ORANGO ISLAND, Guinea-Bissau, Feb. 1, 2007
Where Women Propose And Men Can't Say No
An African Isle Where Matriarchal Tradition Still Holds Sway
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Photo
A young couple holds hands on the island of Orango, off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
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Like all men on this African isle, Carvadju Jose Nananghe knew exactly what it meant. Refusing was not an option. His heart pounding, he lifted the steaming fish to his lips, agreeing in one bite to marry the girl.
“I had no feelings for her,” said Nananghe, now 65. “Then when I ate this meal, it was like lightning. I wanted only her.”
In this archipelago of 50 islands of pale blue water off the western rim of Africa, it's women, not men, who choose. They make their proposals public by offering their grooms-to-be a dish of distinctively prepared fish, marinated in red palm oil. It's the equivalent of a man bending on one knee and offering a woman a diamond ring, except that in one of the world's matriarchal cultures, it's women that do the asking, and once they have, men are powerless to say no.
To have refused, explained the old man remembering the day half a century ago, would have dishonored his family — and in any case, why would he want to choose his own wife?
“Love comes first into the heart of the woman,” explained Nananghe. “Once it's in the woman, only then can it jump into the man.”
But the treacherous tides and narrow channels that have long kept outsiders out of these remote islands are no longer holding back the modern world. Young men are increasingly leaving Orango, located 38 miles off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, a country in West Africa. They find jobs carrying luggage for tourist hotels on the archipelago's more developed islands; others collect oil from the island's abundant palm trees and sell it on the African mainland.
They return bringing with them a new form of courtship, one which their elders find deeply unsettling.
“Now the world is upside down,” complained 90-year-old Cesar Okrane, his eyes obscured by a cloud of cataracts. “Men are running after women, instead of waiting for them to come to them.”
Standing in the shade of a grass roof, he holds himself upright with the help of a tall spear and explains that when he was young he took extra care to maintain his physique, learned to dance and practiced writing poetry — all ways in which men can try to attract women, without overtly making the first move.
In recent years, young men have become increasingly bold, going so far as to openly propose marriage — a dangerous turn, say traditionalists.
“The choice of a woman is much more stable,” explains Okrane. “Rarely were there divorces before. Now, with men choosing, divorce has become common.”
With records not readily available, it's unclear how many divorces there were earlier, but islanders agree that there are significantly more now than in the years when men waited patiently for a proposal on a plate. They waited some more, as their brides-to-be then set out for the eggshell-white beaches encircling the island, looking for the raw materials with which to build their new house.
Women built all the grass-covered huts here, dragging driftwood back from the ocean to use as poles, cutting blankets of blond grass to weave into roofs and shaping the pink mud underfoot into bricks. Only once the house is built, a process that takes at least four months, can the couple move in and their marriage be considered official.
There are matrilineal cultures in numerous pockets of the world, including in other parts of Africa, as well as in China's Yunnan province and in northeastern Thailand, says anthropologist Christine Henry, a researcher at France's elite National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS. But the unquestioned authority given to women in matters of the heart on this island is unique — “I don't know of it happening anywhere else,” says Henry, who has written a book on the customs of the archipelago.
That things are changing is evident in the material chosen for the island's newest house: concrete. It was erected by paid laborers, not local women.
Although priestesses still control the island's relationship with the spirit world, their clout is waning, as churches sown by missionaries have taken root.
“When I get married it will be in a church, wearing a white dress and a veil,” says 19-year-old Marisa de Pina, who strikes a modern pose under the blond grass of her family's hut, wearing tight Capri pants and sequined sandals.
She says the Protestant church she attends has taught her that it is men, not women, that should make the first move, and so she plans to wait for a man to approach her. To make her point, the teenager pops into her hut and returns holding a worn copy of the New Testament, its pages stuffed with post-it notes, letters and business cards.
It's a decision that has caused strife inside the mud walls of her family's house.
Like her niece, Edelia Noro wears store-bought clothes instead of the grass skirts still favored by some older women. She, too, attends church. But she says she doesn't see why these trappings of modern life should alter the system of courtship.
More than two decades ago, she set off for the closest beach looking for the ingredients with which to propose to the man she loved.
Noro waited for the tide to recede, then dug in the wet sand for clams, collecting them in a woven basket. She was embarrassed, she said, that she was too poor to afford a proper meal of fish and could only offer her groom-to-be what she could gather with her own hands. So after preparing the dish, she placed it in front of him, then ran and hid behind a tree, peeking out to see his reaction.
“He did not hesitate and ate right away. I could see the love shining in his eyes,” she said, a glow spreading across her cheeks.
Although the island's unique customs may be fading, there are still pockets of resistance. Often, it's women that lure men back into the fold of ancient ways.
Now 23, Laurindo Carvalho first spotted the girl when he was 13. He worked in a tourist hotel, wore jeans, and owned a cell phone and thought of himself as modern and so he thought he could turn tradition on its head, asking the girl to marry him. With the wave of a hand, she rejected him.
Six years passed and one day, when both were 19, he heard a knock at his door. Outside, his love stood holding out a plate of freshly caught fish, a coy smile on her face.
Carvalho still wears sandblasted jeans and flip-flops bearing the Adidas logo, but he now sees himself as embedded in the village's matriarchal fiber.
“I learned the hard way that here, a man never approaches a woman,” he says.
© MMVII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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There is nowhere in the Bible that says that women need to wait for men to decide, it saddens me some missionaries see it necessary to dispel local customs that do little harm and promote a patriarchal society that has more to do with the Roman empire than with Judeochristian core beliefs.
Does the man get the fish made for him every day afterwards to!!!
haha
"There should be a law against proselytizing missionaries - they have corrupted and destroyed more civilizations than can be counted." - Posted by oleander8
I couldn't agree more. It's very sad to see these traditions and customs, which have been followed for eons and harm no one, demonized and eventually lost forever because some foreign belief system preaches that they're "wrong". Leave these people alone and let them express their traditions and culture as they have been for centuries.
Posted by Reel-Crazy at 08:21 AM : Feb 02, 2007
Never mind, I'll stick to our "old" ways then!!!
You should be submitting scripts to Hollywood.
They follow behind evil invaders and help to destroy indigenous cultures and displace then with their INFERIOR religious rubbish of biblical bull/koranic krap!
Thank the stars that the moronic missionaries' evil days of ignorance and destructiveness are numbered.
Nero may not be here to burn their backsides and feed them to lions; but there are better ways to cleanse the planet of these mind-wasting and culture-destroying fundamentalist fools for good. LOL
For it is the females that are primarily endowed by Mother Nature with those 'attracting ingredients' needed to titillate the relatively 'weaker' among males, disrupt their inner state of self-control, and thus commence the mating game.
By the way: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord."-Ephesians 5:22, Christian New Testament.
Also: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it."-Ephesians 5:25
This entire chapter of the Bible speaks of mutual obligations.
About the article: is this news?
Posted by jdweymouth at 10:16 AM : Feb 02, 2007"
LOL
Of course you "say this with christian charity"; you duplicitous devil!
You deceptive and devilish christians are wishing that someone will 'come back' and save your delusional arses.
For when the masses become more awake to the devilishness and destructiveness of the terrorizing and sodomizing christians and their moronic missionaries over the centuries, those aggrieved people will FINISH THE JOB THE EVIL EMPEROR, NERO, STARTED -- your duplicitous christian behinds will be burned and fed to the beasts of the fields.
And Mother Earth will be cleansed, at last.
And by the way, you will have the company of the maniac muslims along with their EQUALLY insane islam! LOL
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by oleander8
February 2, 2007 3:30 PM EST
- "...This entire chapter of the Bible speaks of mutual obligations...
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Reply to this comment
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See all 19 CommentsPosted by jdweymouth at 10:16 AM : Feb 02, 2007"
For the majority of the people in the world the bible is just a book - when you quote from it you restrict yourself to speaking only to fellow believers. Would you take seriously someone who spoke from the Koran if it differed from the bible? Probably not. It too is just a book.