When the bride has no price

We were seated somewhere in Nyamiyaga, watching the evening slowly settle over the hills, with my best Nyamiyaga friend.

She defends bride price with a kind of conviction and grace. “Bright,” she says, “you men have completely misunderstood bride price.” She has my attention.

Because I had gone into the conversation prepared to make the usual argument: that women cannot be bought, that young men are being financially squeezed, that some families have turned a cultural ceremony into an auction and that the whole thing needs to change.

But my friend is not defending the auction. She is defending the meaning. Her view is spectacularly intriguing. Perhaps we have been arguing about the wrong thing. Perhaps the question is not whether bride price should exist.

The question is what bride price was supposed to mean and what we have turned it into. Somewhere between the cow, the goat, the envelope of money and the modern wedding fundraising committee, something beautiful may have been lost.

To begin with, a woman has no price. She never did. The very phrase “bride price” is problematic. It makes marriage sound like a marketplace in which one family buys a woman from another.

But that was never the full cultural idea. What many of our ancestors understood was not the purchase of a woman, but an exchange between families. A young man was not merely saying, “Give me your daughter.”

The objects mattered because they represented something. A cow was wealth. A goat was wealth. Food was hospitality. Clothing was honour. The visit itself was recognition. The elders were witnesses.

The negotiations were not simply haggling over the value of a woman; they were bringing two families into a relationship and there goes the folklores.

Today, we fall in love on WhatsApp, spend six months sending heart emojis, propose in Dubai, organise a wedding through Google Sheets and still discover that before he becomes a proper son-in-law, he must sit before a group of uncles who have never heard of Wi-Fi.

And perhaps there is something useful in that. Modern marriage has become intensely individualistic.

We are told: “It is your marriage. Do what makes you happy.”

But marriage has never been only about happiness. It is also about responsibility. But once a marriage tradition becomes a financial transaction in which families begin calculating the economic value of the people involved, something has gone terribly wrong.

The danger is not tradition. The danger is commodification. And perhaps this is where the different generations need to sit down together. The young people are right to ask questions.

The elders are right to defend culture. But neither side should assume it owns the whole truth. That, to me, is how culture survives. Not by freezing it. By allowing it to breathe. Let the cow remain if the culture requires the cow.

Let the goat remain. Let the aunties sing. Let the uncles negotiate. Let the bride’s family receive gifts. Let the groom arrive with his entourage looking unnecessarily important.

Let us preserve the laughter, the ceremony, the elders, the clan, the food, the storytelling and the beautiful awkwardness of bringing two families together. But let us leave one thing behind.

The idea that the woman has a price. She does not. She is not a cow. She is not a cheque. She is somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, and eventually, somebody’s wife and perhaps somebody’s mother.

And the man is not an ATM either. Marriage should not begin with one family trying to extract the maximum value from another. It should begin with two people saying, with the support of their families. We are going to build something together.

Perhaps that is the bridewealth we really need in modern Uganda. Not wealth paid for the bride. But wealth invested in the marriage.

If a tradition cannot help a young couple survive the first five years of marriage, raise their children, build a home, withstand economic hardship and still like each other after the wedding photographs have faded, then perhaps we should have the courage to ask whether we are preserving culture or preserving the ceremony.

And that is a conversation worth having. Preferably under a mango tree with my Nyamiyaga best friend. Because these things are easier to discuss when nobody has yet brought out the bride price list for me.

The author is a concerned citizen.

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