MzAgams

Brief History of Marriage In Nigeria 

Some people firmly believe that marriage was ordained by their God and should never under any circumstances be dissolved. Like most social institutions the truth is much more prosaic. In this post I’m going to give you a brief history of marriage in Nigeria. Marriage as we know it today is an import from western aka European culture. The first recorded evidence of a marriage ceremony uniting a woman and a man dates back to 2350 B.C. Mesopotamia. Since then marriage ceremonies have been recorded from all over the world. We don’t know exactly why or how marriage emerged but we do know that from the very beginning marriage had little to do with love or with religion like it does today. 

According to some marriage emerged when early humans transitioned from hunter gatherer to ownership and contemporary modes of production. One theory is that marriage emerged in response to lands rights and the desire to hold them within a tribal or lineage group making it desirable to establish clear lines of succession. The commodification of human beings e.g. through slavery, also created ownership rights in offspring similar to rights in chattel. Some writers link the evolution of the institution of marriage with private property rights and capitalist mode of production.  As social stratification increased it also became a means of protecting bloodlines. 

According to Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” (Penguin Books, 2006) “It was a way of getting in-laws, of making alliances and expanding the family labor force.” Love was not a criteria for marriage till more recently. But as family plots of land gave way to market economies and Kings ceded power to democracies, the notion of marriage transformed.

“What marriage had in common was that it really was not about the relationship between the man and the woman,” Coontz wrote. Marriage’s primary purpose was to procreate and ensure a clear inheritance and social position. The Anglo-Saxons saw marriage as a strategic tool to establish diplomatic and trade ties. According to Coontz,  people “established peaceful relationships, trading relationships, mutual obligations with others by marrying them.” Christin Mann said as much about the Lagos elite in her essay Marriage Choices among the Educated African Elite in Lagos Colony, 1880-1915. According to her Lagos merchants often married as a means to secure their credit to inland distributors.  Her findings are in sharp contrast to John S. Mbiti more idealistic and aspirational description of marriage in west Africa. 

“The institution of marriage was probably the most important means of cementing social relations between clans, preserving tradition and culture, and codifying social customs.”George B. N. Ayittey, Indigenous African Institutions (Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Transnational, 1991).

While in the west, bloodlines were important, in Igbo Nigeria sometimes a man or a family sought an infusion of new genetic material into the family bloodline because it was recognised that talents, behaviour etc were genetic. Among the Igbo of south east Nigeria, whether a child was the biological offspring of a man was less important than who had the right to claim the child by reason of having paid the bride wealth for the mother. Bride wealth was distributed among the woman’s paternal and maternal relatives as compensation for the loss of her productive and reproductive service. Bride wealth entitled a man to a woman’s productive and reproductive labour and gave him property rights to her children, which could be pledged for a debt, sold into slavery or even given in bonded labour for a limited time.

In Igbo Nigeria a woman never became a man’s property, he could not transfer property rights to her on for instance. Which is why in the old days a woman had to be returned to her kinsmen for burial. Her husband and his kinsmen were held accountable for her welfare and sometimes had to endure a trial by ordeal to prove that they did not kill her. Women were married to produce legitimate offspring. If a woman failed to produce offspring a man could marry another wife. However, a woman whose husband failed to make her pregnant was also entitled to seek another husband or a covert or overt lover to give her fruit of the womb

Before colonisation, marriage among the tribes of Nigeria was a civil institution not a spiritual union.  In pre-colonial, pre-Christianity Nigeria up to twenty different forms of marriages were known to exist. Marriage was a contract between two families, just like it was in much of the rest of world including Europe before Christianity. The feelings or opinions of the bride or groom did not always count in the decision to marry.  In Igbo-Nigeria where I come from parents could be particularly overbearing and often still are to this day. 

Around 5AD the Catholic Church started taking an interest in the marriage ceremony. Christians began to celebrate marriages at Christian gatherings conducted by ordained ministers. By the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church formally defined marriage as a sacrament, sanctioned by God and the Sacrament of Matrimony as a union between God, the man and the woman. The notion of marriage as a sacrament can be traced to St. Paul who compared the relationship of a husband and wife to that of Christ and his church. As a Sacrament Marriage is considered part of the Church’s liturgy. A sacramental marriage takes place between two baptised individuals. According to the Catholic Church, Jesus taught that marriage is indissoluble: “Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Matthew 19:6).

It was during the 16th century Reformation in Europe that Protestant theologians started to define marriage as a life-long and monogamous covenant between a man and a woman. Then in 1533 Henry VIII  decided to divorce Catherine of Aragon and broke England’s ties with the Catholic Church when the Pope refused his petition. This led to the creation of the Church of England, now the Anglican Community. Henry VIII went on to marry and divorce five more times. 

Different branches of the Protestant church view marriage differently;

• The Lutheran Reformation held marriage to be a Social Estate 
• The Reformed and Methodist branches held that marriage was Covenant
• The Anglican Tradition defined marriage as a Commonwealth and 
• The Enlightenment Tradition defined marriage as a Contract

Other religions recognise the rite of marriage in various ways. In Islam marriage is  considered a religious duty, a moral safeguard and a social commitment. It is also seen as a simple secular contract between a man and a woman in which each party provides services to the other. In Hinduism marriage is  considered a sacred ritual that joins two individuals together for eternity. Meanwhile, in Buddhism marriage is a choice and there are no formal teachings or requirements. 

The first Christian missionaries to come to the region of southern Nigeria prior to British colonial rule were the Catholic. In 1515 they established a mission and school in Benin City but the slave trade inhibited its growth much. Islam was already an established religion north of the Niger and Benue rivers. Islam arrived in Nigeria in the 11th and 12th centuries. However, Islam, like the animist religions of the southern tribes, allowed polygamy, unlike Christianity that preached one man and one wife. 

The first mission of the Church of England was formally established in 1842 in Badagry Lagos by the Reverend Henry Townsend. The first modern Catholic mission was established Lagos in 1865. Christian missions set up schools. The main goal of Christian schools was to convert people to Christianity. By 1899 in Nigeria, there were 8,154 primary schools, 136 secondary schools, and 97 normal schools. Missionaries viewed Western marriage customs as central to Christianity. According to Kristin Mann (1985), polygyny was as offensive to early missionaries as human sacrifice and slavery and monogamy was a condition of baptism. Frederick Pilkington (1957) called it ‘an evil custom’ along with infanticide and human sacrifice. Monogamy became an important characteristic of new Christian converts. However, converts who married in church did not always stick to monogamy and some went on to marry again under native law.  

Lagos was the first part of modern Nigeria to be made a British colony in 1862 and the first Marriage Ordinance came into existence in 1863. According to Mann, the creation of the colony  encouraged repatriated slaves from Sierra Leone and the Brazil to settle and saw them take up missionary work.  According to her, they introduced Christian marriage into Lagos and by extension Yorubaland. These returnees formed the nucleus of the Lagos elite in the mid and late 19th century. Their strong Christian morals saw them marry in church. Under the 1863 ordinance Church marriages were recognized as a legal alternative to court marriages. (Ime N. George*, David E. Ukpong, Eme E. Imah 2014) This created the so called Ordinance marriage, predecessor of todays statutory marriage, as a new marriage category and one which had the full weight of the law behind it.

In 1884 a new marriage ordnance was enacted for Lagos and the Gold Coast with the support of the church and replaced the 1863 version. The Ordinance provided penalties for anyone flouting the monogamy rules. These Ordinances did not apply to the Protectorate of Nigeria so outside Lagos it was possible to contract either a customary-law marriage or a Christian marriage in accordance with the rites of the church. In 1900  the Marriage Proclamation for the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was made. When the Lagos Colony and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria were merged in 1906, the Marriage Proclamation was repealed and the 1884 Ordinance applied to the whole region. Then in 1907 a Marriage Proclamation was made for the Northern Protectorate. The Marriage Ordinance 1914 stream lined the marriage laws when the two protectorates were merged. 

The Marriage Act 1914 is substantially similar to the 1884 Ordinance and based on the same principles of monogamy as the English law of marriage. The new statute made the celebration of marriage a purely civil function, leaving the parties to observe any religious ceremony they chose. Whereas a Christian and a  ordinance marriage used to be one and the same thing, a new category of marriage known as Christian marriage, was now created. There were now four categories of marriage in Nigeria; a customary marriage, a Christian marriage, an Islamic marriage (although it is treated as a customary marriage) and an Ordinance marriage, what today we call a statutory marriage. A marriage that is performed under the act is a statutory marriage, what used to be ordinance marriages in colonial Nigeria. With minor amendments, this statute continues to regulate the celebration of civil marriages in Nigeria. It is an English marriage as defined by Lord Penzance English law in Hyde V. Hyde (1860);

“the voluntary union for life between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”.

In Lagos at the time there was a very clear distinction between a Christian wife and a traditional wife. A wife married under native law and custom had very distinct rights that included economic autonomy. Christian wives on the other hand were seen as dependent and were expected to be. Whether the wife was going to be an economic contributor or a consumer was a factor in choice of marriage. At the time couverture was also a common law principles and meant a wife legally lost her identity upon marriage to her husband, as well as anything she owned. It wasn’t until 1882 that the Married Women’s Property Act (a English stature of general application) allowed Christian wives in the colony to own and control property in their own right, dispose of property through a will or conveyance, and recognised the separate legal identities of husband and wife.

Christian and ordinance marriages (often considered one and the same thing) disempowered women economically. 

“After customary marriage, husbands and wives had clear-cut economic rights and duties to one another. Husbands provided wives with a place to live, gave them a small amount of capital with which to begin trading, and contributed to the support of their children. Wives, on the other hand, cooked and performed domestic labor for their husbands, but also traded or engaged in some other economic activity outside the home to help maintain themselves and their children. They had their own incomes, which were often larger than their husbands’ earnings. Economically, both spouses retained considerable independence and exercised exclusive control over their own affair.” (Mann Kristin 1985)

‘Women among the educated elite strove to marry in church and conform to foreign marital norms, in part because Christianity, European education, and colonial legal and economic changes had altered their opportunities. When they embraced Christian marriage, elite women sacrificed the autonomy and economic independence of illiterate Yoruba women for the privileges associated with membership in the elite.’ Kristin Mann

The 1884 marriage Ordinace was as an attempt to legally secure monogamy but it did not work as expected. Despite the penalties polygamy was widely practised and justified even by the early native missionaries. African clergy were known to split from the European church and allowed polygamists to participate in church, what European churches refused to do.  Christian wives endured polygamy especially when they were themselves unable to have children. Kristin Mann cites at least five elite families where the Christian wife raised the children of her husband from different ‘native wives.’ What the Ordiance did do was secure for the Christian wife and her children with inheritance rights that they would not have otherwise had under native law and custom. While women have almost never filed a case of bigamy against a living spouse, and bigamy can be hard to establish, many fileds claim for their inheritance rights under statutory English law. Sometimes even if they have not lived with the deceased husband for decades. Sweet revenge for the first wife but potentially a problem for the second or third wife if she was married under customary law. How do you prevent being literally removed from your home of many years by vengeful first wives? This problem is probably unique to Nigeria. What’s interesting is that more than 100 years later this situation remains the same.  Statutory wives or Christian wives endure polygamy in whatever form without bringing action in bigamy against their spouse and sue to the court to protect their inheritance rights and exclude customary wives and sometimes offspring when the spouse dies. You can read my post on bigamy here. Bigamy in Nigeria is a dead law. 

Rather progressively, Nigerian law has made it impossible to exclude a biological child of the deceased from inheritance, changing millennia of customary practices that have served the various tribes of Nigeria in the matter of inheritance. There will be interesting court cases on the matter. Let us be watchful. There is a major shift in attitudes. There is a growing sense of personal responsibility. So if you born outside, as we say, you must be made to pay. Previously, a child was the primary responsibility of the mother, men want access to that child, they have to pay for the privilege. Now they are being forced to take responsibility by the law.

Today, statutory marriages is still practiced mostly by the educated elite. Some Christian churches are licensed to perform statutory marriages and are required to ensure that the statutory requirements – primarily publication at the registry office to enable objections, presumably if either party was previously married. The fact that marriage registries, like our criminal records, are not centralised, so it would technically be possible to marry at a registry in Abuja and in Port Harcourt without a record of either marriage been available. Significantly there is yet another category of marriage, the native Christian marriage, which is supposedly a marriage that takes place in church but without fulfilling the publication requirements and licensing under the marriage act. Courts have described the as a church blessing of a customary marriage. The first native Christian marriage took place in 1895 (Kristin Mann 1985)

The biggest disservice of the Marriage Act is this distinction between statutory marriage and chieftain marriage. It has left literally millions that married in Church thinking they were marrying under the Act only to find out, usually when filing a petition under the Matrimonial Causes Act, that the requirements for a statutory marriage were not met. I was one of those people. I remember wondering how come only pretended to sign the marriage register in the church for the pictures after the ceremony. In 1984 I did not know that the church  wedding was different from the statutory marriage. 

In Nigeria today more people are however marrying under the Marriage Act. There are many reasons for having a statutory marriage. One important reason is acceptable  documentation. Institutions all over the world require stringent proof of marriage. Federal registries became popular because it was easier verify and accept their credibility. Your native law marriage does not come with a credible certificate issued by a known authority. And your church certificate might look pretty and be completely useless as a legal document. Those that are travelling abroad and want to go with their spouse have to provide documentation that they are married. I see a growing number of divorces being filed when the trip doesn’t happen and discontent sets in. 

A statutory marriage is the most practical form of marriage. Practical – no fuss and they are legally married. It gives a couple a legal status as a couple even if the requirements of a customary law or religious marriage are not fully met. It is especially useful when either or both spouses are professionals because it ensures access to all sorts of privileges and entitlements, like family health insurance, tax breaks and such. 

A statutory marriage isn’t something one should jump into just because of documentation though.  A statutory marriage is much harder to dissolve than a customary marriage, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the circumstances. It is however easier to dissolve than a religious marriage which requires the intervention and ruling by the Church.  

Some people think that a statutory marriage is not valid in the absence of a traditional marriage ceremony – whether native or Christian. This is not true and you are legally wed and documented as such and to change that legal documentation will cost you some time and money. But what does that Yahoo Boy care? He will marry as many times as he can get away with. Once in America, once in Germany, once in Taiwan, one in Lagos and at least once in Abuja. He is not worrying about how these different legal ties could affect his heirs 20 or 30 years down the line. He may be right not to worry. There may be no record except for those who actually keep it. 

In 1970 the Matrimonial Causes Act enacted to govern dissolution of marriage and custody in Nigeria after decades applying common law principles taken from English law. The Matrimonial Causes Rules were made in 1983 setting out the procedure for instituting actions for the dissolution of marriage, custody, settlement and maintenance. Received English law (consisting of common law, doctrine of equity, and statutes of general application which were in force on 1 January 1900) still apply in Nigeria and matrimonial decisions of courts in England are persuasive authority in Nigeria.

This is where we are today in Nigeria on marriage. 

So what type of marriage do you have? Christian? Statutory? Islamic? Or Customary? What type do you think you have? What type do you want to have? Book a consultation with me here to learn more. 

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References  

1. How Christian Denominations Are Distributed Across Nigeria https://nationalwire.com.ng/christian-denominations-distributed-across-nigeria/#.YvV1Xy1Q3_R
   1. September 24 1842 date was however adopted, being the date of the first official open air service held in Nigeria under the memorial Agia tree in Badagry, flagging off the official entrance of the religion in the geographical area now referred to as Nigeria.
   2. While the Anglican and Methodist churches maintained their holds in the south west, the Roman Catholic church has remained strong in the eastern part of the country where an average family in the south east can be said to have been greatly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church
2. CMS Archives http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/church_missionary_society_archive_general/editorial%20introduction%20by%20rosemary%20keen.aspx 
   1. In 1857 following a successful private expedition up the Niger, Samuel Crowther was commissioned to establish an African mission to evangelise Africans.
   2. For Crowther both academic and practical education were of the greatest value in evangelism. He centred the mission stations on schools, and at the same time emphasised the need for missionaries and converts to exercise direct Christian influence on the laws and customs of the people.
3. What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule by Max Siollun Hurst Publishing 
   1. ‘If any British can claim to have spread “civilisation” in Nigeria’, writes Siollun, ‘it is the missionaries, not the colonial government.’
4. Legislative History of the Gold Coast and Lagos Marriage Ordinance: III by Shirley Zabel, Journal of African Law Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 10-36 (27 pages)
5. The Development of Statutory Marriage Law in Twentieth Century British Colonial Africa, Author(s): H. F. Morris, Source: Journal of African Law , Spring, 1979, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 37-64 Published by: School of Oriental and African Studies, Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/745340
6. ConFlICtual InsertIon oF marrIage ordInanCes In brItIsh ColonIal aFrICa: the ghanaIan experIenCe – Esubonteng-2018-Religion,_Law_and_Security_in_Africa.pdf https://www.readcube.com/articles/10.18820%2F9781928314431%2F21 
7. Interaction of Customs and Colonial Heritage, Their Impact on Marriage and Children in Nigeria by Nwudego N. Chinwuba, ANTHROPOS 111.2016: 49–68 https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0257-9774-2016-1-49.pdf?download_full_pdf=1
8. Historical background https://onlinenigeria.com/marriages-in-nigeria/ 
9. Formality of Statutory Marriage in Nigeria: Need for a Policy-Driven Construction of the Marriage Act  by professor Emeka Chianu* Faculty of Law, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria (E-mail: chia- nu_emeka@yahoo.com). 
10. Marriage Instability Among the Kanuri of Northern Nigeria by Ronald Cohen, McGill University, American Anthropologist – December 1961 – COHEN – Marriage Instability among the Kanuri of Northern Nigeria1.pdf
11. INDIGENOUS MARRIAGE INSTITUTIONS AND DIVORCE IN NIGERIA: THE CASE OF ABIA STATE OF NIGERIA by Ezinna E Enwereji, Abia State l University, College of Medicine, Uturu, Abia State, Nigeria, Eur J Gen Med 2008;5(3):165-169 
12. Cultural Diversity of Marriage Sustainability in Nigeria: Strengths and Challenges by Ime N. George*, David E. Ukpong, Eme E. Imah, Department of Educational Foundations, Guidance and Counselling,Faculty of Education, University of Uyo, Uyo,P.M.B. 1017, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria *Corresponding Author: nsisong99@yahoo.com Sociology and Anthropology 2(1): 7-14, 2014 
13. Mann, Kristin. Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. Cambridge University Press, 1985. via Cambridge U Press:
14. Marriage Choices among the Educated African Elite in Lagos Colony, 1880-1915 Author(s): Kristin Mann – Source: The International Journal of African Historical Studies , 1981, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1981), pp. 201-228  Published by: Boston University African Studies Center Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/218043 
15. History of Marriage: 13 Surprising Facts By Tia Ghose published June 26, 2013 https://www.livescience.com/37777-history-of-marriage.html 
16. Aspects of Marriage in West Africa https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/aspects-marriage