“My cousin was getting married and we went to negotiate the dowry. The in-laws insisted they would only feed us after striking a deal or rather agreeing to their demands. We were kept hungry from mid-morning to around 5pm in some remote part of Nyanza.
The hunger, however, did not subdue us, we eventually left after the two sides disagreed. We blatantly refused to pay the ten grade cows they were demanding. Each cow would have cost us around Sh100,000, making it a whooping one million shillings,” narrates Otieno*, adding that, with his in-laws-to-be sticking to their guns, his cousin called off the wedding and moved in with another woman.
Credit worth assessed
Otieno* says that some in-laws assess your credit history and strike your pockets like lightening with crazy demands. “It is like their daughter has died and they are now claiming compensation from her killer(s),” chides Otieno*.
For Charles Njeru*, a medical doctor, the demands made during his wedding preparations where like the ones kidnappers make when asking for a ransom.
Listen to him: “My in-laws asked for Ksh2 million. I initially assumed I had heard wrong. We tried to negotiate, but they insisted. They claimed that their daughter was well educated. It beat me because she was getting married to a fellow doctor; no raw deal at all, it wasn’t like I was some village idiot.
My uncles and father lost their cool and left the negotiation room. I followed them out, and unlike Lot’s wife, I never looked back. That was the end of that relationship.”
Groom fined, blackmailed
Other relatives will not wait for the negotiations to start to demand ‘planes’ and ‘ferries’. Some will start their blackmail as early as possible.
A woman only identified as Jackie knows this too well. “My best friend, Njeri, was having her ruracio. For one reason or the other, her boyfriend’s people arrived late. Her aunts blew up, and demanded a hundred white goats before negotiation. The groom’s relatives apologised, but their hosts would hear none of it. The visitors ran out of patience, told them ‘to go to hell’ and left the home in a huff,” narrates Jackie.
Cases of rowdy aunts who hold brides hostage until they get this or that from the groom’s kin are the order of the day at most weddings.
Crazy demands