For weeks, Daddy Lumba’s marriage has become a smorgasbord of different marriage theories, and a case study of how cynical public commentary can make a good marriage ugly, and a great wife look pretty evil and greedy. A deep look into long-distance marriage, emotional connection, and the complexity of secondary family life.
Social media has served us a cocktail of lessons on how not to marry, while religious purists continue to feed our curiosity with what a clever blogger described as ‘cacophonous whataboutery’, that is, responding to queries with counterquestions.
I am before i do
In the process, we have been educated about when a marriage ceases to hold, and whether a piece of legal document is potent enough to contest our customs and traditions.
For Ghanaians living abroad, Lumba’s marriage(s) is a careful reminder that it matters where a person chooses to erect the building blocks of love, because it will be tested–not by love, but by time, and sometimes the law.
The enduring lesson has been: Before you say I do, say I am, and know thyself.
You are either married or you are not. There is no such thing as being a little bit married, nearly married, or married while at one location and not quite married in another.
As cumbersome as marriage already is, it becomes oddly cumbersome when a sane person suffers the indignity of pretending to be married to immigrate to another country.
This indignity extends to those who are properly married–both legally and customarily- when foreign embassies treat every African marriage with suspicion.
The unwritten rule is: This marriage is a sham until you prove us wrong. And often, the shams look more convincing than the real.
While abroad, it would take more convincing to prove to a review officer at the embassy that the spouse you intend to sponsor was legally married to you.
Often, a marriage certificate is not enough; you are required to explain how you became lovers, remittance history and evidence of communication.
The embassy also requires loads of pictures and a description of the reasons behind the photos. You must also remember the dates they were taken.
These are only supporting documents to the mountain of mandatory forms you are expected to complete.
Secondary families
That is only the beginning of a process that could take years to complete.
While waiting, genuine marriages may become sham, not because the motives were fraudulent, but because the parties may be driven by the long wait to pursue other interests against the marriage covenant.
A wife’s fidelity may be teased and tested repeatedly while waiting for a husband who may be married or cohabiting with another woman, and raising three children as a secondary family. The primary family is his wife and kids in Africa, who are known to his community.
When the secondary family comes from a different nationality or race, the men often see them as human expressions of their immigration papers, rather than their blood relations.
These men may have paid upwards for their infidelity by enjoying the pleasures of another woman, but they also pay the infidelity price downwards by maintaining wives back home who also return the favour by cheating.
Often, these unfaithful men get their comeuppance when they are made to raise other people’s children.
They may have visited home once or twice in five years, where they convinced themselves that their wives’ ovulation cycles conveniently coincided with their visits.
The kids often become DNA shams to complement the clever sham of their parents’ union.
These kids are victims of the fraud.
To cure this shame, many families and religious leaders in Ghana discourage long-distance marriages, and in many recent cases, have refused to bless unions where one partner lives abroad. Even when a partner is a citizen or has genuine residence in a foreign country, some concerned parents have defied the power of the dollar or the pound sterling and insisted on a clear plan of immigration sponsorship before they consent to a marriage.
That plan, however, is at the mercy of a computer device on the desk of an immigration officer. It is a long and protracted process.
Opposite ambitions
The sham is not quite cured when the spousal sponsorship is approved, paving the way for a spouse to join the partner abroad.
In rare cases, wives have deserted their husbands at the airports to join their boyfriends in waiting taxis, for ‘airport stowaways’. The marriage may not have been consummated.
Divorce follows.
Marriages among Africans abroad have made headlines for some interesting and controversial reasons, with West Africans topping the charts for sham marriages.
The courts in many Western countries hear huge volumes of divorce cases daily involving immigrants of African origin.
The Chinese and Indians hardly throng the courts for divorce.
The chief factors for marriage troubles among Ghanaians abroad are money, greed, bad associations, and ‘opposite ambitions’, where each partner pursues development in their home region independent of one another.
While HighLife music lovers await the results of the legal wranglings from Daddy Lumba’s marriage matters, it is not clear which of these factors are feeding the feud between factions loyal to the two phenomenal women associated with the talented musician.
Lumba’s marriage is not unique; it is redemptive.
The superstar’s celebration of both women in his songs, is a defence for the collective angst of women whose sacrifices in marriages have been undervalued or misrepresented.
For the African man abroad, Lumba only filled in a well-known template of how to live in two countries and build love in two places. That is everyman’s Golgotha.
Tissues Of The Issues
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