How Africa
A 35-year-old Kenyan woman with 11 children, Rael Mukeku, is married to two men. According to Mukeku, all his two husbands are aware and happy about the polygamous arrangement.
Rael lives in a thatched cabin, the only house in a small rock complex in Chyulu Hills National Park, Makueni County.
She spent much of the two decades of her married life, which she is not ashamed to reveal. She married for the first time at the age of 10.
“I had my first marriage in 1992 and we were lucky to have our first child the following year. “I had 10 other children since then,” Mukeku told Nation. She also revealed how it was misperceived among Kamba and most Kenyan communities.
Juggling between cradling her baby and trying to appease three other children who were wearing worn clothes, crying for food, she remembers her background. She was educated at Standard Two in a public school, worked as a maid at a neighbor’s house and was married in the same village.
“The second husband arrived when I had seven children. He did not like taking care of children unless some of them were his, and that’s how we ended up having more children, “she says.
However, she does not regret having married the two men who work as casual laborers and give birth to many children.
” My only mistake is that I started with men who are not rich, but that does not worry me much because they are caring and loving,” she says, recalling a recent incident in which her husbands together to help heal a disease.
“One of them sold his three goats to pay the bill for the hospital, while the other provided the money we needed for daily care ,” she says.
It was her physical needs that encouraged her to look for another husband because the first husband, 50-year-old Muema Nguu (pictured here) and ill, was not able to do so. She had confided in her mother before taking the second man.
Muema also approved the idea but posed as a condition to meet his future rival.
Unlike Muia, who spends all nights at home, Nguu goes home twice a month.
Mukeku says that every time his two husbands come home at the same time, “they do not fight for trivialities because they agreed to be in this relationship”
Source: The Nation.co.ke
