"Nyiego en gimarach !"
Akelo and Akong'o were two women, both married to the same man. (This is Nyanza, remember ... polygamy used to be common !) Both women had borne their husband a daughter. The problem was that Awino, the daughter of Akong'o, was more beautiful than Awiti, the daughter of Akelo.
Akelo was jealous, for young men kept coming to propose marriage to Awino, and Awiti was ignored. Akelo decided she must kill her daughter's rival when she was asleep. The girls slept in the siwindhe (the place where unmarried girls slept with an older woman, perhaps their own grandmother). The girls who were the best of friends, shared a bed, each keeping to her own side.
Akelo asked her daughter which side she slept in; Awiti replied 'away from the door'. But when Awino, the other girl heard this, she was suspicious, and begged her sister to change places. So on the fateful night Awiti was nearest the door.
At the darkest hour, Akelo crept in to murder Awino, but instead slaughtered her own child, and crept out again.
Next morning when everyone saw what had happened, there was wailing and sorrow. Akelo pretended to mourn with everyone else, for like others in the village, she had not seen the body, until she followed the mourners into the siwindhe where the girls had slept ... only to find it was her very own dear Awiti who lay there dead. Here was a corpse she hadn't expected, and now she really was grief-stricken, wailing with greater sadness than the village folk had ever seen before.
So the moral of this story is: Nyiego en gimarach ! Jealousy is a bad thing !
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