Married To Africa

Marry Me in Africa is an invitation to discuss approaches and processes in African marriage ritual. As one crucial institution in African culture, marriage in its traditional African definition has helped many of the continents cultures maintain a sense of community and identity. This book invites especially students and researchers into exchanges on some African marriage traditions and their roles in African societies. It concerns those aspects that fascinate me and many other Africans that we believe will interest people in the New World, particularly the Caribbean. Researchers of the African Diaspora might want to use some of the marriage practices for reconstructing models for analysis and interpretation of the formation and transformation of the African heritage in the Diaspora. Marry Me in Africa is particularly useful for scholars not familiar with the different cultural practices among African societies, their sources of identity and diversity, and the implications of these for understanding African social systems. This book will be a useful companion for other scholars who know about some of the cultural practices but are unable to identify exactly their relationship to specific ethnic groups, traditional concepts, social, political, economic, technological, and other practices that have constituted the patterns of cultural behavior among African societies through marriage. Individual or local cultural traditions and practices are presented within the context of the general African cultural heritage, leading to cross-cultural comparison and generalizations. The convergence of traditional marriage patterns and continuities in specific aspects of traditional values and behavior of various societies are examined over the common-ground sense of community among Africans that may not be the same today as in the past. For this reason this book takes the liberty to discuss present manifestations of a transformed past in the present.

G. Pascal Zachary is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal when he finds love in, of all places, the zoo in Accra, Ghana. That is where he meets Chizo Okon, the surrogate mother for an orphaned chimpanzee. In Married to Africa, Zachary tells their warm and humorous story, which is as much about the marriage of two cultures as it is about the marriage of two people. Chizo introduces Zachary to an Africa usually overlooked by visitors. He learns about the spiritual fervor of ordinary Africans, the mysterious power of juju and the rewards of eating bushmeat and other African dishes. He learns how to haggle effectively, pick a reliable taxi driver, live on "Africa time" and adapt to being a white minority in a black society. Chizo, meanwhile, deftly adapts to living with her obruni, the local nickname for a white person. As their romance deepens, the couple learns how differently things can appear to them. While Zachary indulges a passion for traditional African art, Chizo worries about the possible evil spirits harbored in his wooden statues. When the two move to San Francisco, Chizo must learn to navigate a new world. The result is a different kind of immigrant story, powered by a series of wacky, wonderful and unforgettable tales -- such as Chizo taking a machete to Zachary's ex-wife's garden (not out of malice, of course), driving enthusiastically without a license, charming her hard-boiled Jewish mother-in-law and managing requests from poor relatives in Africa. The arrival of Chizo's teenage daughter marks the end of the beginning and the start of a new saga in this uniquely American love story. Married to Africa is a tender and charming account of a marriage and a fascinating look at how two people come to know each other across culture and race.

This examination of changes in adolescent fertility emphasizes the changing social context within which adolescent childbearing takes place.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. Love in Africa seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people’s ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, Love in Africa is a vivid and compelling look at love’s role in African society.

Originally published in 1987, this book shows that there is still considerable continuity in the practices and ideas of marriage in Afican against a background of social and economic change. This book discusses the diverse marriage forms in Africa and explores the different systems some of which can be understood in terms of Levi-Strauss's distinciton between complex and semi-complex structures, while others throw up questions of filiation, child custoidanship and rights secured through bridewealth transactions.

First Published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Originally published in 1953, this study examines the effect of social change on African domestic organization and marriage. Changes to African social organization due to increased contact with the West are analyzed and accounts given as to how these changes were handled by various administrations and missionaries. The volume is contributed to by lawyers, missionaries, anthropologists and sociologists from Africa, Europe and the USA.