The Taita people are several East African ethnic groups who have been living in Kenya for four or five hundred years. They are sometimes also referred to as the Wataita or Wadawida. The Taita are largely highland farmers who inhabit a mountainous area of southern Kenya. The Taita tribes consisted of lineages or clans. The lineages were autonomous social groups that occupied their own territories in the hills.
Sex and Lust in African Tribal Life
Early ethnographic accounts of African life and gender relationships were filled with numerous tales of lust and sexuality. Travelers and missionaries in Africa did not mention anything about love. In the past, many anthropologists thought that Africans were not able to love in ways other than sex.
European missionaries reported on this kind of “native” sexual behavior, condemning these relationship practices. Therefore, they educated men and women in African tribes on how to live according to the Western moral ideals of family and religious virtues. Christian missionaries were obsessed with teaching “proper” family relations and sexual behavior.
This ethnocentric misunderstanding of Westerners, which the first missionaries narrated in their accounts, has been the most common way that Europeans and Americans thought about African gender relations (Jablow & Hammond, 1977, p. 16).
European influences culturally refined and framed the Taita’s folk notions of sex, lust, and love, which glossed over indigenous African emotions and feelings. This new language of relationships introduced by Westerners reflected internal feelings and private experiences that have always been present in Taita culture. East African folklore tell a few love stories that were known before Europeans arrived (Bell, 1995).
The Traditional Arranged Marriage of the Taita
The widespread practice of polygynous relationships and marriages was another concern of missionaries. They believed that women and men involved with one another outside of their monogamous relations were the primary sins of African society.
The real cultural practices of Taita marriage were, however, more complex and more pragmatic in their way of social life. The Taita people have long practiced arranged marriages. In the selection of a mate and getting married, the needs of the extended family and the tribal community were more important than the preferences of a young woman or a man. The parents and other relatives of the senior generation looked for a prospective mate for their children. Such a mate should be healthy and have an agreeable personality. Everyone in the family, including the prospective bride and groom, understood that the primary goal of arranged marriages was the welfare of the family, not the individual. Therefore, individual preferences, wishes, and feelings were deemed irrelevant in this case.
The Taita Polygyny
Polygyny, along with free sexuality, has been a common and acceptable cultural practice among the Taita tribes. Marital polygyny assumed that a man could marry several women for family relations.
Western missionaries regarded this widespread practice of women and men being involved with one another outside of marriage, which was presumably supposed to be monogamous. Westerners preferred monogamous marriage to polygamous marriage as a cultural norm. Therefore, they persuaded the Taita people about the cultural and religious superiority of monogamy. They transformed the tribal indigenous ideals of marriage and encouraged men and women to convert to the virtue of monogamy.
European missionaries introduced Western cultural features and the rituals that glorified monogamous marriage and love expressions into African daily life. Despite these new Western cultural marriage practices, polygyny remained a popular practice in their families’ relationships (Bell, 1995).