By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
By now, everyone knows the story, but it still sounds sweet no matter how many times it is repeated.
Last Friday, thousands of (probably) single women scrambled madly at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre to hear the “apostle of marriage”, Nigerian Pastor Chris Ojigbani.
As the one account put it, “For several hours, business came to a standstill as police and security guards from the KICC and the Covenant Singles and Married Ministries struggled to keep the thousands of women at bay”.
Pastor Ojigbani was obviously buoyed, and he preached for more than four hours. A KICC official told the Africa Review website: “I have organised events for the last 10 years, but I have never seen one like this.”
The marriage scramble at KICC surprised many people, because if you mostly listen to FM stations and read the lifestyle columns by the fashionable women of Nairobi, you would have been labouring under the impression that marriage is out of fashion. So how does one explain what would seem a great hunger to get hitched?
I am one of the most hopeless commentators anywhere in the world on this matter, so I will just go by what other people’s research says on the intricacies of courtship and the yearnings of the heart.
The Kenyan market research firm, Consumer Insight (CI), does a lot of off-the-beaten path research on various social trends. They discovered several things in a series of their recent researches. First, that more Kenyans – and East Africans – are going to church.
However, they are also less religious. That is contradictory; it shouldn’t happen. However, the findings suggested that they go to church mostly because they are lonely and looking for love, not because they are seeking spiritual healing.
There is a disconnect here, because priests and pastors still preach the message of salvation. The genius of some people like Pastor Ojigbani is that he realised that the souls who come to prayer are not all looking for God, but are in a relationship market.
Again, there is one problem with that conclusion. Recent data suggests that divorce has risen sharply among young Kenyan couples. CI also reports in one of its surveys that the numbers of married people, and those who are happy in their relationships, are declining.
Even more interesting, the data shows that there is a big rebellion among women towards the things associated with a traditional woman’s role in the house – stuff like shopping, and doing chores around the house. The girls just don’t like that stuff.
All this leads us to some tentative conclusions. One is that the reason so many people are surprised and confused by the events at Pastor Ojigbani’s marriage and love-fest is not because so many frenzied women turned out.
It is because we men are generally not used to women being so assertive about seeking marriage. Kenyan society still expects them to sit around, braiding their hair and polishing their nails, waiting for Mr Right to come along.
The real story at KICC, then, was really about the rebellion against convention. The other, is something that CI might want to try and capture next time. If lonely people are going to church to find someone, they are probably looking for companionship, not marriage.
I sense that the real value of men today is mostly as companions, not husbands. Okay, I know it might be hair-splitting, but recent developments in many parts of the world at the height of the global financial crisis might help us here.
Two things happened. First, many marriages collapsed when couples lost their jobs. Nothing surprising there. However, the number of new marriages also shot up, as people sought the support of someone else to help them ride out the crisis.
In times of economic uncertainty, marriage is a good way to hedge your bets – for both men and women. Marriage is the new sacco.
The surprise about Pastor Ojigbani’s show, then, is not that there were so many women, but rather that they were not many more. Then, that there were so few men!
cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
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