Interrogating Gender and Religion through Seniority, Language and Liminality in Kasena Marriage Rituals (Northern Ghana)

Since the arrival of European missionaries in Africa, there has been a charged debate over people’s marriage choices. This paper outlines the major elements in the academic, African feminist, and popular discourses on marriage in Africa, focusing on two core issues: the conceptual divide between the marriage practices of the Kasena, a Ghanaian ethnic group, and the context-dependent social construction and production of gender in marriage through the marriage practices of the Kasena people of North-East Ghana.

Marriage among the Kasena people is predominantly viewed as a lifeline, as it ensures – or promises to ensure – the continuous existence of the people and the society. Therefore, in many ways, the sole purpose of procreation through marriage is the continuation of the lineage through children. Marriage is also perceived as the acceptable social institution for procreation.

Furthermore, marriage is considered in this society as important for tracing kinship ties through a male ancestor, which has implications for inheritance rights.

By comparing these functionalist assumptions of the purpose of marriage in the literature on marriage in African societies with ethnographic material from Navrongo, this paper demonstrates that marriage in Kasena society does more to individuals and the society than it has been seen to do in the functionalist explanations of marriage offered by earlier anthropologists researching on marriage in African society. In this paper, I strongly argue that the marriage practices of the Kasena people that I document in the paper contribute to a context-dependent social construction and production of gender in Kasena society. That is the point of entry of this paper to the academic literature on marriage and religion in African societies. What this paper brings new to earlier research on marriage in Africa by anthropologists is the African feminist conceptual understanding of the core gender issues in marriage practices discussed in the paper. The paper frames the marriage practices of the Kasena people in clear African feminist conceptual discourse and on relevant conceptual ritual themes that enable me to make the analyses of how the marriage practices documented in this paper contribute to the context-dependent social construction and production of gender in Kasena society. This interdisciplinary conceptual framework of the paper adds new knowledge to the functionalist view of marriage in African societies by earlier anthropologists.