This past weekend, my postmate Tess and I attended our first wedding in Cameroon together. The wedding was for our friend Amadou, a teacher at the local high school, who we work with on a girl’s scholarship program. The ceremony was actually a three day affair: the first day was a party celebrating the end of the bride’s youth (a PC-version of a bachelorette party, I gather?), the second day was the traditional muslim ceremony, and the third day was the civil ceremony and a big soirée with dinner and dancing. We attended day three, in all its glory.
The civil ceremony was set to begin at 10:00am, so, Cameroonian wedding novices that we are, we arrived at 9:45. This was obviously an error. We were among five or so guests in attendance. For an hour and a half, we watched the wedding planner decorate the space with bouquets of fake flowers and fabric-covered archways. We also watched a man alternate between cleaning chairs and dancing intensely by himself in the middle of the room. We also had our photo taken with some random dude sitting next to us, who proceeded to write “A day I will remember forever and cherish and think about every day!” on the envelope holding the photo. We do not know his name, nor does he know ours, but I’m glad he’ll always cherish the memory of sitting near us at the wedding.
At 11:30, the couple and wedding party arrived (the couple looked lovely! The bridesmaids dresses were just as hideous as you’d expect in the States!), but then we all continued to wait until 12:15, when the mayor finally arrived to conduct the ceremony. Many words were said and laws were discussed, but one aspect intrigued me most: in Cameroon, marriages can be monogamous or polygamous (men can have up to four wives, according to the Qur’an), but they are set as such at the beginning of a marriage during the civil ceremony. Tess and I were both rather surprised, after hearing Amadou and Fatima’s quite beautiful love story, that he chose a polygamous marriage. Later, we chatted with Amadou’s co-worker about this and she explained that culturally, Muslims in Cameroon almost always choose polygamous marriages, even if they never take a second (or third, or fourth) wife, and that it would have been more shocking if he had chosen a monogamous marriage. This clarified things a bit, but we remain intrigued and now plan on asking every married person we know here what their feelings are on the subject.
That evening, now savvy, we arrived an hour and a half late to dinner (at 9:30pm). The couple, however, arrived three hours late, so once again, we waited. Dinner took place at midnight, and as our table was the last to be called, only sad, cold green veggie mush remained to be eaten. At this, Tess declared herself over Cameroonian weddings forever, and we escaped into the night.
It was an interesting cultural experience to attend the wedding, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to do so. Given that, I can’t really wrap my mind around just how sexist marriage laws are in this country. Excerpts from the Mayor’s speech include the words “The man is of course the Chief of the Household, since every household needs a Chief”, and “The wife must remain faithful in her marriage, and the husband must try to remain faithful, and if he cannot, he he should take the other women as his wives.” None of this was news to me– work here has shown me that women are seriously disadvantaged in all aspects of society– but just to hear these words spoken aloud and then agreed to made it all a bit more real, I suppose. I’m going to continue pondering this, and what it means for my work here (particularly in the sector of Girl’s Empowerment), and will write back as profound thoughts (or more likely, not-so-profound-thoughts), come my way.
Colleen in Cameroon 