Meet Kenya’s ‘hip-hop’ grannies

They gave birth long before their time, only for fate to turn them into grandmothers at 30, writes JECKONIA OTIENO

Contrary to the commonly held view that grandparents are grey-haired and wrinkled fountains of wisdom, a new generation of ‘hip-hop’ grand parents is emerging faster than you can blink. These are women who become grandparents in their early 30s, a time when some of their age mates are still praying and fasting for Mr Right.

Of course you wouldn’t include men in this picture because they vanish as soon as they get the news that she is pregnant. So by the time she becomes a grandmother 15 years later, she has long forgotten his name.

Take the case of a girl who gives birth at 16 and runs off to the city, leaving the baby with her parents. In no time, the child starts referring to its grandparents as papa and mama. As this girl grows up in the village, a boda boda operator sweeps her off her feet with free rides and cheap sweets and before she knows it, she is pregnant — at only 16, like her mother before her.

Toddlers

Mzee Koech from Kapsabet is still bitter that his daughter left him and his elderly wife to raise a child she got in the village. The daughter, he complains, kept giving birth in the city and dumping more children in his home. His first grandchild has dropped out of school due to financial constraints and is now pregnant.

Laments Koech: "She would appear with a baby and vanish in three hours without the toddler. If we are struggling to make ends meet and she keeps bringing more children whose fathers we do not know, and here her daughter is also giving birth, how will we manage?"

The city is also not spared from the ballooning numbers of young, irresponsible grannies, especially in the populous areas.

A woman from Makongeni got pregnant when she was fifteen and still in secondary school. It was a grave mistake and her family forgave and allowed her to go back to school. But two years on, even before her daughter had stopped suckling, she was expectant.

Her parents didn’t take it lightly and admonished her for adding more burden to an already overstretched budget. Her father had retired from the civil service and her mother sells fish to supplement the family income. The going was already tough without adding two more mouths to feed.

Dennis, who works as a casual labourer in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, says that if his school-going or unemployed daughter gave birth, he would accept it. But if it happened a second time, he would chase the whole pack because he does not have time to waste toiling for people who cannot learn from their mistakes and feeding children whose fathers are drinking beer.

Chewing gum

The role of grandparents as storytellers and counsellors is well-known in every society, but what kind of enriching stories can a 32-year-old woman who is crazy about the Nigerian hit song Ashawo Awosha and chews bubble gum from morning to midnight tell a grandchild?

Newton Makokha, 60, says when he was growing up in Bungoma in the 1950s, women stopped eating chicken and eggs the moment their daughters got married so as to look different and respectable. Up to the 1980s, you could distinguish a grandma from her manner of dress — long dresses, sweaters, rubber shoes and headscarves. Even the way they sat was different; legs crossed at the ankles and stretched across the floor. Not any more, laments the retired teacher.

Boob tops

"Today, you have young grandmothers in mini-skirts, boob tops, bikers and pedal pushers in clear competition with their children and grandchildren," says a disappointed Makokha.

Grandmothers walking with their daughters and grandchildren sometimes make it difficult to tell which of the two is the mother, more so when they open their mouths to speak. On one hand, the mother (grandmother) could be talking about getting down for Sunday jam session while the daughter shares plans to rock away to reggae beats in the estate pub.

Incidentally, that is how mums and daughters, not to mention fathers and sons, end up fighting over soul mates.

Catfight

Recently, an expectant woman in Eastlands, Nairobi, engaged her equally pregnant daughter in a fierce catfight after it emerged that both of them were dating the same man. The woman in her mid 30s has lived with the daughter whom she got when she was 17.

The man came home expecting to meet the older woman only to find her daughter present as well. But when she asked her daughter to leave, the younger woman refused, saying the man was her boyfriend. Incensed, the older woman pounced on her daughter when it even dawned on her that far from sucking from the same straw, they had both been impregnated by the same man.

Moral decadence

The question on everybody’s lips was how the two unborn children would refer to each once they are born. An onlooker, to the amusement of the crowd, asked, "Is one child going to refer to the other as a cousin, sister, aunt or what?"

Stories of men dating women and their youthful-looking mothers are legion, if the confessions on FM radio station talk shows are anything to go by. Moral decadence aside, one can’t help noting that these days, young mothers-in-law hug and even peck their daughter’s boyfriends and husbands.

Some even go as far as going out together for drinks and, in a heady pub atmosphere fuelled by alcohol and a 35-year-old mother-in-law in tight jeans and a killer cleavage, something, anything, could go wrong. Contrast this with men in their 70s who never as much as glanced at their mother-in-law’s eyes or shook hands.

This is not to suggest that men, from the young to elders, are not to blame. In the old days, sowing wild oats was an expensive affair. You would not only be fined heavily, but would in most cases be forced — by your father — to carry your cross and marry the damsel in distress.

Furious fathers

It was a relatively easy policy to enforce because young men lived in their father’s homesteads then and their furious fathers could throw them out. But today, when fathers have no idea what their sons are up to, and with a generation that get intimate without even knowing each other’s surnames, a woman can be impregnated by a lout she met in the bar and whom she will never see again.

So much as we have clueless grandmothers, some of the 30-year-old hotheads you see sprawled drunkenly in the gutter could equally be grandfathers, only that they either don’t know or care.

Thus, whereas a grandfather in the 1970s was a serious man dispensing wisdom and providing leadership to a large polygamous home, today’s hip hop grandpa is a guy about town who has never built a house, leave alone get married.

In fact, he could — together with his 17-year-old daughter and one-year-old grandson — still be a permanent resident in his mother’s house; fed, housed and clothed by his parents at 33 years of age. And oh yes, still sowing wild oats, too.

No wonder the few women we spoke to blamed this trend on runaway boyfriends who refuse to take responsibility.

Frustrated

"When a girl of 17 is impregnated and dumped, she gets frustrated and will do anything to feel loved and accepted by a man. It doesn’t help that society and her parents push her to get married.

"Men exploit the situation only to run away when she falls pregnant again. This is how some helpless young women end up with as many as five children from different fathers," says Mary, a bank teller in Nairobi.