Intangible heritage of love in Africa
Madam, Africans have interesting sayings about love that reveal how the people of the continent may value and practice love. In Mozambique there is a saying, ‘if you do not travel, you will marry your own sister’, in Tunisia, it is said that ‘if the full moon loves you, why worry about the stars’?, while South Africans are fond of saying ‘love, like rain, does not choose the grass on which it falls’.
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher holds a different view. She focuses on the biochemical process of love, which she says has three distinct phases; lust, attraction and attachment. For Fisher, society has created a social and cultural context for the interpretation of biochemistry, but in Africa, a cultural heritage, and cultural legacy of love persists.
In Africa, the requirement to pay bride price (lobola) can determine one’s access to love. Bride price is the payment of dues from a prospective husband’s family to the bride’s family. The negotiations can be costly, involving multiple levels of the exchange of livestock or money. But lobola can be extremely expensive for families trying to emerge from poverty. A man who does not have the means to pay it may be unable to marry the person he loves.
In Nosy Be, northern Madagascar, access to love is partly managed by women. Single women can wear their hair in the ‘braids of love’ and thereby signal public intent that she is seeking a long-term relationship and, ultimately, marriage. By wearing these braids, women can reject men who only seek a temporary liaison. On Sakatia Island (also in northern Madagascar), prior to the wedding, a woman will have her hair braided by female in-laws. This is a public indication of the inlaws’ commitment to bonding with the daughter-in-law through marriage.
RITUAL OF ATTRACTION, REJECTION
In Zanzibar, women use scent and philosophy as part of the ritual of attraction and rejection. They can perfume their kanga fabric to entice potential lovers or they can reject them by wearing a kanga with a negative proverb.
Troubled lovers in Africa can rely on family or a beautiful heritage of prose. A troubled couple can rely on wise uncles and aunts to counsel them. Those abandoning all hope of reciprocal affections or who are looking for a different form of love and who live along the coast can focus on love from nature and not humans. The latter prompted me to compose an anthology on human love of nature and a visual ethnography of human love of the sea. Women and men from a range of cultures express a deep, visceral love for the ocean and coast through surfing, swimming and icy morning dips. In summation, love in a globalised and nature-preserving Africa doesn’t always require having a readily available human being to reciprocate one’s feelings.
And then there is also online love in Africa and everywhere else. TikTok shows how a single person has to bravely navigate date zeros (one-hour encounters during which to assess long-term compatibility), breadcrumbing, situationships, penny dating and delusionships.
Confusing matters further is that Africans also have the cultural heritage of expensive lobola negotiations and cultural stereotypes regarding who one can marry. So, which is preferable, what to do? Life is changing for many and not changing at all for others who are told who to marry.
There are deep oppressions associated with the culture of love for many people but there are also many positive and poetic cultural inheritances of love on the continent. I think we should celebrate and build on affirming and creative forms of love in Africa. It is a rich heritage, worth celebrating and preserving.
Rosabelle B