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. Building upon the author's previous work, Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, this title's findings are intended to produce for policy-makers a picture of the forces producing changes in family relationships and the instability of marriage to which legislators, civil or religious, could refer when deciding what practices to treat as permissible and what to forbid. For this reason it has laid more emphasis than is usual in works of theoretical anthropology on specific aspects of African marriage where it has been assumed that the divergence was most marked.
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.
The explosion of the church in Nigeria is phenomenal, with a forward momentum that is as remarkable as the missionary optimism of the first century Church. The history reveals a tightly woven narrative of the process of beginnings, growth, and change.
In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the appropriation of marriage by a rural Namibian elite as a case study, the book tells the entwined stories of class formation and marriage decline in post-apartheid Namibia.
Africa has witnessed massive changes in the last fifty years – from independence through structural adjustment, rule by military juntas in several countries and to a period now where the focus is on how best to prioritize their needs based on resources, national goals and human potential. There is general agreement that human capital is important in economic growth and development. There is always the need to ensure that resources and human capital are used appropriately to advance development. Gender disparities, whether in treatment, access to resources, resource utilization and the law, may in themselves retard or slow down development. Resources and human potential in all societies include how best to ensure there is no gender disparity and to fully tap the resources inherent in women for personal, social and national development. Beginning with the women’s suffrage movement, there has been the push to encourage gender equality worldwide. The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 embodies the commitment of the international community to implement policies that will enhance the political, social, economic, educational empowerment of women. This book highlights the issues affecting women in Eastern and Southern Africa – what role does custom and patriarchy play in gender disparities in education, access to health, problems in the workplace and family relationships? How have women writers in the last twenty years presented the issues of patriarchy, women’s rights, globalism and women’s holistic development? What are recent developments that have helped improve the situation for some women? These are some of the issues that are covered in this book. The thesis of this book is that there have been policies and strategies developed that have worked to empower women. However, vestiges of sexism, gender disparities in several fields still remain and traditions/customs and patriarchy have aided in still keeping women down.div“/div>
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf
