King Solomon of Kakamega: A polygamous man in Kenya has been in the news lately bragging about his eight wives, seven concubines and more than 100 children he claims to have sired. Mr David Kalukhana, the 63-year-old who first got married in 1987, claims he is “too smart for one wife.”
“A head like mine cannot be managed by one woman,” he is quoted by Sunday Nation as saying. “I need many wives so they can manage the amount of brains and ideas in my head.”
This case nearly ties in with a January 2023 report by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), indicating that a typical Kenyan man has an average of seven sexual partners, for the first time acknowledging a phenomenon that had always been swept under the carpet. “A higher proportion of men (15%) than women (4%) reported having two or more sexual partners in the 12 months prior to the survey,” KNBS said in the report.
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Interestingly, Mr Kalukhana, who likens himself to King Solomon in the Bible, is not your typical polygamist with means. He lives from hand to mouth, and counts himself among millions of Kenyans who call themselves hustlers, which basically means scrapping through life through simple but often tough economic activities.
What’s baffles many is how he manages to take care of this huge family yet he owns only a half-acre parcel of land on which he lives with them and grows some maize.
To earn an extra coin to feed his 107 children, Mr Kalukhana says he farms sugarcane, a lucrative cash crop in this area, where the main two millers – West Kenya and Butali Sugar – pay out tens of millions to residents weekly.
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To provide for his large family, Mr Kalukhana labours around, doing this and that, including landscaping. Every month, Mr Kalukhana says his wives and children consumer five bags of maize. “When I’m not farming, I go out to do some work like constructing stone fences around homes. They will never sleep hungry as long as I’m alive,” he says.
Listening to him makes men with one or two wives look like under-achievers. But in a tight economy like Kenya’s, an extra mouth to feed in a family can be a drain.
Most men look at the quality of life their wives and children lead but it would appear that for Mr Kalukhana and other men with similar lifestyles, quantity is the key indicator of success. But economically speaking such huge lust-driven families often lead poor lives, as evidenced in Kalukhana’s home – from poor housing to cheap dresses and footwear.
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