous.
To add insult to injury, the former First Lady is reputed to drive the hardest of bargains, and never hesitates to leverage her status as a widow - the nuclear option - in order to secure important advantages.
Cynicism
The economic perspective, of course, can only infer abysmal cynicism on Madame Kenyatta's part and, understandably, have remained in a state of vehement exasperation for decades. A billionaire bargaining with shopkeepers and mama mboga! Mama Ngina asserts her widowhood to gain a trifling advantage at the expense of struggling grocers and hawkers!
The problem with this perspective is its unmitigated lack of vigilance; it is oblivious to its extreme vulnerability to overly convenient premises, too ready to accept the obviously questionable, and lacking even the most elementary scepticism or vigilance against facts that are prima facie perplexing.
Consistency requires that a miserly Mama Ngina would inhabit a squalid hovel wherein she hoards a colossal stock of utterly useless junks, shuns all society and only parts with the meanest scrap with tremendous suffering. Philanthropy would be utterly foreign to her, and the delegations that troop to Gatundu in endless torrents would return with sensational reports of a woman utterly besieged by reflexive illiberal proclivities.
Social exercise
As shown earlier, Mrs Kenyatta's adventures are purely social exercises; they are about encounters with people. From this standpoint, her status as a widow is anchored in a very rich social context; she was raised in a time when our communities were constituted with dense networks of moral obligations, with every individual being defined in terms of implicit and explicit coordinates of reciprocity arising from their age, gender, stage of life transition, marital status, economic means, occupation and so forth.
Very few societies disregarded widows who personified a powerful test of integrity, both of the society as a whole and of all the individuals comprising it. In every sense, widows subsisted under a unique dispensation in which their responsibilities were radically diminished, whilst their immunities and privileges were expanded.
Consequently, special arrangements were always made to attend to the requirements of widows and their households with respect to labour for various tasks, subsistence in lean as well as festive times, mandatory ritual observances as well as defence and security.
The traditional huts which our people inhabited were designed as cylindrical earthen walls with conical thatched roofs whose apex bore a staff to denote the presence of a patriarch, and was punctually removed upon his as a proclamation to the entire community that a widow resided therein, and required their dutiful care and protection.
Once a person had noticed this fact, their actions were automatic: a hunter bearing his kill would stop by and leave a cut, and every other person was obliged to attend similarly.
Whenever she gives notice of her status, then, Mama Ngina Kenyatta makes a strong appeal to a neglected humanitarian tradition which ensured that no member of the community was plunged into perpetual misery on account of tragedy.
It may even be said that she is harnessing the focality of her socio-political status to call attention to a forgotten moral obligation to remember that once upon a time, our people had robust mechanisms of ensuring that widowhood did not become synonymous with destitution and stigma.
The world would be a much better place if we heeded this appeal and rediscovered our noble humanitarian heritage this holiday season.
The writer is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya
