Women, not men, choose spouses on island
by Rukmini Callimachi
ORANGO ISLAND, Guinea-Bissau – He was 14 when the girl entered his grass-covered hut and placed a plate of steaming fish in front of him. Like all men on this African isle, Carvadju Jose Nananghe knew exactly what it meant. Refusing was not an option. His heart pounding, he lifted the aromatic dish, prepared with an ancient recipe, to his lips, agreeing in one bite to marry the girl.
“I had no feelings for her,” said Nananghe, now 65. “Then when I ate this meal, it was like lightning. I wanted only her.”
In this archipelago of 50 islands off the western rim of Africa, it’s women, not men, who choose. They make their proposals public by offering their grooms-to-be a dish of distinctively prepared fish, marinated in red palm oil. Once they have asked, men are powerless to say no.
To have refused, explained Nananghe, remembering the day half a century ago, would have dishonored his family : and in any case, why would he want to choose his own wife?
“Love comes first into the heart of the woman,” he explained. “Once it’s in the woman, only then can it jump into the man.”
But the treacherous tides and narrow channels that have long kept outsiders out of these remote islands are no longer holding back the modern world. The young men of Orango, 40 miles off the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, are finding jobs carrying luggage for tourist hotels on the archipelago’s more developed islands. Others collect oil from the island’s abundant palm trees and sell it on the mainland.
They return with a new form of courtship, one which their elders find deeply unsettling.
“Now the world is upside down,” complained 90-year-old Cesar Okrane, his eyes obscured by a cloud of cataracts. “Men are running after women, instead of waiting for them to come to them.” …
Read the whole story here. It’s a bit superficial, but is a good reminder that social customs are malleable, for better or worse.
Via Tracy McGaugh
