Mistresses take lion’s share of male income

Illustration | John Nyaga | NATION  

By GATONYE GATHURA gathura@ke.nationmedia.comPosted Monday, March 7 2011 at 22:00

In Summary

• ‘Mpango wa Kando’ menace more common and expensive since emergence of the Aids virus

The city mistress has been identified as the greatest danger to the rural Kenyan wife, a conduit for new HIV infections and a threat to the village economy.

With these women, affectionately known as gacungwa in Central, jadiya in Kisumu and other endearing names among various communities, men are less likely to use a condom, and will invest much more in them than in any other non-marital relationship.

Comments from a sample of more than 2,000 male urban migrants in the country indicate the mistress culture to have become more common and expensive since emergence of the Aids virus.

Figures on how an urban male Kenyan shares his money between his sex partners, shows a stark contrast between the huge cake apportioned to the mistress compared to other casual partners.

According to Dr Nancy Luke of Brown University, US, majority of the men she interviewed in a survey said that mistress relationships are “expensive” and that males give jadiya larger transfers than other types of non-marital partners.

“Over three-quarters of jadiya received a transfer in the month before the survey, and they got much larger amounts than casual and commercial sex partners on average,” says Dr Luke in her study published last year in the American Journal of Sociology.

The study funded by the World Bank, the US Center for Aids Research and others says although this survey was carried out in Kisumu, mainly because of the high HIV prevalence rates in the area, and huge male immigration levels into the town, it is representative of entrenching urban sexual behaviour in Kenya.

Now called Mpango wa Kando in Aids prevention programmes, these relationships are recorded as a major source of new HIV infections requiring extra attention.

“The mistress is prevalent, entrenched and will not go away, in some cases threatening to run over the rural wife,” says the study.

Approximately one third of the migrant men in the sample were involved with at least one mistress in the last month, 17 per cent were engaged with at least one casual partner, and only two per cent had encounters with prostitutes.

Dr Luke cites a 2007 study which indicated a decline in commercial sex in Kisumu and other urban settings which is in line with findings from the Kenya Aids Indicator Survey of the same year.

The recent survey indicates that the energies saved from the commercial sex may have been extended to Mpango wa Kando. Dr Luke found the length of a relationship to be associated with issues of trust and condom use: as partners know each other longer, trust between them increases and condom use decreases.

“Among the sample of migrants only about a third used a condom with the jadiya, whereas condom use was substantially higher in casual and commercial partnerships.”

This study, Migrants’ Competing Commitments: Sexual Partners in Urban Africa and Remittances to the Rural Origin, gives strong evidence that indeed, the mistress is a major drain to the financial remittances to the rural family.

“Interestingly, the mean amount given over the previous month to a mistress constituted over one-fifth of men’s monthly income on average and approaches the amount given to the rural family.”

The longer one maintains a jadiya, the survey found, the greater the financial gift to the mistress, further reducing remittances to the rural family.

“As my theoretical framework predicts, transfers allocated to serious sexual partners significantly decrease remittances to the family, by more than 10 per cent on average.”

But although the habit of a mistress is not limited to migrants who leave their women in the village alone, those residing in the city with their wives were found to be less generous to the gacungwa.

“This is perhaps because of their greater resource commitments to wives in the city or because spouses directly oversee resource allocation,” says Dr Luke.

Urban immigrant

The researcher, however, gives credit to the Kenyan urban immigrant for being a generally good remitter to the extended rural family and other causes in his village.

The work finds that migrants who maintain stronger ties with their original families send larger remittances, similar to other remittances made globally.

The researcher argues that remittances to rural communities are very important and could very well be holding the area’s economy together and any competition with the mistress could have serious drawbacks.

“I find that increased transfers to new jadiya sexual relationships in the city are associated with a statistically significant reduction in remittances to the rural extended family.

Most of the involved mistresses expect the relationship to lead to marriage; however, this does not happen often with the partnership remaining a commoditised affair.

While some men eventually marry their jadiya, says Dr Luke, most are unlikely to become wives. For example, approximately 30 per cent of married men in the study had a mistress in the last year.

“If each of them married these partners, the urban polygyny rate would increase from 6.2 per cent of married men to over 30 per cent, a figure that would be excessively large for contemporary urban Africa.”