Kenyan Marriage Bureaucracy
I’ve been married twice in my life; the first time was to another American in a courthouse ceremony in Virginia, and the second (final) time to a Kenyan in Kenya. The two processes were entirely different and worthy of documenting here. Note that in both instances, it is a civil marriage that is discussed and not the greater cultural traditions of religious ceremonies or tribal unions.
US: Down and Dirty
After living together for several years and being officially engaged for a few months, my (then) partner and I decided to get married. Originally, we had planned a destination wedding and had intended to fly our families to Puerto Rico, envisioning a ceremony on the beach with the Caribbean waves crashing on the shore behind us. Most of our budget was spent in travel and accommodations, so hiring a wedding planner wasn’t an option. In the end, this approach proved too stressful and we decided to do a simple courthouse ceremony and then “honeymoon” in Puerto Rico, bringing our families to join us since we hadn’t seen them in a while.
In Virginia, the process of getting married was simple:
Book an officiant online to perform the ceremony.
Go to the courthouse and get a marriage license.
Exchange vows.
Complete the license, including signatures from participants and officiant.
File the license with a moderate fee, showing photo ID to prove identity and appropriate age. .
Congratulations! That’s all it takes.
NB: Civil marriages vary by state in the US, but the process should be similar. Las Vegas, for instance, has a reputation for getting people married quickly and cheaply. In the US, this form of marriage isn't meant to be a hassle.
The Kenyan Way
Getting married in Kenya was a drastically different experience. It should be noted that, in this case, the marriage was between a Kenyan citizen (my wife) and a foreigner (myself), which alters the rules somewhat from the basic Kenyan civil marriage. Where I am aware of differences, I will note them below.
Government Application
Among more traditional marriages in Kenya, one might go through several steps before arriving at the government application. These steps might include negotiating a dowry, a pre-wedding ceremony with the village, etc. For the purpose of this piece, we focus only on the administrative portion.
Whether it is two Kenyans marrying one another, or a Kenyan and a foreigner, the start of the Kenyan marriage process is the same: you get the government’s permission. This requires submitting an application to the Registrar of Marriages for the area you’ll be performing the ceremony in. If this area is Nairobi, or if a foreigner is involved, then the application is done online through the Kenya eCitizen website. Anywhere else and the application is submitted, in person, at the nearest Registrar’s office.
Note the link to the Registrar of Marriages in the middle of the image. This is where one should click to begin the application process.
NB: eCitizen is a useful website for anyone that will be in Kenya for an extended period of time, and not just for marriages. It is also used for things like admission fees for national parks.
In order to submit the application, both parties will need to provide:
Copies of IDs. For Kenyans this can be their National ID or Passport. For Foreigners this is the passport.
Phone numbers and email addresses
Father’s and Mother’s details
Names
Alive/Decased
Occupation
Country of Residence
ID for each witness (one for bride and one for bridegroom).
Passport-sized photo for bride and bridegroom
Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage (each)
Any divorce decrees (each)
Original birth certificates (each)
For the foreigner: Visa/Entry pass and return ticket for leaving Kenya. I had to include both a printout of my eTA approval as well as my entry stamp in my passport.
No Impediment to Marriage
The certification of no impediment to marriage is a document I had never heard of. For me, as the foreigner, this came down to making an appointment at my embassy in Nairobi and paying them for an affadavit notarized by consular staff. The embassy is used to do this and provides the form, at least the US Embassy does, and charges a moderate fee. The form basically attests that there is no reason you cannot be legally married. For my wife, this came in the form of an affidavit taken at a local advocate’s office and notarized by a commissioner of oaths.
Divorce Decree
As I had previously been married, and divorced within two years of applying for this marriage, I was required to provide proof of divorce. As a resident of Kentucky, I ordered a copy of my divorce certificate through the Office of Vital Statistics and had it shipped via UPS to my residence in Kenya. This process took about two weeks total and I uploaded the official copy to the eCitizen website.
This was a surprise to the local registrar.
I was the first person who had ever uploaded a divorce certificate and not the entire approved packet of divorce papers signed by the presiding judge. The registrar scrutinized the document, noted its novel approach, but did accept it as valid.
A Note on Artifacts
Submitting the applications through eCitizen requires you to upload the above artifacts. This is not the easiest of processes. Each artifact type was different; some wanted image files, others wanted PDFs. The size restrictions between the uploads were different, even among the same filetypes. I started by taking images with my phone and then converting them to the appropriate file type and using online resizing tools to meet the specification. This often resulted in difficult to see or distorted images that got the application kicked back for edits. Even going to a local Cyber (a Kenyan shop where you can get scans, prints, and sometimes photography) to have the documents scanned in resulted in problems. In the end, the registrar said she “had a contact” that could do the documents for us, for a fee.
Approval
No one is having a legally recognized marriage in Kenya without the government approving it. This approval is multi-staged, requiring a review of your documents and an interview in person with your local registrar, and then someone in Nairobi reviewing the application as well. Both steps of this approval are required before you can schedule the ceremony.
We’re not finished needing approval, either.
Once you’re approved to marry, then you need approval to get married on your chosen day. There’s a permit that’s issued to the registrar that allows them to perform the ceremony, and this is not automatically put through the system, but has to be applied for, and comes only after you’ve paid the requirement government fee through eCitizzen.
Curiously, after we paid the fee through eCitizen using M-Pesa, we were directed to a separate, non-government office in the same building to give another 2000 KES to someone else and bring back a receipt. This extra fee was not included on any formal documentation nor the official website outlining the process. For those keeping track, this is now the second extra fee we’ve had to produce to get through this process.
The Interview(s)
Once your application is submitted, then you use the registrar’s website to book an appointment with the local registrar. You need to bring all of your original documents, and I recommend having 3 copies of each one on hand to leave with the registrar. They will review your application, look at your uploads, and if there’s anything they don’t like, then it gets kicked back to you for edits and you start the whole upload, submit, and schedule appointment process over again.
Be prepared for “Swahili time” as part of this process. Our appointment was at 9:00 am, the first available, but the office staff didn’t unlock the door until 9:30 am and the registrar didn’t show until 11:00 am. We had already returned home when we received a call asking us to come back in.
This is, also, the part where the government ensures it’s an authentic marriage and being performed for the correct reasons. We came prepared with chat histories and so on, but were never asked to produce proof of the length of our relationship.
For us, it took three interviews before final approval. At the first one we were instructed to redo the documents using a Cyber to really scan them. At the second we were informed the documents still looked bad, and to pay the registrar’s contact to do them. At the third, we were approved and began to wait.
For the next two weeks we called or visited regularly to check on the status for selecting a ceremony day. The registrar had vacation coming up and my eTA would expire before she returned. The official in Nairobi held things up due to personal matters (Alcoholism was involved, we were told; the amount of tea you get in Kenya is amazing).
By the time everything was approved and we could officially schedule our wedding, we had a whole four days of notice.
I would like to note here that, officially, once you’re approved for a marriage to a foreigner in Kenya, you only have a 14 day window before your approval expires. It’s also worth noting that marriage to foreigners bypass the need to post an impending wedding announcement 30 days prior to the wedding.
The Big Day
In the registrar’s office, just before the vows are given. Take a moment to marvel at how beautiful that bride is!
The day of the ceremony is booked, but not a specific time. It is first come, first serve. We were advised to arrive early, but you just can’t rush a bride on her wedding day, and with the results you see above, you can tell it was absolutely worth the wait!
Our wedding had a slight hiccup: my witness lost his photo ID and the ceremony couldn’t proceed without it. Luckily someone in his family found it and sent it to us via boda boda (motorcycle courier) and it only delayed us another hour or so. I had prepared my own vows, but we were not offered the chance to use them. The ones used by the registrar were quite thorough and beautiful, however. No notes. We exchanged vows and rings, then everyone involved signed the papers (including several copies of the license the registrar had pre-ordered for us), and that was it!
Off we went to our reception dinner and photography session.
Analysis
The difference between the two processes is striking, sociologically.
In the United States, our culture of individualism is seen. The government’s role is minimal and centers around record keeping. It plays little to no role in approval and is not there to scrutinize if the marriage is good for the greater society. It is decentralized as well; all records are filed at the municipality level and do not require any greater approval from higher levels of government. This efficiency is what allows for Vegas-style same day weddings.
Our Kenyan marriage, on the other hand, took 39 days from the time we filed the initial application to the day of the wedding ceremony. It brought with it a sense that this was not just record keeping, but a kind of rite of passage. The government played the role of a gatekeeper, doling out approval for marriages as it saw fit based on criteria there were not well-stated or made available. People were inserted into the process where automation could have been used, or requirements made that did not seem to serve a purpose other than adding a roadblock (ie. the requirement for approval to perform a civil marriage after the approval for marriage and already been given).
Then there’s the matter of the two extra payments we made…