Introduction: Forum on Contemporary Mande Marriage Trends

This special Forum on Contemporary Mande Marriage Trends groups together a set of papers that were originally given as conference talks on a panel of similar title I chaired at the 59^th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Washington DC in December of 2016. As noted by Lynn Thomas and Jennifer Cole in the Introduction to their widely-cited edited volume, Love in Africa, the dearth of scholarly investigation of marriage and family life is such an iconic feature of African Studies that Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan scholar, mentioned it in his searing 2005 popular online essay critiquing the marketing of Africa and African issues, entitled “How to Write About Africa.” Thomas and Cole’s 2009 book made good progress toward filling that odd lacuna, but drew its content from studies mostly conducted in Southern and Eastern Africa, with just two locations representing West Africa: Nigeria and Niger. There is much more work to do. Emily Burrill’s 2015 study, States of Marriage, is the first to focus entirely on Mali, with a number of references specifically to Mande cultures in her historical enquiry which is drawn upon by several of our authors here in their analyses of Mande marriage today.

These are studies of contemporary patterns, issues, and trends in thinking about and engaging in marital relationships in Mande cultures, both within West Africa – Mali and Sierra Leone in particular – and across borders and oceans in the form of transnational unions in migrant communities in France. In my four decades of experience within the West African context, Mande cultures maintain one of the strongest grips on cultural traditions despite centuries of acculturating forces at play in dynamic tension with core Mande values. These forces began with the widespread adoption of Islam and its reduction of the number of women one man could marry, followed by colonization and the imposition of French legal structures designed to regulate legitimate forms of contracting and of ending marriages, then the exposure to the norms of other places and societies through the music and films of the colonial period. Malian peoples, even today, boundlessly consume steamy telenovelas from Mexico, Brazil, and India that are broadcast on the same national channel as the richly-costumed and much-beloved local productions of Mande epic stories such as that of Da Monzon Diarra, king of the Segu Empire in the early 1800s (Sidibé 2010).

Which practices from the revered past are maintained and which are abandoned and replaced varies from lineage to lineage, village to city, and depends also on levels of education, economic standing, and still today, caste status. The tripartite caste system that stratifies Mande societies may be changing in some respects (see Hoffman 2017; Skinner 2015) but the stigma associated with sexual relations and marriage across caste lines continues to affect decisions about who can marry whom more often than not. Along similar lines, the classic Mande preference for marriage between cross-cousins (children of a brother and sister or their equivalents), endures as an active principle attended to by members of many lineages when seeking candidates for a first marriage.

The issues to be considered for a first marriage preoccupy each of the authors in this Forum. For the migrants in the foyers of Paris, as revealed in Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye and Stefan Le Court’s “Living Away From Family is Not Good but Living with it is Worse: Debating Conjugality across Generations of West African Migrants in France,” the most important factors – ethnicity, caste, religion – are further complicated by the need for “regularization” through obtaining legal status as an immigrant to France. While this can be done rather expeditiously by marrying a woman born in France, there are other considerations like knowledge of and attachment to the home culture that weigh just as heavily in the decision-making process.

Bruce Whitehouse, in “The Trouble with Monogamy: Companionate Marriage and Gendered Suspicions in Bamako, Mali” explores what a number of us have perceived as the surprising endurance of contractual or de jure polygamy at a time when fewer and fewer men can afford more than one...