The African I Never Knew

Martins K. Badu
Eng 112
9/4/2017

The African I Never Knew

        Living in New York City, i have come across and learned a lot about many ethnic groups and cultures from all over the world. Since my heritage is West African, i always get people who talk to me about, or ask me questions about other cultures in Africa, assuming that i know about it. They normally think that Africa is just one big country with the same culture all across. Even though i had studied some of the beautiful cultures of the people of North, East and Central Africa, i didn't know much about them until i made friends with an East African, from the Luo tribe of Kenya. He enlightened me about some of the similarities and differences between my West African culture and his East African culture. There were differences in the food, language, dressing and the marriage patterns. 

        One big thing that really stood out was the marriage. I attended his traditional marriage ceremony. The whole event is called 'Ayie', which means "I agree". In this case, the family of the man approaches the woman's family, and gets her mother to agree to release her daughter to the man's family for marriage. This really amazed me, because it was the opposite of the traditional marriage in West Africa where the woman's father is the one that agrees to  release her to the man's family for marriage. My curiosity led me to research and read more about the Kenyan Luo tribe's traditional marriage. Doing this, i discovered that, it is polygamous, meaning that the man can have multiple wives. Also that, when the man dies, the widow is supposed to have intercourse with, or marry a relative of the husband. This, 'cleanses' her to prevent a curse. According to Weinreb, "among the Luo, a man's funeral rites are incomplete until his widow has been "inherited"...this traditional practice requires her to remarry or at least be "cleansed" through sexual contact with a member of the deceased [husband's] clan...if she refuses, she is confined to her home and prevented from planting crops on her husband's farm , or even to visit her neighbor's home, because people fear she will bring a curse to the clan". They did this to keep the woman in the family, to prevent her from taking the husband's assets out of the family. In a nutshell, it was for economic measures.

        In conclusion, i learned that there are a lot of differences within a culture, because different ethnicities have their own unique practices that make the whole culture beautiful, and when all these cultures live together in the Big Apple, that makes it the greatest city on the planet.

Work Cited

Weinreb, Alex."Traditional marriages among the Luo in Kenya including polygamy, consent of       parties involved, and treatment of women in the community", refworld.    http://www.refworld.org/docid/3df4be520.html, 20 April 2001, web. 4 Sep. 2017.