Marriage

Link to Childbearing

Thus, to thoroughly grasp the significance of marriage in African religion and life, one must fully understand the meaning of childbearing for African people. Many scholars have noted that the preservation and transmission of life may well be the highest African cultural value. Within the context of the African worldview, the birth of many children is consequently seen as an imperative and a blessing because those children will ensure the continuation and strengthening of the family lineage and the community at large. Also, the children will be responsible for ensuring that their parents receive proper burial rites and for performing commemorative rituals that, in turn, will maintain the deceased in a state of immortality through their continued connection with the world of the living.

Marriage creates the context within which children are conceived and born, hence its critical significance. Getting married and having children is a social, moral, and, ultimately, spiritual obligation and privilege. Likewise, one's refusal or failure to get married and have children is largely incomprehensible, and certainly quite reprehensible, as far as African religion is concerned. It signifies that one is rejecting God, whose original creative and continuous power manifests itself, among other things, through the uninterrupted birth of human beings; it is as well a rejection of humanity because the latter depends on human fertility for its perpetuation.

The Family's Role

Marriage, from the standpoint of African religion, is never simply an affair between a man and a woman, but an event that involves at least two families. African families are normally quite large because they include several subunits. In a matri-lineal context, for example, a family will include at the minimum a woman, her husband, their daughters, their daughters' husbands, and their children. In addition, there may be other relatives sent to live with them, servants and their children, who become an intricate part of the household.

Furthermore, families also include not only the living, but also the ancestors of the lineage, as well as the children yet to be born. Some scholars have rightly pointed out that marriage provides a unique and dramatic opportunity for all the members of a particular community to meet: the deceased, the living, and the unborn. All have a stake in marriage. In the case of an exogamous marriage system, that is, when the wife must come from another lineage or clan, marriage involves not only two families, but also two clans as well.

...