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The Sunday Nation front page headline last weekend was: ''SECRET WIVES' A quarter of Kenyan men are either openly polygamous or have a secret wife, 16% have a child that their spouse knows nothing about. And 45% say having more than one wife is a GREAT idea!'
Listening to 'Busted' on Easy FM radio station each morning bares these statistics out. It is sheer, compelling voyeurism! The number of spouses (men and women) who suspect their cheating partner's of bigamy is shocking. More often than not they are proved right. Men phone in to trap wives into admitting that they are raising a child from another man, though the wife has always tried to convinced her husband that the child is theirs. And so it goes on in ever more tangling webs of deceit.
It seems like the country is at a bit of a crossroads, where once it was acceptable to have more than one wife, now it is not accepted so much in modern Kenyan society, so second and third wives are kept in secret. The Nation reported that it is often at funerals that the real truth is shockingly exposed. The President's wife, Lucy Kibaki, slapped an official in view of the media when she was mistakenly referred to by the name of the President's lover/other wife at an official function last year. An embarrassing incident!
I do hope that after living here for some time and the fact that I am now thirty five years old (it's down hill from here), my husband doesn't go getting any funny ideas...