AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	23. Family Dynamics an Migration: Tensions in Gender and Generation Relations
Paper ID	330
Author(s)	Ndeda, Mildred A.J.
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Soon after the establishment of colonial rule the Luo family hitherto intact, local and according to the existing report almost practiced a measure of gender equity began to be affected by the introduction of certain colonial policies and practices. Of great significance were the labour policies introduced by the colonial government and the resultant vaccilitating male migrant labour system that kept changing in terms of numbers leaving home, length of stay away and sometimes complete withdrawal from home. At the start of colonial labor, marriage had been intertwined and affected by developments in the modern colonial economy. The most important of these was the transformation of the Luo land as a major source area for migrant labour in Kenya. In the initial stages, the migrants were majorly young and unmarried men who sought employment just to acquire consumer goods for their personal use, move beyond the authority of the elders or accumulate bride wealth to form a household. But this was to change over the years when married men frequently sought employment as migrants for various reasons. As it became common for husbands and fathers to depart for a period of waged work to distant urban centers, mines, plantations to satisfy their needs for cash, the very nature and meaning if both marriage and the household changed. The intention of this paper is to analyse how marriage became transformed into relations of absences, where husbands and wives lived and worked apart from one another. Concomitantly, due to the removal of the male labour, households progressively lost their identity as units of integrated production and consumption. The shifts in the nature of marriage and household largely resulted in the fact that wives stayed at home during the periods of their husbands waged employment to the eyes of the men leaving the wives behind seemed to have distinct advantages and yet this was not without drawbacks. This paper will analyse these drawbacks. It will be concluded that marriage functioned as a mechanism of social contact used by the colonial state in conjuction/patnership with the African women, manipulated marriage practices with the intent of more strictly regulating women’s behaviour and curtailing their freedom of movement. Both the men and colonialism perpetuated existing networks of social control. But how did women respond to these measures? It was by resistance. This paper will discuss the effects of the introduction of the migrant labor system on various facets of the family structure. It will touch on the effect on the toponymy, its introduction of runaway wives, the expansion of eloping, and the transformation of the marriage pageants and the consequent ease of the divorce system.

Reconstruction of gender identity in colonial Kenya: Marriage and the migrant labour system among the Luo of central Nyanza 1900-1945.