The marriage of Anansewa and the divorce of Rev. Dr. Counselor

I was the best man at a friend’s wedding twenty something years ago when we had just left university.
Walking his daughter down the aisle, the father was seen visibly weeping.
Curious eyes of wedding guests swept through the hall like orphan antennas.
We all wondered why he cried, as we wandered to the reception, where our father-in-law would reveal the story behind the tears. He had fears–fears about what manner of man was taking his only child from him; fears about what manner of marriage awaited the young lady. Fears of the known unknowns.

Ananse marriage template
As a custom at many marriage receptions in Ghana, guests shared lessons and offered the new couple pieces of advice on how to make their marriage work.
We all clapped loquaciously when the bespeckled professor, the bride’s uncle, told the story of Esi Sutherland’s ‘The marriage of Anansewa’.
Perhaps, good old Kwaku Ananse is the only person in human history who could tell the future of his daughter’s marriage from the beginning.
At his cunning best, Ananse promised four affluent chiefs marriage to his daughter, and benefitted from gifts and money.
As the marriage gets closer, Ananse tells all four suitors that his daughter was dead, to see which suitor would still be committed to spending on the funeral of a wife he never married.
Chief-Who-Is-Chief sends off his messengers with loads of gifts and takes full responsibility for the funeral, beating the other suitors who only sent condolences and small gifts.
Mr Ananse brings back his ‘dead’ daughter to life for the highest bidder, succeeding in finding the right man for his daughter and also gaining financially.
This should be the template for modern marriages.
We wouldn’t need marriage counselors if we adopted Ananse’s template.
However, marriage, even Ananse’s kind of marriage, can be unpredictable.
There is so much in the womb of time, including divorce, death and the irreconcilable differences that make you wonder why there was ever marriage in the first place.
So, when last week the internet exploded with verifiable gossip about the divorce between a popular marriage counsellor and her prophet husband, we were motivated to look back into time’s womb and ask our gullible selves: how did that also happen?

Worst woman to marry
For years, Rev. Dr. Counsellor Charlotte Oduro, taught us how to marry, inventing examples from her own marriage to admonish us to either stay and endure our fallible marriages, or walk away to keep our sanity.
She exposed us to the theory of being married while single, branding that experience as the most dangerous in the chain of red flags that married couples should spot and flee.
The celebrated counsellor bragged that she could not count the number of times she had packed out from her husband’s house, describing herself as “the worst woman ever when I married my husband”. In full counselling flight before her husband’s congregation, she explained herself: “I maltreated him; I looked down upon him; I disrespected him; I never acknowledged him as a man, because I did not understand why he should be my head; we could be heads together”.
The counsellor also told the congregation that she saw her husband as uncouth and unpolished, because of his low level of education, and would sometimes push him against the wall and kick him in the groin.
Meanwhile, we learnt from the husband that they had sex only twelve times in their sixteen years of marriage, but the counselor contests this, clarifying that she denied the husband sex for only seven years, within which period she had been providing counseling services on television.
In an age of scapegoatism, you don’t need to look like a goat to be scapegoated. Who can we trust these days?
Our politicians lie to us; prophets tell us strange tales from the spiritual realm, and pretenders who have failed at their own marriages counsel us on how to marry and build relationships.
These anointed leaders have mostly succeeded in their craft because their clients and followers are mostly impressionable. While counsellor Charlotte lived the veritable single life even as a married woman in a loveless marriage, her professional counseling may have motivated some of her followers to leave marriages they could have mended.

Life is short. Have an affair
Marriage is serious business, especially in an age of fast things where ugliness is a choice and good looks can be bought with stolen money.
In the infinite range of possible or probable partners a person may choose from, the options include people suffering from mental disorders resulting from a sickening anxiety about how they look (body dysmorphia), or gender dysphoria–a mismatch between a person’s gender identity and the sex assigned at birth. The good marriageable options left along the spectrum are very few. But they also come with their own hidden sicknesses. Marriage looks like an apparition that must be feared.
These days, counselors tell us how marriages fail, instead of how they succeed.
Just as AI shows us how to cheat our ways to easy success, we are used to quick marriages and no-stress divorces.
It is worse for African marriages abroad, where the divorce rate is very high.
Here, there are professional counselling services for how married couples can successfully cheat on their spouses and stay married. One such organisation is Ashley Madison, whose motto is ‘Life is Short.Have an affair’.
That is the best substitute for divorce. Marriage counselling does not work well here because the counselors are in their third marriage, or like Rev. Dr. Charlotte, are semi-happily divorced, single, but not quite searching, yet ready to mingle.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
Tissues Of The Issues
bigfrontiers@gmail.com