The ghost wives of Ukambani

Mulewa Muthiani goes about her business just like any other widowed woman in her village in Ukambani. But there is one difference between her and "normal" widows – Mulewa never met her husband. In fact, she was married to him after he died, about 30 years ago.

Mulewa is what is referred to in Ukambani as a ghost wife. And while she never set eyes on Muthiani, her husband, she knows for a fact that he once lived, and even if now long dead, he continues to live as a spirit. This she knows because when she was being married, her mother in-law, Muthoni - who died in 1992 - told her that she was being married to bear children for Muthoni's son, Muthiani, who died in early childhood. Yes, she has children – five in fact – who were fathered by different men and who bear her dead husband's name.

According to C.W. Hobley in his study titled "Bantu Beliefs and Magic" published in 1967: "There is a curious custom in Ukambani, which throws some light on the spirit beliefs of the people. If a young unmarried man is killed away from his village, his Imu or spirit will return there and speak to the people through the medium of an old woman in a dance and say " I am so-and-so speaking, and I want a wife." The youth's father will then make arrangements to buy a girl from another village and bring her to his, and she will be mentioned as the wife of the deceased, speaking of him by name.

Hobley's conclusions, though throwing some light on this unique marriage practice, are far from grasping the totality of it, for it distills the whole phenomenon into an ideal situation. It assumes that the dead man must have lived to his youth and that his spirit must demand a wife. While this could have been the origin of the custom, it is now no longer the case. Whether through adulteration or refinement, the practice has undergone some transformation and now accommodates even the spirits of male children who have died in infancy. All the bereaved mother has to do is to count the years until the dead baby would have reached marriageable age, then she can find him a bride.

Such wives are called "maweto" (plural) or "iweto" (singular), meaning "just by mentioning" because there is no actual husband. "Maweto kavula kathei" [empty blanket] is also used to refer to women married to other women, or husbandless wives. But to differentiate ghost wives from women married to women, the term "kiveti kya imu" meaning "wife of a spirit" is used. This distinction between ghost wives and women married to women is significant. Ghost marriages are a recognised institution in their own right, while some Kamba customary law experts argue that woman to woman marriages might be a corruption of the former. They point out that barren women were not allowed to marry ghost wives because they had not given birth to any children in the first place. Indeed, there must be proof that a baby boy existed in the first place for a ghost marriage to take place.

This is a point stressed by anthropological researchers on the phenomenon. Sarah Musila, who set out to investigate the phenomenon of women married to others in 1987, found ghost marriages existing alongside her subject of study. In her dissertation titled The Socioeconomic Status of Women Married to Others: A case study of Iveti Location in Machakos District (1987), she found out that: "If a son dies before he has been married, the parents arrange for him to get married in absentia so that the dead man is not cut off from the chain of life."

The main motivation for these marriages, therefore, is the continuation of the dead man's lineage and that of his father. Such marriages usually occur when a couple has had the misfortune of having their male children die before marriage. They might have several daughters but these daughters are expected to marry and leave the family home. Even if some of the daughters have had children and remained at home, their children are not perceived as continuing the line of their maternal grandfather because among the Akamba, kinship is patrilineal. Such children, for example, would not belong to the same clan as that of their grandfather.

So although the children of one's daughter are biologically related to him, those of a ghost wife, who may have been begotten by men unrelated to the grandfather, are closer to him because socially they are directly descended from him through his dead son. They are regarded as his real grandchildren and they treat him as such.

Sarah Mumbua explains the logic behind this reasoning: "It may not matter very much about the biological link, it is the mystical link in the chain of life which is supreme and most important."

It used to be that the ghost wife was given to a brother or a cousin of the dead man for the purposes of bearing children. This assured that the biological link between the children and their grandparents was not broken. Now, however, ghost wives are given a free hand in choosing their lovers.

According to Eric Mutua, a prominent Nairobi lawyer who is also well versed in the Kamba customary law, "Ghost wives are accorded all the privileges of a normal wife and their right of inheritance is protected under the law." Mutua explains that the parents-in-law of the ghost wife are bound by law to give her the share of inheritance that her ghost husband would have received from his parents. And indeed, this is what happens in practice because in most cases, parents who bring a wife for their dead son have no other male children. Such parents will have a lot of wealth from the bride price paid for their daughters. They use this wealth to pay the bride price for the ghost wife. As such, it is the ghost wife and her children who inherit the wealth of her parents-in-law.

Ghost wives have another advantage in light of the recent changes of succession law. Mutua says, "The children of the ghost wife are entitled to maintenance costs from their respective biological fathers under the Children's Act of 2000. It does not matter whether a marriage has taken place, only that the paternity of the child is ascertained." As such, a ghost wife can claim maintenance costs from any man who has fathered a child with her. This scenario is, however, unlikely given the fact that in most cases the ghost wives rarely reveal the identities of their children's fathers. The fiction is maintained that such children belong to the dead man whose name they bear.

It has also been that the parents of the dead son are supposed to treat the ghost wife with all the respect they would accord a "real" daughter in-law, and anything less than this is frowned upon by the whole community. 

But recently, the mother in-law of a ghost wife abandoned her matrimonial home after her husband started sleeping with their "daughter in-law". The woman had no children of her own, having suffered several miscarriages over a number of years. Figuring that one of the dead foetuses must have been a boy, she married a ghost wife on his behalf, and expected her husband to treat the ghost wife as a daughter-in-law. But he had other ideas and decided that because his daughter in-law was conceiving children with other men, he might as well do the same.

Another thing that is undermining this practice is the proliferation of woman to woman marriages where there are no ghost sons involved. Kasendi Munyoki, 54, was married by her mother-in-law Kisengi, 82, about 20 years ago. Kisengi has no sons, dead or otherwise, although her husband has another wife who has sons. But she wanted somebody to inherit the wealth she and her husband got from the bride price of her six married daughters. 

She has grandchildren through Kasendi but they are confused about what to call her. They have settled for "mwaitu", which means "mother" and reserve the name "mama" for their mother. They cannot call Kisengi grandmother, as would be the case in a real ghost marriage.

Equally confused is Kasendi, who has taken the name of one of Kisengi's step-sons. But she has been advised by neighbours to change the name on her ID card and replace the name Munyoki with Kisengi for the purposes of inheritance because she is only entitled to inherit from her "mother-in-law", not through the mother-in-law's step-son.

In another strange case, a woman has married another woman on behalf of her dead mother. Margaret, an educated married woman living in Nairobi, was the only daughter of her mother and had put up a house for her mother before she died. Margaret's "ghost wife" is now living in that house with her four children. It is not clear why the woman was married because Margaret's father has another wife. Neighbours do not know what to call her.

Such strange marriages are complicating the age-old tradition of ghost marriages among the Kamba, but the practice trudges on for as long as lineage remains patriarchal. As Radcliffe Brown says in his study titled African Systems of Kinship and Marriage "... it is not sexual intercourse that constitutes marriage either in Europe or amongst savage peoples. Marriage is a social arrangement by which a child is given legitimate position in the society, determined by parenthood in the social sense."