Marry Me in Africa

2012-09-17 Biography & Autobiography

Author : E. Kofi Agorsah
Release : 2012-09-17
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 772/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Marry Me in Africa by : E. Kofi Agorsah

Download or read book Marry Me in Africa written by E. Kofi Agorsah. This book was released on 2012-09-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marry Me in Africa is an invitation to discuss approaches and processes in African marriage ritual. As one crucial institution in African culture, marriage in its traditional African definition has helped many of the continents cultures maintain a sense of community and identity. This book invites especially students and researchers into exchanges on some African marriage traditions and their roles in African societies. It concerns those aspects that fascinate me and many other Africans that we believe will interest people in the New World, particularly the Caribbean. Researchers of the African Diaspora might want to use some of the marriage practices for reconstructing models for analysis and interpretation of the formation and transformation of the African heritage in the Diaspora. Marry Me in Africa is particularly useful for scholars not familiar with the different cultural practices among African societies, their sources of identity and diversity, and the implications of these for understanding African social systems. This book will be a useful companion for other scholars who know about some of the cultural practices but are unable to identify exactly their relationship to specific ethnic groups, traditional concepts, social, political, economic, technological, and other practices that have constituted the patterns of cultural behavior among African societies through marriage. Individual or local cultural traditions and practices are presented within the context of the general African cultural heritage, leading to cross-cultural comparison and generalizations. The convergence of traditional marriage patterns and continuities in specific aspects of traditional values and behavior of various societies are examined over the common-ground sense of community among Africans that may not be the same today as in the past. For this reason this book takes the liberty to discuss present manifestations of a transformed past in the present.

Married to Africa

2009-04-21 Biography & Autobiography

Author : G. Pascal Zachary
Release : 2009-04-21
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 620/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Married to Africa by : G. Pascal Zachary

Download or read book Married to Africa written by G. Pascal Zachary. This book was released on 2009-04-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: G. Pascal Zachary is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal when he finds love in, of all places, the zoo in Accra, Ghana. That is where he meets Chizo Okon, the surrogate mother for an orphaned chimpanzee. In Married to Africa, Zachary tells their warm and humorous story, which is as much about the marriage of two cultures as it is about the marriage of two people. Chizo introduces Zachary to an Africa usually overlooked by visitors. He learns about the spiritual fervor of ordinary Africans, the mysterious power of juju and the rewards of eating bushmeat and other African dishes. He learns how to haggle effectively, pick a reliable taxi driver, live on "Africa time" and adapt to being a white minority in a black society. Chizo, meanwhile, deftly adapts to living with her obruni, the local nickname for a white person. As their romance deepens, the couple learns how differently things can appear to them. While Zachary indulges a passion for traditional African art, Chizo worries about the possible evil spirits harbored in his wooden statues. When the two move to San Francisco, Chizo must learn to navigate a new world. The result is a different kind of immigrant story, powered by a series of wacky, wonderful and unforgettable tales -- such as Chizo taking a machete to Zachary's ex-wife's garden (not out of malice, of course), driving enthusiastically without a license, charming her hard-boiled Jewish mother-in-law and managing requests from poor relatives in Africa. The arrival of Chizo's teenage daughter marks the end of the beginning and the start of a new saga in this uniquely American love story. Married to Africa is a tender and charming account of a marriage and a fascinating look at how two people come to know each other across culture and race.

Is Marriage for White People?

2012-09-25 Social Science

Author : Ralph Richard Banks
Release : 2012-09-25
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 532/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Is Marriage for White People? by : Ralph Richard Banks

Download or read book Is Marriage for White People? written by Ralph Richard Banks. This book was released on 2012-09-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished Stanford law professor examines the steep decline in marriage rates among the African American middle class, and offers a paradoxical-nearly incendiary-solution. Black women are three times as likely as white women to never marry. That sobering statistic reflects a broader reality: African Americans are the most unmarried people in our nation, and contrary to public perception the racial gap in marriage is not confined to women or the poor. Black men, particularly the most successful and affluent, are less likely to marry than their white counterparts. College educated black women are twice as likely as their white peers never to marry. Is Marriage for White People? is the first book to illuminate the many facets of the African American marriage decline and its implications for American society. The book explains the social and economic forces that have undermined marriage for African Americans and that shape everyone's lives. It distills the best available research to trace the black marriage decline's far reaching consequences, including the disproportionate likelihood of abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, single parenthood, same sex relationships, polygamous relationships, and celibacy among black women. This book centers on the experiences not of men or of the poor but of those black women who have surged ahead, even as black men have fallen behind. Theirs is a story that has not been told. Empirical evidence documents its social significance, but its meaning emerges through stories drawn from the lives of women across the nation. Is Marriage for White People? frames the stark predicament that millions of black women now face: marry down or marry out. At the core of the inquiry is a paradox substantiated by evidence and experience alike: If more black women married white men, then more black men and women would marry each other. This book not only sits at the intersection of two large and well- established markets-race and marriage-it responds to yearnings that are widespread and deep in American society. The African American marriage decline is a secret in plain view about which people want to know more, intertwining as it does two of the most vexing issues in contemporary society. The fact that the most prominent family in our nation is now an African American couple only intensifies the interest, and the market. A book that entertains as it informs, Is Marriage for White People? will be the definitive guide to one of the most monumental social developments of the past half century.

Boy-Wives and Female Husbands

2021-04-01 Social Science

Author : Stephen O. Murray
Release : 2021-04-01
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 119/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Boy-Wives and Female Husbands by : Stephen O. Murray

Download or read book Boy-Wives and Female Husbands written by Stephen O. Murray. This book was released on 2021-04-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the many myths created about Africa, the claim that homosexuality and gender diversity are absent or incidental is one of the oldest and most enduring. Historians, anthropologists, and many contemporary Africans alike have denied or overlooked African same-sex patterns or claimed that such patterns were introduced by Europeans or Arabs. In fact, same-sex love and nonbinary genders were and are widespread in Africa. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands documents the presence of this diversity in some fifty societies in every region of the continent south of the Sahara. Essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines explore institutionalized marriages between women, same-sex relations between men and boys in colonial work settings, mixed gender roles in east and west Africa, and the emergence of LGBTQ activism in South Africa, which became the first nation in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Also included are oral histories, folklore, and translations of early ethnographic reports by German and French observers. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands was the first serious study of same-sex sexuality and gender diversity in Africa, and this edition includes a new foreword by Marc Epprecht that underscores the significance of the book for a new generation of African scholars, as well as reflections on the book's genesis by the late Stephen O. Murray. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Murray Hong Family Trust. Access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1714.

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