Love and Marriage - Traditions

Who says love and marriage iare related?

Getting a wife in some of the remote areas of Lesotho continues to follow traditional cultural patterns, good or otherwise.

Tradition 1: The proper, honorable way, to acquire a wife involves:

• the boy informs his parents of the girl he wishes to wed.
• his parents visit her parents to present the son's interests
• the girl and her parents take time to discuss the suitor's proposal
• if the girl and her parents accept the proposal, a further meeting between the families, not including the couple, is arranged and a bride price agreed to - some number of cows usually
• once the bride price is agreed to, wedding plans are made and carried out
• after the wedding there are then some interesting cultural expectations such as the girl moves to her husband's family home or village. The bride's mother is not allowed to visit for a year, nor may the new bride visit in her mother's home during this time

Tradition 2: Then there is a less honorable tradition. It is sometimes reverted to if the honorable approach is not successful or if one fears they might be rejected using the honorable approach. The steps in the less honorable tradition:

• the boy and his accomplices observe the movements of the girl who holds his interest or of a random girl who happens by
• if an opportunity presents where she is alone or otherwise vulnerable, the boy and his friends 'drag' her off to a hiding place where she is kept until after dark
• after his parents are in bed, the boy and his buddies take the girl to the boy's home where he knocks and calls out to his parents, "I have brought home a visitor," code words for "I have got me a wife"
• the next morning the boy's family sends a messenger to the girl's family telling them not to worry about their daughter, she is with them as the wife of their son

The girl's parents may or may not protest, but it is apparently the exception that they will demand the return of their daughter. A bride price may still be negotiated, but the girl's parents would be in a weaker bargaining position. (The extreme in this approach is when the boy rapes the girl and thereby claiming her as his wife, though dragging her home and making her his wife seems not a whole lot different.)

These practices though not common in the city continue to occur in the rural areas of Lesotho. One of Wendy's students, when home for Christmas, was so raped. She returned to school but when she learned she was pregnant, she accepted the 'marriage'. Then a friend of ours, found herself in a predicament because of such a marriage.

Our friend works and has two small children. She had a girl that lived with her and helped with the childcare when she was at work - a live in baby sitter. The girl went home one weekend to visit her mother. It was to a remote village, and the girl had told how it was a long and lonely walk from where she would get off the taxi to where her mother lived.

Sunday the sitter did not return. Monday her mother called. Her daughter, she advised our friend, was married ... tradition 2. The predicament for our friend: no sitter, no notice, and no sympathy from her employer.

Traditions.

~ Benno ~

(As yet no one has come for or arranged to pick up the sitter's things. Thank fully, through a number of unrelated circumstances our friend was able to secure another sitter; another story for another time maybe.)