FEMALE HUSBANDS: Why Women Were Once Allowed To Marry Other Women In Africa?

Africa has been studied by scholars all over the world intrigued by the many cultural and traditional practices that have several meanings and significant impact on people. While some practices have gone extinct due to exposure to westernisation, others have been stopped for the dangers they pose to victims while many others have prevailed.

One of the least spoken about cultural practices that dominated Africa remains the woman to woman marriage that functioned as a normal marriage rite in parts of the Dahomey Kingdom, Eastern Nigeria and parts of Southern Africa.

Africa has been studied by scholars all over the world intrigued by the many cultural and traditional practices that have several meanings and significant impact on people.

While some practices have gone extinct due to exposure to westernisation, others have been stopped for the dangers they pose to victims while many others have prevailed.

The marriage, like any other ceremony, involved both families, dowry payment and a special rite performed after which one woman played the role of a wife and the other a husband. The couple lives together and could even have children.

In a polygamous community, a woman could marry more than one wife if she could afford to. Women marriages were well celebrated and

respected and they were treated as normal like the male and female union.

However, it took a woman with a certain level of social status and authority to be able to marry a woman and take up the role of a husband.

The various societies that practised woman to woman marriage had the same systems that made a woman eligible to marry a woman as her wife.

Usually, a woman could marry a widow with kids to help support her family and children who would then bear the name of their female husband.

Women husbands usually had male partners who they had s3x with. It was not convenient that she got pregnant but in cases where she did, she had the right to either abort or keep the child who her wife would raise after birth.

The acceptance of female marriages in Africa in the 17th and 18th century shows some form of social structure advancement that Africa could boast of as compared to Western society.

However, such portions of history have been omitted in telling the African history and especially the advancement of women in the social structure of Africa.