How dowry fosters marital rape

It was African pre-colonial law, sometimes derisively but wrongly termed “African customary law” in Eurocentric lexicon, for the groom’s family to offer a “gift” of money, property, or other tangible asset to the bride’s family as a prerequisite to marriage.

 Known as dowry or lobola in southern Africa, the law, or custom, if you must, has survived in most modern-day African post-colonial states. It’s a practice that’s been demonised and vilified on the one hand, and cherished on the other.

It’s loved or loathed in equal measure. It’s not the preserve of the “primitive”, for the “cosmopolitan” heartily and joyfully indulge in it. It’s unarguable that lobola complicates gender relations and may lead to the vice of marital rape.

In the West, and its dominant literature on Africa – in law, anthropology, sociology, or fiction – the Black African female is depicted as forever horizontally prone, prostrating, or supplicating to the male.

The Black African female, or girl-child, is universally viewed as a victim of the savage, demonic Black African male. The image of the Black African male as a savage brute, often stupid and violent, is the grist of the mill of Western popular culture. In the West, where I live, a White woman often nervously grabs her purse and scoots away whenever I enter an elevator. In contrast, she will often smile and genially acknowledge, or flirt, with a White male stranger in the elevator.

Lacking in intelligence

But I digress. My point is that African pre-colonial practices and laws are viewed by hegemonic Western scholarship as barbaric at worst, or with patronising admiration at best.

The default position when looking at Africa is to assume the worst, and then look for any redeeming qualities or characteristics. We are viewed throughout the world as subhuman or lacking in intelligence and the ability to think or produce ideas.

We are seen as dupes who often rush to consume the ideas of “superior” Western or European cultures. This was brought home to me in sharp relief when, in 1974, an elderly white American asked me in the State of Illinois – where I partially attended high school – why my name was Robert.

The white man had inquired, quite legitimately I later thought, whether all African names were “finished” for me to take the name Robert. That’s why, among other reasons, I “killed” Robert.

Dowry falls into this tortured space. It was equally vilified as a practice of “buying” or “selling” the bride to the male. It’s argued that it turned the woman into chattel, or commercial property, akin to the enslavement of a human. The theory of the case is that “chattelisation” of the female essentially sub-humanises her and turns her into a “thing” or personal property belonging to the male. Is dowry a practice of subordination? How did Black African cultures think of it then, and now?

We know that culture is the total accumulation of a people’s wisdom or stupidities. A people can’t exist without a culture. We also know there shouldn’t be a hierarchy of cultures, with some cultures deemed superior to others. That’s akin to saying some races, or groups, are superior to others and should dominate, enslave, or colonise the inferior ones.

But what we can’t deny is that some cultural practices are odious to those who practise them or to those outside the culture. However, we can also agree that no race or group has a monopoly on either “good” or “bad” culture. So, it’s always risky and inadvisable for one culture to point an accusing finger at another.

But dowry raises serious questions. Why, for example, were Black African males the only ones allowed to offer dowry? In India, the reverse is often true. The argument often is that dowry wasn’t “bride price” per se, but an act of “uniting” the two families.

Drunken husbands

It wasn’t compensation for the loss of the female’s services to the maiden family. That somehow it was acknowledgment that the female was valuable as a human.

This is the rub – the bride, once married, would leave her maiden home and live with the groom and his family. She was no longer a member of her biological family. In contrast, the male kept his familial identity. This is problematic and discriminatory.

It’s indisputable whatever the merits of dowry were in pre-colonial societies, the logic of the cultural practice has been irredeemably corrupted. Today, parents and relatives demand “payment” for the bride and set actual money prices. Many husbands claim “ownership” of their wives. That’s partly why marital rape has become endemic.

I would argue that perhaps over 90 per cent of husbands and men have raped their wives or girlfriends. Drunken husbands often stagger home late at night and rape their sleeping partners.

Their argument is that marriage, especially through dowry, secured continuing uninterrupted one-time consent to sex on the day of marriage. To them, consent isn’t needed before every post-marriage subsequent sex act.

  @makaumutua.