Fluidity and hybridity of customary marriage traditions in contemporary Uganda
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Date
2023-03Author
Alexander, Paul Isiko
Joy, Mukisa Isabirye
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The ideology that customary marriages are celebrated according to ancestral
traditions and customs is rife in Africa. There is however continuous invention
and evolution of institutions associated with customary marriage rendering it
burdensome to trace the visibility of ancient ‘traditions’ therein. This
argument is anchored in the theoretical perspective of ‘invention of tradition’,
to analyse the extent to which the celebration of customary marriages in
Uganda has maintained the ancestral ‘traditional’ status quo owing to the
influences of colonisation, westernisation globalisation and modernisation.
Busoga, a predominantly Bantu ethnic society, is used as a representative case
for this analysis. Using a historical and ethnographic approach, it was
established that there is a lot of fluidity and hybridity of contemporary
traditions upon which these marriages are celebrated. The notion that
customary marriages are celebrated based on past traditions is a fallacy,
although at best, efforts have been invested to dramatise past traditions in
contemporary settings.