Cornishmaninafrica

I don’t know of any couples in the village here who have had a church wedding. The early missionaries, bless their souls, placed huge expectations on converts concerning what a church wedding should look like. All the trappings of a Western ceremony have to be in place : white silk gloves, veils, bouquets, tuxedos, trumpets, trombones, mercedes, confetti, photographer, even the cake was in tiers, etc etc. All this is beyond the reach of most urban Africans, but for village farmers it is like asking them to travel to Mars. So people just don’t do it.

Divorce is an aspect of family dynamics which I find hard to penetrate. In the case of divorce, the man takes all. The women does not have custody of the children and returns to her own family destitute. The explanation goes something like this: the relationship between a man and woman is the same as that of the farmer and his field. The farmer sows his field and waits for the crops to grow. Now who gets the harvest – the farmer or the field ? The farmer of course! The same argument is used to justify polygamy. Why shouldn’t a man have several wives when a farmer has several fields? And of course, the other way round, it would be as inappropriate for a woman to have two husbands as it would for one field to be owned by two farmers.