West Africa - Mariage Rites and Ages
Marriage
West Africans generally perceive marriage as an alliance between two kinship
groups and only secondarily a union of individuals. (Akande 1979, Dunabar, 1983). Some Muslim ethnic groups, such as the Serer in
Senegal, or the Songhay in Mali, Niger, and Nigeria,
are exogamous, preferring to marry outside their lineages. In Nigeria, Islamic law prohibits marriage between
Muslim men and animist women, though Muslim men may marry Christian women. Muslim Nigerian
women may only marry other Muslim men. In Senegal, Tukulor men adhere to the Quaranic
injunction against marrying pagan women. Dyula men do marry pagan women, but Dyula women
do not marry pagan men.
Other groups have very specific rules against marrying outside of the ethnic
group, rather than outside the Islamic religion. Among
the Malinke, a group of some four million Muslims in several coastal countries, men can
marry women who are not Malinke, but women may only marry Malinke men. Similarly the Jahanka allow their men to marry
non-Jahanka women, but women may only marry Jahanka men (Weeks 1984).
The age of first marriage and betrothal customs vary widely in West Africa.
Traditionally, most West African peoples regarded a girls as marriageable at the time of
puberty. In Senegal and Mauretania, the
average age of a women at her first marriage is 23. Women
in Mali and Niger marry earlier, at an average age of 16.
Hausa girls are generally married between the ages of 10 and 12. The girl's family arranges her first marriage. If she has not yet reached puberty, she will stay
in the home of her parents until her first menstruation and then go immediately to her
husband's home. The girl's consent is not required, but she may repudiate the marriage
after puberty. Men, on the other hand, do not marry until they are capable of supporting a
wife, which means that many Hausa men are thirty before they wed.
The payment of bridewealth is an essential part of marriage in most
West African communities, Islamic or not. The
payment usually follows indigenous rules rather than the classical Islamic tradition of
mahr. In Niger, for example, the
negotiations leading to marriage are marked by a series of gifts. In practice, the bride's
family often spends as much as the groom's on these exchanges. Nevertheless, the marriage
is not valid until the payment of bridewealth and the announcement of the amount. Among most West Africans, the bride's family
receives the payment rather than the bride herself.
The government of Niger encourages people to register marriages, but
registration is not required for a marriage to be valid. A Nigerien husband is obliged to
provide his wife with food, clothes, lodging and pocket money. A wife has the right to acquire and administer
property, as well as the right to respect, good treatment and conjugal relations. She is obliged to obey her husband, including
seeking his permission to leave the house, whether for visits or for work. If she does
not, he has the right to send her from his bed or administer a light beating (Dunbar
1983).
Malian husbands are legally required to support their wives and
children. As a practical matter, however, women have difficulty enforcing the law (Hosken
1982).
In Nigeria, married Muslim women have certain rights to property that other
Nigerian women do not. Under statutory Nigerian law, a married man controls his wife's
property and she may not enter contracts that would jeopardize his right to such property. She cannot enter into loan or hiring agreements
without her husband's consent, nor can she obtain a passport without it. However, under
sharia law a married woman's property is her own (Akande 1979).
Marriage practices among the Mbororo of Cameroon downplay the
relations between husband and wife. Once a
woman becomes pregnant the first time, she returns to her parents' household and stays
there until the child is weaned, about three years after she gives birth. During that time she has no contact with her
husband.
Divorce
Divorce is extremely common in West Africa. Among the Hausa, divorce
occurs almost as frequently as marriage. All forms of divorce sanctioned by sharia are
allowed, but repudiation is the most common. In Niger and Senegal, however, divorce is not
valid until registered with a court. In the
rest of West Africa, repudiation is sufficient, meaning that many women do not actually
know their marital status. Women who initiate
divorce must return the bridewealth their husband paid at the time of the marriage. If a
Muslim couple divorces, the woman is expected to observe idda, the forty-day waiting
period proscribed in the Quran. During this period, the ex-husband is supposed to support
her, though women have no way of enforcing this (Akande 1979).
Once a woman is divorced and her idda period has passed, she will
generally remarry within a few months, as most West African Muslims consider it socially
unacceptable for a woman of childbearing age to remain single. Divorced women do not suffer any social stigma in
Mauritania, unless their family or the family of their ex-husband blame them for the
failure of the marriage. However, a few groups, such as the Daza in Chad and the Nupe in
central Nigeria, allow divorced women to remain single and to serve as the head of their
household.
Among the Fulani, divorce is relatively easy for either partner to
obtain, although men are more likely to initiate it.
Prior to the final divorce, the spouses must observe a period of conjugal
separation in which the wife returns to her father or guardian. The wife's idda period begins after this
separation. The Woodaabe also recognize a
process of divorce in which the wife leaves her husband and establishes an informal
remarriage prior to or without proper dissolution of the first marriage (Weeks 1984). Among some West African groups, women keep
their houses after divorce. Others expect women to return to their natal home.
Polygyny
Polygyny predates Islam in West Africa and is practiced by most ethnic
groups, regardless of religion. A man's wealth is determined by the number of wives and
children he has (Akande 1979). Many West
African Muslims see polygamy as part of being devout, as well as a status symbol for men. Affluence rather than any other factor, usually
determines whether or not a man has more than one wife. In mostly Muslim Senegal,
approximately one-quarter of urban marriages and one-third of rural marriages are
polygamous. Although the law requires first marriages to be declared polygamous or
monogamous at the time of the wedding, in practice this is rarely done and there are no
sanctions against men who change their minds. Frequently
even men who start out wanting to be monogamous change their minds as they grow older. As
they become more prosperous, they are better able to afford having multiple wives.
Senegalese men who are literate, whether they have studied only through primary education,
or all the way through university, are more likely to have several wives than are men with
no education. On the other hand, Sengalese women who have higher education are less likely
than others to be in polygamous marriages (Antoine and Nantilelamio 1996).
Hausa men see polygamy as an obligation, if they can afford it. Some Hausa subgroups, such as the Kanuri, also
allow men to keep concubines. When a Hausa
man has more than one wife, the co-wives live in separate rooms within the same house, not
in separate homes.
In Mali, many men, particularly of the merchant class, perceive having more
than one wife as part of being a serious person (Warms 1994). Similarly for the Sosa of Guinea and Sierre Leone,
a predominately Muslim people of about a million, having multiple wives, sometimes more
than four, conveys prestige. One exception to
the general rule is Mauritania. There the
Maures, who are the elites of the country, are basically monogamous, while the rest of the
population is frequently polygamous. At the
time of the wedding, a woman can stipulate that the marriage is dissolved if the husband
takes a second wife. Maure women use this provision regularly.
In Niger, the first wife divides the goods and supplies from the
husband among the other wives. Stress and strain between wives lead to frequent flights
from urban marriage home. Some rural women, however, welcome other wives as additional
workers (Dunbar 1983).
In both Guninea and Ivory Coast, polygamy is illegal but widely practiced among the Muslim Dyula and the Jahanka. In Sierre Leone, Muslim Limba men sometimes have more than four wives.
Source: http://els41.law.emory.edu/ifl/region/westafrica.html