Semantics: The tenuous wall between bride-price & slavery

Only a few weeks ago, the Ugandan news-consuming public was abuzz with talk of how a senior national court had repealed one of the myriad aspects of a traditional marriage custom that has for generations been practiced by most, if not all of the country’s sub-ethnicities; namely – bride price payment.

Everywhere one went - in the vegetable markets, on the taxi-vans, in the banking lobbies – the subject and its broader cousins were on every lip; a sign of how universally intrigued the modern African person is by normative vestiges from the fast receding mists of a crumbling cultural heritage.

Interestingly, many of the conversations I listened in to, were mutually agreed on how protective Africans must be of the practice; how it stood for a great societal legacy that could not just be thrown out the window.

Before we can proceed, let me not equivocate on my position in the matter.

I am one of those men, who have sworn upon all gods new and old, living, dead and dying, that I shall and will not offer a single shilling or commodity to my future bride’s family in exchange for her hand in marriage.

In short, I am convinced beyond mention of words, that bride-price, dowry, family-consideration or the litany of other euphemisms that may be invented to label this archaic practice have no effect in diluting the practice for what it, at the core, is – modern day slavery!

To the best of my knowledge and experience, I may well be the only African man bold (or mad) enough today to make a declaration of such repulsive socio-cultural implications.

I say mad because to attempt to oppose century-old institutions and attendant customs in places like Africa, with their profusion of self-contradicting quasi-elites, is to call scorn and ridicule upon oneself, is to ask to be labeled a brainwashed, westernized traitor to culture.

Not even so-called feminists help matters.

The girls and women, who rightly should see themselves as victims of this slavery, further  appall me by the vehemence with which they defend the practice;

‘‘We can’t just be given out free of charge …’’

‘‘What a man desires must cost him …’’

And other idiotic and shockingly crass phrases are what the average girl on Kampala’s street will utter if and when confronted with the question of bride price.

It unnerves me to think of how happily a segment of society can cooperate in its own enslavement. 

This indeed must be the zenith of stupidity!

I reckon this is why African women in their marital homes are continually abused by their spouses and yet remain silent – after all, cows bought for a price don’t moan under the whip!

I of course, being the newly converted and baptized pacifist I am, like to take all this fire sitting down and grinning sheepishly, and wait to vent out my rejoinders on platforms like this – where the chance for actual collar-grabbing and bloodshed, hallmarks of contemporary African pseudo-elitist disputation, are much minimized.

One of the first illogicisms that strike me about the self-appointed defenders and guardians of Africa’s endangered cultural memes is how inconsistent their words are with their actual lives.

The majority of Africans are people who are ninety percent of the time employing a mass-produced amenity to ease their life, often imported from some industrial center in Europe or Asia.

For a typical illustration, take the case of your average Ugandan urbanite; who is awoken daily by a Chinese-made alarm clock or phone, having slept on Pakistani-made bedspreads, drinks morning tea from a Thai-made cup, wears Chinese-made socks and briefs to work, to which he travels by boarding a Japanese-made taxi-van.

In only four hours, this culture-defending African has supported at least three economies that aren’t his own and will go on to widen that bracket as his day progresses – yet he has the nerve to say his sister or his daughter should be sold for a fee to any potential suitor in the name of preserving African culture.

To be plain, such arguments are the stuff that engenders acute encephalitis!

In a related episode, a colleague had the effrontery to once say to my face,

‘‘But I am a Muganda man! This is what my ancestors have done for ages, I can’t go against my people’s ways …’’

(For clarity’s sake, the Ganda people are an ethnic sub-group within Uganda).

This brings me to my second and perhaps last response (for now) to the matter;

If you cannot divorce yourself from your identity as a Muganda, or African for that matter, then why do you no longer walk around half-naked with only a flimsy skin about your loins as your antecedents once did?

Why do you not use drums and foot-messengers to communicate but have imported telephones (cancer aggravations and all) en masse into your once pure civilizations?

There are of course great pockets of Africa where people have no telephones and wear no clothes, the poor sections, but my point is that few ‘‘de-tribalised’’ African citizens aspire to that sort of allegedly pristine, agrarian existence? Why not?

Culture can’t be a customized cafeteria where one takes their pick!

You can’t say, let’s uphold skin-and-hide wearing, and abandon black magic.

You can’t say - in with bride price (women slavery), and out with child sacrifice.

If culture must be upheld, it must be wholesomely done so, and not cherry-picked like a conflated basket of 'goods' and 'bads'.

Child sacrifice, genital mutilation, early and forced marriages are, by the way, all aspects of many ethnic cultural heirlooms that most ‘modernized’ Africans talk about in hushed whispers, or not at all - why?

Because they are ashamed of acknowledging that their all knowing, glorious ancestors were also savage, ignorant and to a great part primitive in their interpretations of the world.

This is of course universally true of pre-technological societies world-over, including European and Asiatic ones.

In short, the African was not alone in his historical backwardness and primitivism; he had the rest of the world primitive beside him.

But when you have a modern-day African descendant, a young schooled professional in his twenties, proudly talking about defending his ancestors’ legacy through buying and selling women, otherwise called bride-price, while his Swedish and Singaporean counterparts are discussing micro-biology and advances in poetic expressionism, then there is cause to worry!

In the 1500s, the world, including Africa, was primitive.

In the 2000s, the world, excluding Africa, is progressive.

Down with bride price, I say! Up with human dignity for our women!