Whichever way you look at it, there is no justification for giving a man the wrong impression about who his children are and which children belong elsewhere. Period.

Common lore says the only person who knows who the father of a child is, is the mother; and until she passes on, it is foolhardy to think you know who your biological dad is.

You can, provisionally, call her husband ‘dad’, but either she will get to some point and tell you the [bitter] truth or, if you’re unlucky, she may die without telling you who your real father is.

While some men die and, when the widow is called upon to step forward, eight others step up, making the term ‘wife’ or ‘widow’ seem like a dramatic term for the chorus in a Greek tragic-comedy, each dragging her brood of previously unknown children, now orphans, there is also the other side to this melodrama of unannounced children, where the man dies and, when the clan heads ask the orphans to step forward, only one does, out of the previously known five.

In that silent statement, the widow is announcing, at the most depressing of times, that the other four children have, all along, been thriving in the wrong man’s house.

So much for fidelity. Luckily, this sort of revelation comes when the man is beyond knowing such heart-stopping truths. Which, unfortunately, is not always the case. I know a case where, having seen that her husband of 70 years had been bed-ridden for a year, and there was no sign of recovery, this woman went to his bedside and, ever so gently, called him.
‘Mzee,’ she said, ‘I have something to communicate.’

He could barely lift his head to hear what she had to say, but when she told him that his favourite son; the one who reminded him most of his wife, because he resembled her to the tiniest detail, was not his, he sat right up, like some sudden shot of life-giving therapy had been administered to him.

What made it worse was his wife telling him who the real father was: His best friend whom he had dragged along, decades ago, to buy land right next to his, since they had grown up as best of friends. For a man whom even doctors had given up on, you can imagine the impact of this knowledge to him, for he lived on another three agonising years, before he died the most miserable man in his locality.

Picture also, the children who are traded like articles, in this manner. A man or woman has grown up knowing Mzee Gumasi is his/her father, only to be told, at the age of 45, that no, it is the family cattle-keeper who actually fathered him.

The mulaalo the children he grew up taunting, abusing and throwing stones at. With such memories, do you expect that adult child to be delighted to meet his/her true dad, or to crack up, not knowing how to refer to the other siblings anymore?

Women who ‘sit’ on this sensitive information cite the fear of losing their marriages as the reason for not speaking out, but hey, how about the people whose identity you’re playing with? How about the children whose esteem you could destroy, when they learn that their siblings are only half-brothers and sisters?

How about the man who, like that 87-year-old man who failed to die on realising that he had lived a lie all along, as his son’s fake father, now has to wonder what had been going on all along - remembering the times he laughed with his cuckolding foe of a best friend; wondering whether any of his children were indeed his? How about them?

Yeah, I know, you’ll say what about the men who cheat on their women; or get women and don’t declare that they had children before. Yes, indeed those cases exist, but should we, because others have wronged us, go ahead and wrong them? Should we?