Review by Insa Nolte: New Histories of Marriage and Politics in Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Histories of Marriage and Politics in Africa
This is a Review Article of Osborn, Emily, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. xiii + 273. ISBN 978-0-8214-1983-0 (pb). Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), pp. xiii + 300. ISBN 978-0-8214-2120-8 (pb). Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), pp. xiv + 239. ISBN 978-0-8214-2145-1 (pb). It argues that the three books reviewed in this article make an important contribution to Africa's social and political history. Defying explorations of marriage as a product of the political economy and avoiding a consideration of marriage simply as an example of social or legal transformation, Emily Lynn Osborn, Rachel Jean-Baptiste and Emily Burrill focus on marriage, sexual relations and the household as important and contested categories of historical production. Their emphasis on the implication of marriage in wider social relationships resonates with historical-anthropological reconstructions of precolonial and colonial forms of gendered agency. It also reveals marriage as a vantage point for research that transcends conceptual boundaries between the private and the political, and by implication also boundaries between different fields of historical inquiry.
Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology, 2021
The task of this paper is to highlight some of the marriage relationship tendencies that have changed in the modern African Marriage, in relation to the traditional norms, as manifest in two texts of two African Feminist writers. The study thus examines how Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus explore the marriage institution in Africa and unearth the changing dynamics in it, as it pertains to the modern or post-modern African society. The study concluded that though the dignity of marriage coupled with its necessity as a social institution is unquestionably maintained in our focused African texts, its dynamics, in modern society, must yield to positive change, at least, to reflect the emerging socio-economic trends in African society today.
Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae
This article discusses the challenges which the institution of marriage faces within the African indigenous societies. Marriage is understood to be one of the most vital mechanisms in maintaining the consistency of all societies on earth. Scholars, such as John Mbiti, understand marriage to be a drama in which everyone becomes an actor or actress and not just a spectator. While this sounds truly ideal, the reality is that most Africans understand marriage to be an institution primarily knotted within African cultural norms and traditions with disparity roles between the couple. The article argues that such an imbalance unleashes toxic masculinity and manhood ideologies which are chiefly designed to deny women the rights to be fully actresses in the theatre of marriage. It also argues for the need of liberative frameworks within which to challenge the dominative traditional and cultural dogmas which are creating disparities between men and women in marriage. Musimbi Kanyoro’s cultura...
African Marriages in Transformation: Anthropological Insights
In this article, I will outline central transformations of African marriages and link these changes to four broad anthropological approaches which I label as metanarratives. I use the term ‘metanarrative’ to stress the rather high degree of coherence within these four anthropological interpretative frameworks. Similarly, James Ferguson applies the concept of a ‘metanarrative’ to analyze the way anthropologists among others have perceived and constructed ‘modernity’ and ‘urbanization’ in the Zambian Copperbelt (Ferguson 1999:14-17). I will start with British social anthropology and classify this approach as a first metanarrative centering on the leitmotif of the stable African marriage. The metanarrative of the stable African marriage is only one line of thinking that is prominent in African ethnography. There are at least three other influential metanarratives framing the work on African marriages during the 20th century, i.e. the metanarrative of the destruction of ‘the’ African marriage and family system and the (more unspecific) metanarrative of change of African marriage and family systems. Finally, the fourth and most recent metanarrative used to interpret transformations in African marriages highlights fluidity and flexibility of African marriages. In the final section of my article I will discuss the possible emergence of a new metanarrative that aims at understanding the dramatic increase in wedding costs and the parallel decline in marriage rates, especially in Southern Africa.
Mukt Shabd Journal, 2022
Most of the study of African literature has largely been the domain of post-colonial theorists and any other aspects like the social setup, gender studies or human relationships have found lesser space for themselves as subject of in-depth study. Even the most vocal writers, who through their works might appear like iconoclasts, remain traditionally, distinctly patriarchal in their personal approach, supportive of motherhood and focused on issues of bread, butter, culture and power. But what has gone largely unnoticed in literary criticism is the strong socio-cultural roots of the Africans, especially related to marriage –the primary denominator of an aesthetically evolved civilized society. Marriage has been one of the most binding instrumentsof social cohesion and strong inter-personal relationships not only between two individuals, but their family, clan and community as well. The African wedding, that can come to pass through various means –love, arrangement, barter, inheritance or even capture, are all equally sacrosanct and have the involvement of the whole community from its initiation till the end, if at all there be a case. This article looks to study the relevance of marriage and its integration in the African society through the novels of the likes of Buchi Emecheta, Elechi Amadi, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Africa, 2018
in shifting circumstances. Second, it demonstrates that studies that treat racial politics as discrete local practices, impervious to external ideals, overlook the power of human agency in the rapidly globalizing world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Third, and most importantly, it puts the anti-colonial movement in its merited place in the history of sexuality. Whether it is the story of the 1919 race riot in which white men blamed black men for taking their jobs as well as their wives, or the case of Felicia Agnes Knight, who protested about the impending termination of her white husband's appointment in Ghana in 1961, the intersections of race, nationalism and sexuality come to life in an important manner. The 1919 race riot in Britain and its implications for black men's economic survival and immigration status assumed new meaning in the contestation over interracial marriage and sex in the 1920s and 1930s, as Gold Coasters decried the increasing 'enticement' of their women by 'irresponsible' white men who abandoned the children they had fathered. While cases of deliberate abandonment of multiracial children existed, the big questions about interracial affairs often dovetail with the core features of anti-colonial struggles that viewed white men's sexual relations with African women as another arm of capitalist expropriation. Thus, the contest over the injustice of colonialism in the Gold Coast included the exploitation of the sexual body, in addition to the abundant solid mineral and agricultural resources of the colony. The intersections of sex, race and antinationalism find another interesting dimension in Ray's analysis of interracial affairs between white women and members of the West African Students' Union (WASU), who shaped the anti-colonial movement and politics in the immediate post-independence era. Ray's observation that romantic affairs between WASU members and white women 'were not just personal, they were also political and politicized' (pp. 212-13) is compelling and apt. Crossing the Color Line is tier-one scholarship, capable of directing a new course in historical research on sex, gender, race, diaspora, empire and identity formation, among other themes and subfields of African colonial history. In Carina Ray's rigorous hands, the reader is introduced to stories of men and women across location and race as they encountered and contested shifting metropolitan and colonial conceptions of race relations, power and gender.
The changing faces of marriage in selected works by Anglophone and Francophone African women writers
2006
This thesis explores representations of marriage in the works of Anglophone and Francophone African women writers. It presents a trajectory of such representations from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, and examines the various social, ideological and literary influences that have shaped these narratives of marriage. The introduction contextualises the study within existing critical scholarship on African women's writing and representations of marriage. From the evaluation of this literature, it identifies and states the thesis's problem and assumptions. It explores various theoretical perspectives on gender, feminism and nationalism as frameworks for analysis in the thesis. The body of the thesis makes connections between different contexts and periods of women's writing and between the different works of individual women writers. The first chapter focuses on the early works of Ama Ata Aidoo and Mariama Bâ, two pioneer writers from Anglophone and Francophone Africa. It examin...