What Motherhood in Kenya Reveals About the Nature of Family

“There you go,” Chelsea murmurs, laying her freshly bathed baby onto blue terry cloth. She negotiates Ada’s arms into a pale pink onesie and buttons it at her legs, still bent tight as a frog’s. Then she lifts Ada to cradle her soft head in the curve of her neck, delighting in the infant’s drowsy embrace.

“The first day I was still in shock, like surprised that I’m finally someone’s mother,” says Chelsea. “But since then it’s been okay, she sleeps mostly during the day.” She only wishes the same was true at night. “She’s not too fussy though,” Chelsea says gently and strokes the infant’s wispy head. At just a week old, Ada is already making her mother proud.

For Chelsea, the decision to name her Ada after her own mother was easy. But choosing a last name has proven harder. Kenyan children can have as many as four names—to honor relatives, appease ancestral spirits, and affirm community identity—and still disagreements arise within families as relatives vie to have their line represented. Ada though, has just one name. No one in her family suggests another; they have not even come to meet her. Chelsea’s aunt, who took Chelsea’s younger brother in after their mother died, has not reached out. In a culture where children also call their aunts “mother” and view them almost as parents, her absence is particularly disappointing.

“I guess they’re still not happy with the idea of me having a baby right now,” Chelsea explains quietly. She suspects it’s because she had the baby out of wedlock but tries not to dwell on it. “It’s just going to stress me out for no reason, so I want to focus on raising the child and building a career and if they choose to be part of it, that’s well and good, if not, pia iko sawa, it’s still okay.”

Perhaps more painfully, Joseph also has not come to see his daughter, or suggested a name from his side of the family, which he’ll need to do soon for it to be listed on the birth certificate. They do still exchange videos though, so he knows the intimate details of their life: One day Ada was thrusting her tiny fists in the air with excitement, and the next, practicing a furrowed brow. “Every day is something new, so seeing these little changes is exciting, I like it,” Chelsea says contentedly. And Joseph is helping them financially at least. Between that and Chelsea’s full salary, which she still receives during her three-month maternity leave, they remain financially secure.

Still, there’s no guarantee that Joseph will continue to help. Chelsea could petition for formal child support, but she says she might not be entitled to much because they’re unmarried and, she adds with some apprehension, it would be an irreversible step into the unknown. “Once you go to court, there’s no going back.” She could burn bridges with Joseph, she says, and Ada might lose her relationship with him forever. “I want the conviction to care for her to come from his heart, not because he was forced by someone to do it.”

She knows intimately what it feels like for a daughter to realize her father supported her out of obligation rather than love. When she was in primary school, before her stepfather entered the picture, Chelsea’s father never paid for her schooling, except in class five when he bought her uniform. That small generosity was so unusual that she still remembers it. Then everything changed in secondary school. “He started paying my school fees and I got a medical card from him, so I felt like, maybe my dad is coming back into my life.” For years, he’d seemed almost like a figment of her imagination, but now here he was, ensuring she was well cared for and getting a good education; finally expressing his love.

As soon as she graduated, though, his financial support stopped, and the medical card soon expired. Years later, after her mother died, Chelsea found a letter among her things. It was a summons for her father from the Federation of Women Lawyers, an organization that offers free legal aid to women. That was the first time she understood clearly, heartbreakingly, that her mother had sued her father for child support. “It was not a good thing to find out someone only supported you because they were forced by a court to do so,” she says ruefully. “I don’t want the same thing to happen to Ada, so if the father decides to support her, fine, and if he doesn’t, at least she knows he made that choice, rather than that he was being forced, which is worse.”

Jane Achieng, a Luo historian at the University of Nairobi, says that before colonialism upended centuries-old traditions, Chelsea’s Luo community would have helped her, likely even forced Joseph to take some responsibility for his child. “The social protections were very strong and there were no outsiders as there are today, people with no community, just floating.” The extended family clan was the primary economic unit, and communities shared child-rearing resources, unlike today’s nuclear families that conserve assets to pay school fees, for example. And the very concept of wealth was different.

Historically, Kenyan families measured their fortunes in terms of cattle, land, and children. “Children were the most important part of the wealth,” says Achieng. She argues that modern expressions of affluence—like expensive cars that sit unused in gated compounds—don’t produce the same social benefits. In Chelsea’s case, Joseph might have taken more interest in Ada if the culture still ascribed such high value to children.

While today single motherhood is relatively common—six of every ten Kenyan women will have at least one episode of single motherhood by forty-five—historically it was rare. That’s in part because today women are more economically empowered and can leave bad or abusive relationships. But it’s also because of a traditional practice called tero or “wife inheritance,” in which the community organized marriages for women who’d lost husbands. Asande Bonyo, the ninety-one-year-old Luo women who described giving birth at home, explains that when her first husband died, she was still quite young and so she married another man from the same family, Nyangoro, and they had several children. When Nyangoro later died in a tractor accident, she married a third member of the family, Oketch. “That was the tradition back then, but if you refused the next marriage, that was also fine.”

The tero system was also polygamous, and when she married Oketch, he already had two wives, each of whom had their own shamba, a plot of farmland in the family settlement. Bonyo says she and her co-wives formed a tight familial unit. “We loved each other; my co-wives loved me so much that they would even wipe me with water,” she says using an expression that connotes deep, unconditional love. Six decades later, she still lives on that same plot of land, next to her co-wives.

Bonyo gave birth to eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. After the birth of each child, her co-wives and others in her community brought food and gifts. “Those were very good days,” she smiles; “you would be cooked for and would just eat.” She recalls filling up on fish and arrowroot, a starchy vegetable thought to have medicinal properties, and not returning to her farmwork for over a month. The traditional rest period was forty days, at which point she celebrated with a ritual bath, similar to the Japanese practice of “raising the floor”—a kind of cultural convergence in which groups on different sides of the globe landed on almost identical postpartum traditions of rest and community support, to address the same biological reality.

Much has changed since then, but polygamy still exists in Kenya, says Gloria Kenyatta, deputy clerk of a county legislature in the Rift Valley. “Polygamy is very legal; it’s one of the traditional marriages we have in the African setting, so it’s allowed, it’s there, it’s very alive and it’s happening.” At independence in 1963, many Kenyans were still polygamous, and while the so-called Marriage Bill in the late 1970s would have criminalized adultery, there was little parliamentary support for such “un-African changes.” Today, polygamy is more common in rural areas, like the one where Kenyatta works, but there is an urban variant: Mubaba is Swahili slang for a wealthy older man who dates younger women, sometimes with his wife’s consent. Often there is a financial component, but, unlike in traditional arrangements, there is no social obligation to provide for the women.

In Chelsea’s case, she says Joseph’s wife knew about their relationship, but it wasn’t clear if she knew about the baby. There was one time, before Ada was born, that his wife called her. When Chelsea realized who it was, she hung up the phone. She never heard from her again.

That episode seems far away now, from a time when she took an interest in anything outside the pale green walls of her flat and the tiny space within them that Ada occupies. It is just Chelsea and Ada now and, of course, her friend Vee, who has been by her side since pregnancy. Another friend, Jen, visits frequently too. Chelsea helped Jen when her son was born four years ago, so Jen is happy to return the kindness now. The two women make up Chelsea’s own small community of support.

Vee stands in the kitchenette cooking sweet potatoes—the steaming pot adding moisture to the already humid air—as Chelsea looks on appreciatively from across the room. “She’s really helping me out with the meals and the laundry, and also with the baby; she’s been very supportive.”

Chelsea needs that help as she recovers, the stitches healing, pain slowly receding. And as it does, she is grateful her body can also nourish Ada. “I have a lot of milk, which is a good thing because some of my friends told me their milk took a day or so to come, so I feel like that was a lucky thing on my path.” After she nurses Ada, she takes the tiny baby in her arms and expertly burps her. In some ways, motherhood has come naturally.

Then, at two weeks, Chelsea’s postpartum support ends when Vee and Jen return to nursing school. Chelsea was fortunate her baby came during their holiday break, but classes have started again, and the flat feels strange and cold without them. In a bustling city of five million people, she is alone with her baby. Bonyo, the Luo woman, reflects solemnly that while her own postpartum days were filled with fish and arrowroot, “things have really changed, these days you can go hungry and no one cares.”

As Chelsea feeds Ada one rainy afternoon, she realizes she hasn’t eaten all day but there’s barely any food in the flat and she’s not sure how she’ll get more. Bringing Ada to the shops makes it so much harder to carry groceries and she worries about exposing such a young baby to crowds. In the days right after Vee and Jen return to school, there are a few times when she leaves Ada here asleep while she runs errands, but it fills her with dread. Most days she simply doesn’t venture outside the house and only sees her old friends when their posts pop up on social media. “Sometimes it can be hard because maybe you see them having fun and you’re like, why are they not visiting anymore, but it’s okay,” she says, her voice breaking. There is a long pause. “They’re just busy with their lives and I don’t get to see them as much because maybe I’d need to go out of the house, but I’m mostly with the baby.”

There is a particular grief that can accompany new motherhood, in which women mourn all they’ve lost even as they gain a child: autonomy, privacy, time, sexuality, professional identity. Psychologist Paula Nicolson writes that women often won’t admit even to themselves they feel that loss because there is such strong social pressure to exude joy. And she argues that if women were instead encouraged to grieve their old lives, “postpartum depression would be seen…as a potentially healthy process toward psychological reintegration and personal growth, rather than a pathological response to a ‘happy event.’”

For Chelsea, this lonely time also surfaces fresh feelings of grief at the loss of her own mother. And later that same week, she gets another reminder, when Ada is due for her first checkup and round of vaccines. Public facilities are known to provide the best postnatal care, which has been free since 2013, so most everyone—from wealthy citizens to refugees—uses the public system. Jen suggests the big, national hospital downtown, but Chelsea recoils at the thought of going there. It was where both her parents died and she knows she won’t be able to get past its familiar concrete exterior. Her cousin, who has newly reentered her life, offers another idea: Westlands Health Center, a little over an hour away by bus.

When Chelsea arrives at the clinic, a small facility inside a concrete barrier and looped razor wire, she drops off Ada’s vaccination booklet then sits on a bench outside next to another mother. They both hold their babies in big, soft blankets and wait for instruction. Eventually, a nurse wearing a hijab and scrubs ushers Chelsea into a sunlit room, where she lays Ada on a long mattress, alongside another baby in a collared shirt. Their four spindly legs kick the air. Ada blows bubbles as Chelsea removes her onesie and then the nurse transfers her to a small plastic scale under a UNICEF poster: Breast milk is best.

Four and a half kilograms, the nurse reports and makes a note on Ada’s chart.

Chelsea looks stricken.

Ada was four kilos last time, and Chelsea had expected her to be up to five today. I don’t know, maybe I should breastfeed more, she thinks. Normally Ada just wakes for a minute to feed then falls back asleep, but perhaps she should encourage her to stay awake for longer and feed more. I feel like she really should weigh more, she thinks. It is a new concern, on top of others: Ada has been congested and Chelsea blames herself for not dressing her more warmly. She is also concerned Ada’s navel is not healing quickly enough, so she applies surgical spirit and checks it frequently for any sign of infection.

“Anxiety is like a switch that turns on,” Chelsea says. And she can’t turn it off.

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From Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries by Abigail Leonard. Copyright © 2025. Available from Algonquin Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.