Can an African feminist have a white wedding? It’s complicated

I wanted to be a beacon of black feminist love; my friends and family teased me for being a sellout

We had been together 20 years, had two children and had a customary marriage with our village sub-county two years ago without any real plans for a church wedding. So we called our second ceremony a celebration of love and not a wedding. How else would a self-professed African feminist survive being the centre of a colonial and Abrahamic religious ceremony that also manages to reinforce the most male-centred aspects of African culture?

Our invitations came directly from me and my partner Mark, not – as is traditional – from our families, and in the form of a playful gif featuring the song Love Potion from the South African group Mafikizolo, a reminder that this was a wedding on our terms. I thought they screamed “liberated African feminist”. But when my cousin Moses received his, he asked, “So, the patriarchy has won?”

He added the power and glasses of wine emojis to his WhatsApp message. I felt his judgment and victory reverberate from his London flat to my Kampala home. So I looked for reassurance from my professional network, a group of people I met 10 years ago when we worked at Oxfam, arguably the most feminist NGO of our time. Surely they would understand that me undertaking a white wedding was simply a celebration of love and not the greatest feminist sellout of all time.

The idea of getting married as an African feminist always felt like the pope renouncing Catholicism – uncomfortable and unlikely. My mother, in her wedding speech, said she never thought my relationship with Mark, who I met when I was 18 and just completing my A-levels, would last because I had been admitted to law school – and female lawyers never get married.

The guests laughed when she talked about how she thought a man like Mark could not possibly distract her academically oriented daughter. My husband and I joined in – intoxicated from dancing to a mix of old-school songs such as Sean Paul and Sasha’s I’m still in love with you, Next’s Wifey and African classics such as Quex’s Kachumbali.

Love is complex and the African feminist is not immune to it. For love, many African feminists have bowed to Uganda’s decidedly discriminatory marriage laws, humbly submitting the consent from their parents that is a prerequisite for grown women to have a ceremony in a church.

In 2023, the Ugandan constitutional court dismissed a human rights activist’s case that a church’s requirements for marriage were discriminatory because they required consent from the woman’s parents, not the man’s, and subjected couples to compulsory HIV testing. At the time, I wrote about how the court’s decision cemented the affront to women’s rights and infantilised women, while absolving the state from having to protect their rights in powerful religious settings.

Still, it was important for my husband, a reverend’s son, that we have an Anglican ceremony. I knew that the part where they preach the problematic gospel of submission to husbands that has kept many African women in the stronghold of abusive marriages would be the squirmiest to listen to. But the reverend who travelled from our village church to the capital, who agreed to hold the ceremony in a private garden and got the guests singing to 2Face’s African Queen, knew his flock well. He explained that submission did not mean complete subjugation of women. And that marriage should be a partnership.

He also advised me to kneel for my husband occasionally. The crowd giggled because I have written about how the violation of African women starts with acts that are common practice for many ethnic groups, such as requiring them to kneel for men. Patriarchy is an intricate part of Christianity; to live as a Christian feminist is to exist in oxymoron. One day they may preach that men and women are equal before God, as the reverend highlighted during our beautiful ceremony – where the skies first turned grey and pelted us with rain before clearing for 38C sunshine – the next they may spend hours berating divorced women and single mothers.

Or, as it was the last time I was in church in February, shortly after the election for another term of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, asking them to pray for the country’s leaders with a record of rigged elections.

“Mugole”. This word greeted me at every turn when I returned from my honeymoon. It is the title given to a newly married person. The words are said in a slightly dragged tone and high-pitched voice that emphasise the lay in moo-go-lay. A female mugole is treated like something fragile, spared from care work in her first days of marriage and well fed so that she remains plump and holds on to the after-wedding glow as long as possible.

For weeks, I embraced my mugole-ness, and sat idly next to my husband, the self-professed pan-Africanist man who dared to marry an African feminist, and who seemed nonplussed by all the contradictions of Africanism, feminism and white weddings that played in my head. I envied his harmony and acceptance of ambiguity, and laughed at the gods’ sense of humour entangling my restless soul with a reverend’s son.

Then it hit me that the harmony Mark enjoyed in this complexity of African-ness and women’s rights was precisely because he was his father’s son. The reverend’s insistence on sticking to one wife when “real” men of the time, including my own grandfather, had at least four, and leaving land to both his daughters and sons in a will, was a radical act of resistance from my late father-in-law. Perhaps marrying an African feminist in a Christian wedding was a continuation of the tradition of resistance.

Before the emergence of the disturbing women-hating brand of African Christianity that we see today, the African women we admire, from Winnie Byanyima to Wanagari Maathai, attended missionary schools at a time when girls’ education was contentious. The missionaries thought they were giving them education that would bring them closer to civilisation and tame their African ways. They could never have predicted the firebrand women that emerged from this education.

It was exhilarating to be a beacon of black feminist love. But the question still played on my mind: can a white wedding be the happily ever after feminists dare to dream of? Or another brick in an institution that African women aspire to their whole lives and tolerate abusive situations for – just for a chance to be considered properly married, fully woman, African and Christian?