Susan Auma has known little rest since 2001 when her husband died, leaving her with two toddlers. Widowed at just 27, Auma found herself fighting to survive in her matrimonial home where she was surrounded by hostility for refusing to be remarried.
Auma’s tribulations started before the burial of her husband when her brothers-in-law instructed her to surrender her husband’s property. The idea had been carefully crafted to leave Auma and her sons vulnerable and in need of a man to take care of them.
Auma refused to participate in all the traditions that were laid before her, accepting the wrath of her husband’s relatives instead. They called her stubborn and threw her out of her home. She was left to fight, many years later, for her husband’s parcel of land to be able to secure her son’s future.
Auma’s tribulations are not isolated in western Kenya, specifically among the Luo tribe, where “wife inheritance” is a deeply entrenched tradition requiring a widow to immediately accept another marriage proposal, preferably from her late husband’s male relatives.
Everything, including the unthinkable, is done to leave the widow vulnerable, including destroying her house. The man who offers to build the widow’s house “inherits” her by default. Orphaned children are incited against their mother, forcing her to accept to be inherited. Animosity deepens between sons and their mothers who refuse to be inherited.
This is why many members of St. Monica Widows Group, a support group in Kenya’s Archdiocese of Kisumu, are “alone in the world.” Children are pressured to want nothing to do with their mothers who chose Christianity over tradition.
St. Monica Widows Group was started in 1984 in the areas served by the Archdiocese of Kisumu. At the time of its founding, the situation was dire. According to Father Lawrence Omollo, the group’s chaplain, women who were kicked out of their homes for refusing to be inherited were being taken in by Catholic mission centers.
“Wife inheritance has been a great pastoral challenge in this region,” Omollo told ACI Africa, CNA’s news partner in Africa, in an interview on Oct. 2 at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Ojolla Parish in the Kisumu Archdiocese, where members of the group had just met for Mass.
“St. Monica Widows Group was created as a support group for widows where they found solace in knowing that they were not alone in their rejection by society and in many other challenges they faced,” Omollo explained.
His words echo those of Archbishop Maurice Muhatia Makumba of the Archdiocese of Kisumu, who has admitted that “wife inheritance” has been “a serious” pastoral challenge in Nyanza, a region served by the archdiocese.
The archbishop said the St. Monica Widows Group was started to rescue widows whose only other option was to be “inherited” and become part of a polygamous union.
“Inheritance is a serious challenge. It is a cultural issue but we are overcoming it slowly by slowly because by forming this group of St. Monica Widows, more and more ladies are opting to join this particular group and refuse to be inherited,” he said.
The archbishop explained that for refusing to be inherited, widows in Nyanza “are ostracized by their communities.”
“Some are rejected. Some lose all their inheritance because of that. They have no access to the property left behind by the husbands,” he explained.
Reports have said widowhood is a source of great distress among the Luo of Kenya’s Nyanza region. Their tribulations include endless court battles for property, rejection, and being blamed for any misfortune that befalls their families.
