Facebooker P’lalur was right to be shocked. “The high number of people getting married in Gulu is alarming. There’s a new wedding meeting launch every week. What’s happening? Are churches subsidising on costs, are parents giving their daughters on credit?” He wondered.
He said at least 10 weddings happen every week! And that was early November.
I have since been included in 15, yes 15 social media groups of Lutino Acholi who are looking for contribution for their traditional marriages set between December 2022 and February 2023.
Of these 15, not even one is my kinsman, and six of these are couples I even barely know in person.
But who is footing the bills for these marriages?
Whereas I know that culture is dynamic, the pace at which we, the Luo, are abandoning our cultural values during these marriages for alien cultures are alarming.
Who marries for you
While growing up, traditional Acholi marriage was the preserve of the man. It was a passage to manhood and boys of age with no sisters to afford bride price, would grow and sell cotton, tobacco, or join the army, or seek paid labour to save some money and marry. Or appeal to their immediate family members or one’s clansmen and occasionally one’s maternal uncles to supplement their efforts.
The decision to marry was not a chance decision! It was thus a great pride to work hard and marry a wife. No wonder marriage was largely a lifetime commitment!
But fast forward. Today, we think of marriage as an entitlement and demand anybody to marry for us, including our classmates, workmates, social media acquaintances, bosses, landlords and landladies, district local governments, politicians and even voters.
Who to invite
The mobilisation for our marriages now ranges from commonplace callouts as is by taxi touts who shout out endearments to potential customer, calling them boss, manager, landlord, uncle, etc.
These blanket invites extend to spiritual blackmails, including invocations and sweetly coined coercions such as God will bless you, you will be rewarded, etc. Even the in-laws from whom one is ostensibly marrying is also dragged into this same WhatsApp loop.
Even worse, the exercise has also become fraught with fraud, namely that in some cases, the marriages are called off, perhaps strategically, but the monies collected are never refunded.
Similarly, where the marriages actually take place, the families rigorously negotiate from evening to dawn. Afterall, the amount collected in the name of traditional marriage, is public knowledge and yet it is not always easily surrendered to the in-laws as demanded.
This tight-fistedness smacks of diversion or misappropriation. No wonder that those who had no bicycles, motorcycles, or cars soon acquire one. Those in rented properties soon become home owners and landlords.
Alien culture
But since when did the Luo or Acholi, in my case, adopt the ‘universal’ culture of parading arrays of infants, children, adolescents, girls at puberty, middle-aged women in sets of borrowed or hired assortment of attires – gomesi or mishanana – for the groom to search and identify his bride from among the crews as he pays transport money for every batch of them that come for the identification parade?
Because this culture of entitlement has run on unchecked, I know of people who have gone ahead to marry their second, third, and fourth wives on the back of hard-earned money from friends. Yet this is neither right nor fair, especially in these hard economic times.
But do we have a way forward on these issues?
Way forward
I would propose that if you must, beyond your family or clan, be helped to marry, first start with something and kindly reach out on a one-on-one basis to those whose help you need – this remains your right.
Conversely, create a platform for those who identify with your cause, to join by choice. Don’t go to the WhatsApp addresses and drag everybody and anybody into what is your traditional marriage.
No wonder there have been stories of non-blood-related chairpersons of such WhatsApp traditional marriages graduating to encroaching on spouses of one of the couples!
But one can also strategically combine the traditional marriage and Western white wedding.
I will contribute towards your white wedding since this Western culture has been widely adopted, for years. It is thus common for others to do traditional marriage and white wedding one day after the other, but just don’t call the traditional marriage a wedding.
However, should the two be mixed up and traditional marriage also termed a wedding, will the groom still come back to the same WhatsApp lot to fund their wedding since these traditional ‘weddings’ have become rehearsals for the white weddings?
Let’s have a rethink and leave what is Acholi as Acholi, or take up what has been adopted as such, but just don’t mix up the two.