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February is now the month of love, because a
celebration based vicariously on the life of fairly minor saint that I
remember in my youth as being of almost minimal significance, has over
the decades gained such popularity and commercial value that it has
become a major urban event. Chocolate, red roses and giant declarations
of love are now de rigueur every February 14 and if you don’t deliver,
the consequences can be dire.

Love, romance and kissing, especially
mouth-to-mouth kisses, who on earth invented that act? I recall being
told by a graduate scholar at the university I was about to enter eons
ago, that kissing was not “African”.

I did not ask the provenance of his research, but
I cannot say I was totally surprised. If he had added that the concept
of romance itself was not African I would have believed him. There is
still something so enduringly prosaic about courting Naija style, so
cut and dried, practical and so unerringly objective that it cannot but
be rooted in culture and history.

So bless me if Google did not come to the rescue
with the answers I was seeking by furnishing my search with a paper by
Ezinna E Enwereji titled, Indigenous Marriage Institutions and Divorce
in Nigeria: The case of Abia State.

There was no “ro” not to talk of “mance” in the
revelations provided by Enwereji’s study that he did at the Abia State
University, College of Medicine in Uturu. The material for the research
was obtained from interviews with 12 ‘key informants’ from 8 randomly
selected small towns and villages.

This was Mr. Mr.Enwereji’s introduction to his paper:

“In Igbo tradition, men who have large acres of
farmland are encouraged to engage in multiple marriages so as to have
women who would work in the farms. Women who are lazy to do farm work
or not so fertile as to have large number of children who would also
work in the farm were divorced. This means that hard work and high
fertility were the basis for successful marriages.”

Enwereji also listed what he found to be the
common causes of divorce and these included: infidelity,
infertility/barrenness, impotence, probing a husband’s sexual life,
inability to reproduce male children and/or large number of children,
laziness in taking on assigned gender roles including farming, cooking
late and/or inability to cook delicious food, disrespect to husband and
his kinsmen.

In his findings Enwereji stated that these were
still “the common causes of divorce today” and asserts: “In this study,
the level of socio-cultural norms spouses observe and respect measures
the stability of their marriage relationships. That is the philosophy
of successful marriage in Abia State is a reflection of the efficient
performance of the woman’s subservient roles in her marriage.”

This is not to say that the traditions of Western
marriage were any less prosaic. The creation of wealth here, the
transfer and accumulation of property there, with the female being the
vehicle in both cases – distinctions with few differences. The concept
of Western Romance was a kind of invention of literary and cultural
traditions that made it sweeter, lacing the hard dry reality with some
honey and accounting for the human emotions that feed into the mix.

And that is what it must be here, the human needs
and emotions and the intervening influences from other cultures that
are now the major feature of the world we live in. After all, if I am
nothing but a tool for you, what else can you possibly be for me?

Not that one is knocking the importance of roles
and the adherence to fulfilling these obligations and living up to
society’s expectations that are based on these values. Marriage is one
of the fulcrums on which society organises itself, it is the wool that
knits the family, and the binding ties it creates live on even when the
original marriage is dissolved. Roles and obligations are after all,
part of the glue that holds us together, which keeps us centered and
informs our identity.

But it is heartening that the same importance
attached to fulfilling roles is now apparently being transferred to the
observance of Valentine. Woe betide the man who “forgets” to spread the
love to all the requisite components.

But there is the dark side to all this male
tyranny that Enwereji cautions against. “There are other indigenous
beliefs and practices in Abia State designed to humiliate and exploit
women that require modification. For instance, the practice of
divorcing a woman for reason of infertility or inability to reproduce
male issues should be discouraged … Also the denial of the custody of
underage children in the guise of preventing them from being exposed to
their mother’s deviant behaviours could place them at risk … “

Frankly the practice of marriage and divorce laws in Nigeria is a
tightrope walk for women: little to gain and everything to lose if it
fails to work. So while we are happily practicing Valentine in the
city, we should spare some thought for spreading the love in the
direction of making the institution more equitable for the half of the
world that keeps it going.