Day 90

With Hannah, Marc Anthony, Josephine, their baby Jordan, and another lady.

Josephine’s wedding.

In Ghana, getting married is not as simple as it is in the UK. It’s not simply a case of being married or not, it’s much more complicated than that. In Ghana, you can have a traditional marriage, a court marriage or a church marriage. The only one recognised by the law is the court marriage (or so I’ve been told.)

A traditional marriage involves your husband buying several different things for your father – fowls, cows, alcohol – it seems to vary a bit. After that has happened, then you are married. This is, as I said, the traditional way, and so men can have more than one wife in this manner.

A court marriage is like a registry office ceremony in the UK, but is in front of a judge.

A church marriage is made in a church. However, according to a colleague, this is not legally recognised by the law, so you’d need to also have a court certificate.

So, I went to Josephine and Marc Anthony’s wedding. They’re already traditionally married but wanted to be legally married too.

I turned up at the allotted time – 8.45am. The bridal party started to come around 9.15, with the bride and groom arriving closer to 10am. While this went on, I watched several cases in front of the judge. Most involved them deferring the judgement to a later date and then spending a lot of time discussing which date this would be, with the judge saying things like “ah, but they (defendants/accused) might be travelling then, so that date might not be good.”

Finally the time came for the wedding. The couple were told about what being married meant, then did their vows. Then the judge :

“Having a court marriage means that you are legally married. You can only be married to one person. The lady can only marry one person and the man too can only marry one person. So [to Josephine], you can’t take another husband. And you [to Marc Anthony], can’t take another wife. The only way to dissolve your marriage is by getting a divorce. You have to come to the court and get a divorce. Even if you are a chief – oh, or an MP – oh, you still can only take one wife. And the only way to end the marriage is to get a divorce. You need to come to the court and get a divorce. You can’t burn your marriage papers, you are still married under the law. We have copies. So if you lose your papers, you can come here, we’ll copy them and you can have another copy. The only way to end your marriage is to come here, pay the money and get a divorce.”

After this, we went back to Josephine and Tony’s house and had some food – presented in the way it always is at marriages, funerals and workshops – in a takeaway box.