How Kenyans used to express love to each other

Love, sages say, makes the world go round. Everyone wants to love and be loved. Forget romantic love, which has not only increasingly become an obsession of the 21st century, but also is, according to most Africans, unique to western cultures. There is a group of African men and women, specifically Kenyans, who have unique ways of expressing love to each other. Despite modernity and infiltration of Western romantic love into Africa, such Kenyans have stuck to their traditional ways of expressing love.
Share hubby with own sister
 In some Kenyan cultures, which we choose not to mention lest we are accused of ethnic profiling, wives show their love to their husbands by, for instance, allowing them to marry a second, third, or even fourth wife, mostly recommending their own sisters and cousins. Mercy Kirigo, who inspired this story, shocked this writer when she told him about her aunt Jane (not her real name) who, out of love for her husband, allowed him to marry her (Jane’s) sister as his second wife. This was after her husband confessed to being attracted to her. Interestingly, over the decades down the line, the two sisters are still happily married to one husband. Unfortunately, when contacted for a phone interview, aging Jane declined, claiming she was not comfortable discussing her private life in the media.   Prof Paul Achola, a Sociology lecturer at Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kisumu town campus, and an expert on family and marriage matters, holds the view that love among some Kenyans was, and still is, expressed in ways that anyone ignorant of these cultures would considetrange.
A wife “giving” her sister or cousin to her husband to marry was, and still is, actually one of the many ways wives express love to their husbands. Apparently, to such women, allowing their husbands to be polygamous is an expression of love. Would you believe it? The professor breaks it down by giving some scenarios and circumstances under which such things would happen. A woman purporting to be madly in love with her husband, and is about to die as a result of, say, chronic illness, in some Kenyan cultures, is expected to leave a will or a testament, written or verbal, asking one of her sisters, cousins or any other younger female relative to get married to her husband. However, the good professor is quick to clarify that: “Africans, by virtue of being very rich in connotations and euphemism, hardly communicated this message directly. It is common to hear a dying woman, out of love, request one of her beautiful sisters to ‘take care of or look after’ her children. Actually, put differently, she would be asking her husband to marry her sister.” Prof Achola adds that in case of proven barrenness on the part of a woman, the husband is given the green light to choose one of their sisters or cousins to join their marriage for the purposes of bearing children.