Law, Religion, Culture and Slay Queens

A critique of the Kenyan Law of Succession (Amendment) Bill 2019

Abstract

Some Old Testament texts suggest that a man’s principal heirs were the sons from ‘legitimate’ wife/wives (Genesis 15:4, Deuteronomy 25:5-10, Judges 11:2, 1Kgs 21:3, and Ruth 4). Yet in Numbers 27:1-11 and the book of Ruth, one encounters the voices and actions of daughters and women who challenged the status quo on matters inheritance. Just like the Jewish religion in the Old Testament, in patriarchal, societies like Kenya, religious beliefs and negative cultural ideologies highly inform matters law and inheritance in ways that are disadvantaging to women and girls. In the African traditional society, polygamy and mistresses here referred to as slay-queens in the Kenyan contemporary street language netted together the family institution. The wives and ‘slay-queens’ indirectly benefit from property inheritance through the children. The Kenyan law of Succession (Amendment) Bill 2019, which is the primal law on inheritance, was reviewed for three years to lock out “illegitimate” children and slay-queens from inheriting the property of a deceased person. In a Kenyan context where women have no say over matters property inheritance and are seen as a man’s property; the bill fails to deliver an equitable approach. From a Post-Colonial and an Afro-Feminist approach, it is proposed that there is need to critique the Kenyan Law of Succession (Amendment) Bill 2019, challenge female experts in law to steer dignity conversations targeting a complete overhaul of all the discriminatory sections, interrogate religious and cultural foundations on which patriarchy finds ways of  legalizing the discrimination of women and girls.