Of the total number of first marriages for both men and women, fifty-four percent were between unrelated individuals. Three distinct categories of non-family marriage exist:- 1) the couple are not directly related but belong to the same clan and are therefore both Fulani, 2) they belong to different clans but are both Fulani, 3) one spouse is not Fulani.
Marriages within clan and ethnic group
Agnatic lineage groups are linked to form clans by putative agnatic relationships of their several male ancestors...the clan...is a unit of co
operation with regard to cattle and labour.
(Stenning 1959: 5)
Second and subsequent generations (of ‘made-in-Ghana’ Fulani) may not have the opportunity of going back home in order to marry. For many individuals, Ghana is home. In some instances however despite having been bom and brought up in Ghana, young women are sent to kinsmen in other countries to marry. The following case study represents a marriage between non-related Fulani in Accra.
Aminata Abubakar
Aminata is twenty-one years old. She is a daughter of the late Alhaji Barry. She grew up in her father’s compound in New Madina with her siblings (both full and half-paternal). In 1996 she married Ali, a graduate economist who works at the Ministry of Finance. I asked Aminata how she met her husband and she told me this story.
‘I went to visit my brother [actually her mother’s sister’s husband’s son] at school [University of Legon]. He [Ali] was my brother’s friend. When he (Ali) completed school he came to stay in Madina. I again came to visit my brother. He saw me and said that he was interested in me. He went to inform his father that he had met me. I told my mother and she said that as long as I love him [it is all right by her].’
On the 2 March 1996 a delegation of Ali’s father’s brother’s and neighbours came to her brother’s house (bearing Kola nuts and toffees) to inform Aminata’s family that Ali wanted to marry her. They were asked to bring 100,000 cedis on 16 March. On the day they came with the money, they set the wedding date for 3 December. They discussed cattle. They brought the cow in January to join her family’s herds in Fownde (Volta Region). The lefe (Hausa for the clothes, and other gifts, given to the bride by tire bridegroom before tire wedding ceremony) was also brought118 by his neighbours from Koforidua (he has no sisters or mother). On the day of the wedding Aminata was taken to Koforidua. There she spent three months in her husband’s father’s house. After three months she returned to Madina where she and her husband have rented a room.
Although Aminata and her husband freely ‘chose’ each other and ‘fell in love’, and were in no way pressured into marrying each other by their families, at the same time they succeeded in conforming to the wishes of their families in choosing suitable partners.
118 8 cloths, 4 d u k u s (Akan for headtie), 6 mayaf-t (veils), 2 pairs of sandals, 1 pair of slippers, 1 towel, 1 sponge, soap for bathing, soap for washing, perfumes, b o d y pomade, cosmetics, a bucket, a large round enamel bowl in which all the things were placed, l e l e (henna) and a bowl.
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Ethnically exogamous marriage
Of the eighty-one women married in the sample, six of them married non-Fulani.
One married a Chamba, one woman married a Ga man, one a Wangara, and three women married Zabarama men. Nine men had married non-Fulani women in their first marriages.119 All but the Akan, French and Ewe women were muslim. In other words less than 10 percent of the total number of first marriages of men and women were to non-Fulani and the majority of these were to other Muslims.
Abdullai Diallo, whose story follows, chose a wide range of different marriage partners:
Abdullai Diallo
Abdullai Diallo is fifty-one years old. He was bom in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He lives in Nima where he trades in salt, maize and timber between Ghana and Burkina Faso. He spent his childhood and most of his early adulthood in Burkina with his parents. At the age of forty-four, he left home to become a cattle trader in Nigeria and Ghana. He has no formal education and has studied the Koran a little.
Abdullai has been married four times. His first wife was a French woman from Lyon. He married her when he was twenty-two years old and she was about twenty. They divorced after two years. She did not convert to Islam and they divorced because: ‘The white woman didn’t want me to take a second wife.’ They had no children.
He married his second wife, Barkima when he was twenty-nine years old. She was thirteen.
Barkima was Abdullai’s mother’s brother’s daughter. After fifteen years of marriage, they divorced. They had two children, Fati, and Halimatou. Abdullai knew nothing about the marriage until after it was completed. ‘I don’t know...when it was arranged, I was in Abidjan.’
While still married to Barkima, and when he was over forty, Abdullai took a third wife, Safiatu.
Safiatu was a sixteen year old Wangara girl from Burkina. They were together for seven years
One wife from each of the following ethnic groups: Akan, Bassari, Berber, Ewe, French, Hausa, Konda, Tambura, Wangara.
and then she died in 1988. Safiatu and Abdullai had one child, Alhassan. ‘When I first saw her (Safiatu), she was in school. So I looked after her for three years before marrying her.’
In 1988 at the age of forty-two (while still married to Safiatu) Abdullai took a fourth wife, Fati.
They are still married and live together in Accra. Fati sells wagashi. She is a Fulani, a Bah.
They are not related. They have one child.
Abdullai5 s first wife was a non-Muslim and a non-Fulani. His second wife was his cross cousin (therefore Fulani and family). His third wife was muslim, non-Fulani and his fourth was Fulani, a non-relative. Marrying non-muslim women is rare and is frowned upon in the Fulani and muslim community at large, as the following case illustrates,
Ousmana Hama
Ousmana is forty-five years old. He was bom in Sira Khatoum, Niger, his clan name is Daranke.
He lives in Odumse, near Dodowa, with his wives and some of his children. He herds cattle and farms.
Ousmana grew up with his mother and father in Niger and was herding there until the age of eighteen when he left his natal home to travel to Ghana to visit his mother’s full brother, Alhaji Tal. He travelled from Sira to Ghana with his mother. He stayed with this uncle for six months before returning to Niger. He maintains that when he first came, he had no intention of staying, he had simply come on a visit. During those six months, he worked hard without rest, looking after his uncle’s cattle. There were five cattle kraals to be looked after.
On returning to Niger, after the six months in Ghana, Ousmana fanned and herded. However his uncle Tal (his mother’s brother) asked him to come back to Ghana, which he did the following year in about 1972. After his visit to Ghana, when he was around twenty years old, Ousmana got married in Sira. His mother and father arranged this marriage for him. He was not related to his wife. For a period of twenty years Ousmana divided liis time between his wife and children in Niger and his uncle’s cattle in Ghana. In 1993 Ousmana’s wife, Aishatu, and their children came to live with him in Ghana. Ousmana and Aishatu have nine children. None of the children has had a formal education in either the French or the English system. Only two of them have studied the Koran and even then only a little. They all live in a remote, rural location.
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Only four years after moving Aishatu, in March 1997, Ousmana took a second wife to the dismay and consternation of his family (Alhaji Tal’s wives and children). He had already had a baby daughter with a local young Ga-Dangbe woman, they got married and she moved into Ousmana’s compound in the bush. Her name had been changed from her Ga name to a muslim name, Hawa. She is about seventeen years old. Ousmana’s first wife Aishatu only speaks Fulfulde and Djerma (Zabarama). His new wife, Hawa, does not speak either of these languages!
Ousmana told me that his second wife converted to Islam when they married.
One of Ousmana’s nieces (his mother’s brother’s daughter) was so outraged by his behaviour that she vowed that if she had the money and space at her own home in Accra, she would take Aishatu and her children to live with her in order for her to escape the pain and humiliation of having a young Ga-Dangbe girl as a co-wife.
Fulani place much store upon physical beauty and perfection. Of the women whose stories were told, only one had married a non-Fulani, non-muslim man as her first and only husband. As the following case illustrates, it would appear that there is a definite reason why this woman did not find a Fulani husband and why
she had to look outside of the traditional ‘pool’ of husbands.
Infirmity and exogamy
Hadiza was bom in New Madina and has lived here all her life. She contracted polio as a child, which has left her with a permanent, and highly discernible, limp. She walks with the aid of crutches. In her mid-twenties she married a local Ga man. She works as a seamstress and has her own kiosk in New Madina. She is divorced and has one child and is currently unmarried and living with her father.
I would suggest it is by no means coincidental that the only woman to marry a local (non-muslim) Ghanaian as her first husband was physically infirm.
In discussing the preferred types of Wodaabe marriage, Stenning (1959:
42-46) noted that the tenth most preferred type of marriage is intra-clan. Intra clan120 marriages have been cross-tabulated for the first marriages of both the
It was not always easy ascertaining whether a name was actually a clan name
women and the men interviewed. The numbers are decidedly larger on the diagonal axis (intra-clan marriage) for both the men and the women. Therefore there would appear to be a higher statistical, as well as stated, preference, among those interviewed, for intra-clan marriage.
or not. Some, such as Moor and Zabarama are obviously the names of ethnic groups, however the individuals concerned felt themselves to be Fulani and therefore w o rthy of inclusion in the categories of intra-clan or intra-ethnic marriages despite their father being of a different ethnic group.
A beautiful bride