Yahoo! News: Women, not men, choose spouses on island
ORANGO ISLAND, Guinea-Bissau – He was 14 when the girl entered his grass-covered hut and placed a plate of steaming fish in front of him. Like all men on this African isle, Carvadju Jose Nananghe knew exactly what it meant. Refusing was not an option. His heart pounding, he lifted the aromatic dish, prepared with an ancient recipe, to his lips, agreeing in one bite to marry the girl.
"I had no feelings for her," said Nananghe, now 65. "Then when I ate this meal, it was like lightning. I wanted only her."
In this archipelago of 50 islands off the western rim of Africa, it's women, not men, who choose. They make their proposals public by offering their grooms-to-be a dish of distinctively prepared fish, marinated in red palm oil. Once they have asked, men are powerless to say no.
To have refused, explained Nananghe, remembering the day half a century ago, would have dishonored his family — and in any case, why would he want to choose his own wife?
"Love comes first into the heart of the woman," he explained. "Once it's in the woman, only then can it jump into the man."
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"The choice of a woman is much more stable," explains Okrane. "Rarely were there divorces before. Now, with men choosing, divorce has become common."
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Women built all the grass-covered huts here, dragging driftwood back from the ocean to use as poles, cutting blond grass to weave into roofs and shaping the pink mud into bricks. Only once the house was built, a process that takes at least four months, could the couple move in and their marriage be considered official.
There are matrilineal cultures in numerous pockets of the world, including in other parts of Africa, as well as in China's Yunnan province and in northeastern Thailand, says anthropologist Christine Henry, a researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research.
But the unquestioned authority given to women in matters of the heart on Orango island is unique — "I don't know of it happening anywhere else," says Henry, who has written a book on the customs of the archipelago.
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"When I get married it will be in a church, wearing a white dress and a veil," says 19-year-old Marisa de Pina, striking a modern pose outside her family's hut wearing tight Capri pants and sequined sandals.
She says the Protestant church she attends has taught her that it is men, not women, who should make the first move and so she plans to wait for a man to approach her. To make her point, the teenager pops into her hut and returns holding a worn copy of the New Testament, its pages stuffed with post-it notes, letters and business cards.
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Although the island's unique customs may be fading, there are still pockets of resistance. Often, it's women who lure men back into the fold of ancient ways.
Now 23, Laurindo Carvalho first spotted the girl when he was 13. He worked in a tourist hotel, wore jeans, owned a cell phone and thought of himself as a modern man, so he thought he could turn tradition on its head and ask the girl to marry him. With the wave of a hand, she rejected him.
Six years passed and one day, when both were 19, he heard a knock at his door. Outside, his love stood holding out a plate of freshly caught fish, a coy smile on her face.
Carvalho still wears sandblasted jeans and flip-flops bearing the Adidas logo, but he now sees himself as embedded in the village's matriarchal fiber.
"I learned the hard way that here, a man never approaches a woman," he says.
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