Of Wababas and Tolstoy’s Literature of Desire and Betrayal

Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy's Realist Approach to Family Dynamics in "Anna Karenina"

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy wrote this famous opening line of his novel Anna Karenina in 1878 and then spent the next nine hundred pages mapping the phenomenon of one family’s peculiar hell—the tragic triangle of husband, wife, lover: a combustible mix sure to explode.

Tolstoy portrayed ordinary domestic life in minute, realist detail, unlike his compatriot Gogol, who depicted ordinary people transformed into something surreal, satirical, and grotesque, or Dostoevsky, known for dramatic, extreme situations—murder, guilt, redemption—spiralling into psychological and spiritual crises.

The "Wababa" Phenomenon: Modern Echoes of Tolstoy's Themes in Nairobi

In Nairobi today, this triangle of husband, wife, lover is captured in the “wababa” phenomenon. The word itself—borrowed from the Swahili for “father”—replaced the earlier term “sponsor”, which had itself replaced the older, more morally censorious “sugar daddy”.

It has become a signifier of a certain kind of middle‑aged Nairobi absurdity—the girl standing at the junction of Moi Avenue and Tom Mboya Street, an explosion of tight jeans and Brazilian hair tumbling and crashing over her face, flustering and shining in the gusty winds of May in Nairobi. In black stilettos and a rolled‑on pair of deep lace‑top stockings set for a wild ride, she has a sleek iPhone phone pressed to her ear, her neck straining above an off‑shoulder top, her eyes scanning every slowing SUV before they light up at the sight of the right car.

The old man parks, opens the door, and ushers the girl into the vehicle, his voice rasping, a gooey slur marinated in decades of distilled degeneracy. The old man is trying to relive his vanished youth, trying to recapture the throb of one moment of desire and excitement. Girl pouts, gleaming, coiffed, perfumed. Then they disappear into the Nairobi night.

Tolstoy would have understood this Nairobi “wababa” situation. Though he could not have known that 150 years later, his words would ring as true in the fluorescent glow of a Nairobi nightclub as they did in the gilded salons of St Petersburg—that the man who slips his wedding ring into his jacket pocket before meeting a young woman barely older than his daughter is the same man, in essence, as his character Prince Stepan Oblonsky, who wakes one morning in the novel’s very first pages to find that his wife Dolly (Darya Oblonsky) has discovered his secret: sleeping with the children’s French governess (house help), a young woman living under their own roof. Dolly will not let her husband into the bedroom.

Anna Karenina is about power, age, and the economy of desire. Tolstoy would have recognised the wababa phenomenon; he would have understood the quicksand that formed beneath some marriages. But he would have been shocked, perhaps, by the speed with which unhappiness can now be transmitted through modern technology—not only messages but also videos to complete the embarrassment in technicolour. A rumour in Karen becomes a meme in Kilimani in under an hour. Every affair is, at some level, crowd‑sourced and co‑managed by thousands of unseen witnesses—an army of bloggers, and anonymous social accounts, sometimes called “Facebook in‑laws."

Timeless Narratives: The Perils of Age-Disparate Relationships in Literature and Reality

And this is the most interesting thing about literature: the names change. The city changes. The century changes. The story of older men chasing young girls does not. A 1 March 2022 Daily Nation article entitled “What are the motives of older men who date younger women?” cited a study by A Well Told Story reporting that 65 per cent of Kenyan youth see nothing wrong with wababa/sponsor relationships, and that 33 per cent were currently in such relationships.

Whatever the reasons for the mbaba phenomenon, in Anna Karenina the consequences are dire. Dolly says, in a heartbreaking confession after discovering her husband’s infidelity: “Everything is at an end, and that’s all. And the worst of it is, you understand, that I can’t leave him: there are the children, and I am bound. Yet I can’t live with him; it is torture for me to see him.” The wife suffers but cannot leave the marriage—like some Kenyan women who cannot leave “because of the children.”

In the novel, there is a more dangerous love affair. Anna Karenina (from whom the novel derives its title) is married to Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin. However, she begins an affair with Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. It does not end well. After a long spiral of emotional turmoil—jealousy, isolation, social exile, and a collapsing relationship with Vronsky—Anna travels to the railway station. Overwhelmed by despair and convinced that she has destroyed her life beyond repair, she steps onto the tracks and is killed by an oncoming train.

Similarly, many young Kenyan women who enter relationships with older men sometimes find themselves entangled in dangerous dynamics—jealousy, possessiveness, threats, and violence.

Tolstoy ended Anna Karenina with Anna’s suicide when the love affair explodes. In Kenya, these explosions are deadly and regular, sometimes ending in the death of the husband, wife and lover.  

If we are to break this cycle of betrayal, humiliation, violence, and death, we must first recognise that narratives like Anna Karenina are not mere entertainment but mirrors and warnings: that the human heart, whether in 19th century Russia or 21st century Nairobi, can be deceitful, fragile—and dangerous.

The writer assists people in documenting their memoirs. johnmwazemba@gmail.com