'Mama Marehemu': When Women Unashamedly Roast Their Own

Reading Time: 9min

How Online Stigma, Masculinity Fault Lines, and Changing Social Norms Are Re-Defining Childlessness in Kenya

By the time Mwende turned 36, she had already internalised the insult before she saw it. It would come in conversations she didn’t start, threads she didn’t join, replies to posts that had nothing to do with her body or her life.

Mama marehemu.

The phrase had become a predictable tag — a way of registering judgment against her lack of children. Not simply a descriptor, but an accusation: that she must have aborted them, hidden a past that society insists she explain.

“I read it again yesterday under a post about relationships,” she says, speaking in the quiet corner of a café in Kilimani, Nairobi, her voice steady but laced with exasperation. “It isn’t even delivered as a question. It’s delivered as a verdict.”

Mwende has never had a child. Her decision to remain childless was never announced on social media — it was a private choice shaped by her life, her priorities, and her observations of partnerships that began with promise and ended in absence. Yet in Kenya’s online public square, her presence registers not as a woman making choices but as someone who owes an explanation.

This contemporary form of social interrogation — made louder and wider by social media — is part of a broader cultural shift. As motherhood once carried a narrow but established social meaning, childlessness today, especially among women in their 30s and 40s, is increasingly framed not only as unusual, but as suspect, moralised, and interrogated.

What was once a life choice or a private health reality has, in many online spaces, become a public performance of judgement.

The New Public Judgement

In Kayole, 31-year-old Clara has read the comments too. Unlike Mwende, Clara’s childlessness was not a choice; it was shaped by years of debilitating pain and medical uncertainty.

“I was diagnosed with endometriosis when I was 26,” she says, seated on a shaded bench outside her family home. “My doctor explained how the condition can affect fertility, but no one else wanted to hear about that.”

Instead of understanding, what Clara encountered — in community chatter and increasingly on digital platforms — was assumption.

“People assume because I don’t have a child I must have done something to prevent it,” she says. “Abortion — that’s the only story people want to tell.”

Social stigma tied to reproductive decisions in Kenya is not new, but its expression has transformed. Trends in reproductive behaviour are shifting nationally: Kenya’s total fertility rate dropped to 2.3 in 2024 from 2.8 in 2022, reflecting both economic pressures and changing priorities around childbearing. Urban centres like Nairobi have seen this decline most sharply, where contraceptive use has increased and nearly half of women of reproductive age report not wanting more children or choosing to delay pregnancy.

Yet this shift is not always welcomed or understood socially. Instead of nuanced conversation, it is met with derision, moralising, and what feels like cultural policing, particularly online.

Childless, Judged, and Publicly Scrutinised

In conversations across Facebook Mothers Groups, Instagram comment threads, and TikTok debates, a troubling pattern emerges: women who have children — often younger mothers — are among those most vocally critical of childless women.

It is not uncommon to see replies tagging childless women with mama marehemu, as though the absence of children must be explained by a hidden reproductive history. In some cases, these accusations take on a life of their own, spreading beyond the original post and shaping the social narrative about entire classes of women.

“They don’t want to accept the idea that a woman can be complete without children,” Mwende says. “So they fill in the gaps with their own assumptions.”

Dr Anne Wairimu, a Nairobi-based clinical psychologist specialising in social stigma and digital behaviour, warns that these dynamics are less about biology and more about emotional projection.

“When someone uses language like mama marehemu, what they are really expressing is a fear of difference,” she says. “For many young mothers, their identity is bound up in their reproductive experience. So when they see someone who hasn’t given birth — by choice or circumstance — it can trigger deep emotional discomfort. That discomfort manifests as judgement.”

This idea of projection — where an unresolved experience is externalised as criticism — is central to understanding how stigma operates. For some women, the lived experience of motherhood without support, praise, or recognition becomes fertile ground for projecting their own unresolved emotional burdens onto others.

Masculinity, Absence, and Online Performance

A parallel narrative unfolds on pages dedicated to toxic interpretations of masculinity.

Across platforms purporting to champion “male self-improvement,” “traditional values,” or “relationship truths,” childless women are sometimes framed as incomplete or deceptive. These pages often thrive on outrage and divisive commentary.

This is particularly ironic considering that many of the most aggressive voices on these platforms are men with little to no involvement in their children’s lives, or who disappeared from relationships when responsibility deepened.

Sociologist Peter Mwangi, who studies gender norms in East Africa, describes this as a crisis not of masculinity but of responsibility and absence.

“What is often marketed as ‘masculinity’ on social media is actually avoidance,” he says. “Men father children and then retreat into anonymity. They do not show up, but they are quick to judge women who carry the emotional weight of that absence.”

This dynamic has very real consequences: data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics shows that family structures are changing. While there is no single authoritative statistic on father absence, multiple social surveys suggest a steady rise in households where mothers are primary caregivers without active partner support, especially in urban informal settlements. These shifts are rarely acknowledged in celebratory terms; instead, they are weaponised in online debates to shame women.

Changing Reproductive Landscape

The assumptions embedded in labels like mama marehemu also overlook important public health data.

Many defensive stereotypes about childlessness presume abortion as a common explanation. Yet evidence from national reproductive health research tells a more complicated story.

According to a recent report by the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC), the Ministry of Health, and the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 792,694 induced abortions occurred in Kenya in 2023, with 78.6 per cent of these among married or cohabiting women, and 65.6 per cent of women who had abortions having previously given birth.

This data clearly challenges the assumption that abortions are primarily sought by childless women. Rather, reproductive decisions happen across life stages — often shaped by economic pressures, family planning gaps, and personal circumstances.

In contrast, data from the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) indicates that spontaneous miscarriages remain more common than recorded induced abortions, and overall induced abortion reporting remains rare in national statistics across age groups.

These insights show that reproductive behaviour cannot be simplistically reduced to moral judgment, and that the lived reality of women’s reproductive choices is statistically and socially more nuanced than public mockery allows.

Voices From Across Kenya

These patterns are not confined to Nairobi. In Mombasa, Nakuru, and Kisumu, women articulate similar experiences, shaped by local context but connected by shared stigma.

In Mombasa, 38-year-old Zainab Juma works as a hotel events coordinator. She has never had children and has chosen to focus on her career. In her Swahili-speaking WhatsApp groups, she says she has been told without irony that she must have “killed her babies in secret.” Others tell her she is “incomplete.”

“What hurts is not the judgement,” she says, “but the certainty that they think they know my life.”

In Nakuru’s Milimani Estate, 42-year-old Esther Kamau has never married and has often been the target of gossip both offline and online. Her perspective is shaped not just by digital noise but by local culture.

“Here, people still believe a woman without children must have something wrong with her,” she says. “It’s as if existence itself is conditional on motherhood.”

In Kisumu, 35-year-old Grace Odhiambo had to stop trying for children after a complex health issue. Her experience with community pressure predates social media, but she says the digital age has amplified the scrutiny without increasing compassion.

“In town gatherings they would whisper,” she recalls. “Now they shout in comment threads.”

Historical Shift in Social Norms

The social meaning of motherhood in Kenya has not been static.

In the 1980s and 1990s, childbearing outside marriage was widely viewed as abnormal, particularly in rural and conservative communities, and unmarried motherhood carried heavy stigma. Today, the social penalty for children born outside marriage has softened in many urban spaces, but the expectation that women eventually become mothers has remained, even as economic and personal realities shift.

According to recent family planning programme updates, the crude birth rate in Kenya has been declining, reflecting broader transitions in reproductive behaviour.

But social norms lag behind demographic changes. In a society that historically equated womanhood with motherhood, the absence of children is still interpreted as an aberration — even though many women make deliberate, rational choices not to have children, whether for health, economic, or personal reasons.

Rethinking Womanhood

Underlying the online rhetoric are deeper questions about identity, agency, and social expectation.

Childless by choice or circumstance, women like Mwende, Clara, Zainab, Esther, and Grace all challenge the old script. Their stories show that womanhood cannot — and should not — be reduced to reproductive outcomes.

They remind us that reproductive choices are lived realities, not spectacle. And they reveal how digital culture can magnify insecurity, resentment, and unspoken grief in ways that harm individuals and distort public understanding.

If motherhood once functioned as a social rite of passage, modern Kenya is reaching a moment where that rite must be re-defined not by assumption or moral judgement, but by respect for individual choice and complexity.

Because when society’s verdicts are shaped by prejudice rather than evidence, the consequence is not emancipation — it is erasure.