Fluidity and hybridity of customary marriage traditions in contemporary Uganda

Abstract

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.