Here’s another TV show with extreme in the title to add to Extreme Makeover, Extreme Weight Loss, Britain’s Most Extreme Weather, and the rest: Extreme Wives With Kate Humble (BBC2). So, are they wives in hurricanes? On sheer cliff faces? Is it a game show?
No. This is a serious programme about the roles of women in different societies around the world. Starting in Kenya, where Humble visits the Kuria people. They’re polygamous – the men marry many wives. So far, so lots of other places and societies. But then it gets more interesting, because they also have a practice called nyumba mboke which means woman-to-woman marriage.
Sounds cool … progressive, even? Hmmm. It has nothing to do with love or sex. These younger wives are effectively bought to help around the place and bear children, preferably sons. None of them – certainly not the ones Humble speaks to – thinks it’s a good idea. It’s mainly about propping up the patriarchy.
It gets worse for Kuria women. There’s another, more familiar, and more sickening tradition: female genital mutilation. At first it looks as if things are getting better. A preacher in the church speaks out about it, Humble joins a rally against it, everyone in the village agrees it’s barbaric, dangerous and wrong, and that attitudes are changing. But then, when she digs deeper, it becomes clear it’s very much still going on, and though illegal (since 2011) the police can’t or won’t do a lot about it. In a sickening ending, in the same village as the rally where everyone said they opposed it, an elder casually tells her that the previous day between 300 and 350 girls were circumcised there. Their god told them to, he says. That and the fact that, as an elder, he gets paid for every girl who is cut. The problems are all depressingly familiar: religion, money, men.
I remember being down on a Kate Humble travelogue once. It was insipid and dull. There’s nothing insipid about this one, even if it takes a while to figure out what it’s about. She gets involved in dangerous situations, asks difficult questions, is threatened and even joins the audacious rescue of a girl on the eve of her planned mutilation. It’s brave, and shocking, and important. Extreme, even.
