When the Ancestors Disagree: Interfaith and Inter-Ethnic Marriage in Ghana

11 minutes ago

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In Accra, a couple can settle the question of love in 2 years and still find their families negotiating, at the engagement table, which register they will sign, which faith their children will carry and whose rites will bury them.

At 5:20 p.m. on a Sunday in Achimota, the list lay folded on the centre table between 2 families, beside a plate of groundnuts nobody had touched. Akosua Boakye, 31, a product designer at a fintech company in Labone, had typed it herself the week before, as her mother's brother dictated it over the phone. It ran to a single page. Near the bottom, after the 6 pieces of wax print and the suitcase, came 2 bottles of schnapps, 3 crates of beer and a Bible.

Saeed Jawula, 34, an anaesthetist at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, sat quietly while his father's older brother held the sheet at arm's length and read it twice. Then the older man cleared his throat and asked, very politely, whether the drinks could be paid for in cash.

Akosua's Auntie did not answer at once.

Two Ghanaian families seated across a centre table in an Achimota sitting room, a young couple between them and a folded engagement list on the table

Akosua is Presbyterian. Saeed's family is Muslim, of Gonja descent, and has worshipped at the same mosque in Kanda for 3 generations. Between them sat questions neither had raised in 2 years of dating: which register the marriage would be signed in, which faith the children would carry, and whose rites would one day bury each of them. This article is about that moment, when a couple who have settled the question of love discover that their families are negotiating something larger. In a country where ethnicity and faith still organise inheritance, naming and death, a mixed marriage binds 2 sets of rules together, and the couple are often the last people in the room to be asked anything.

The numbers explain why rooms like this one exist at all. Ghana's 2021 Population and Housing Census counted 71.3% of the population as Christian and 19.9% as Muslim, so millions of Ghanaians grow up with the other faith on the same street, in the same classroom and on the same office floor. Living side by side is ordinary. Marrying across the line is less so. A University of Ghana study by the geographer Pearl Kyei, drawing on the 2000 and 2010 censuses, found that 12.3% of married people had a spouse from a different ethnic group, with the rate higher among the young, the educated and those living in cities. Accra produces exactly those people, every year.

Among the Akan, a child belongs to the mother's lineage, the abusua, and her brother carries real duties toward her children and, when she dies, real authority over her funeral. In Saeed's family the religious line runs the other way: in Muslim practice, the children of a Muslim father are raised as Muslims. Each family looked at the same unborn grandchild and saw one of its own.

The law adds another fork. Ghana recognises 3 kinds of marriage. Customary marriage, the kind being negotiated in Achimota that afternoon, is valid with or without registration and permits a man more than 1 wife. A Mohammedan marriage, under the Marriage of Mohammedans Ordinance, has to be registered and also permits more than 1 wife. An Ordinance marriage, entered in a register before a licensed marriage officer, limits a man to 1 wife, and a church service becomes one only when that register is signed. Akosua's parents wanted the Presbyterian chapel and the Ordinance register. Saeed's uncle wanted a nikah at the mosque. Each side heard the other's preference as a threat. Her family heard the possibility of another wife. His family heard the expectation that Saeed would leave Islam.

Young Ghanaian couple, a designer and a doctor in scrubs, in serious conversation at a cafe table in Osu, Accra

Then came the matter nobody at the table mentioned and everybody was thinking about. A Muslim burial usually takes place within a day, the body washed and wrapped in white cloth. An Akan Christian funeral can wait weeks in a mortuary while the family raises money, prints posters, and books a venue. Many Ghanaian families have watched relatives argue over a body in the days after a death, and nobody who has watched it wants to marry into it.

The city has changed who asks these questions, and when. A generation ago, families who knew each other's customs did much of the vetting before a couple ever met. Akosua and Saeed met at a friend's birthday in Osu, spent 2 years building a relationship their families barely saw, and then presented them with a finished decision. Families in that position are left to approve or refuse, with little say over the terms in between. Across a decade and more than 2,500 counselling sessions, interfaith couples in Accra have tended to argue less about doctrine than about the calendar: whose festival the children attend, whether the house fasts in Ramadan, where the family is on a Sunday morning.

Southwest Nigeria, the Yoruba region around Lagos, offers a useful comparison. A University of Birmingham research project there found marriage between Muslim men and Christian women to be frequent, with the children normally raised Muslim through the father's line. Frequency there has settled who usually wins the negotiation, and the negotiation still takes place.

The common advice to couples like Akosua and Saeed comes in 2 forms. One says love is enough and the families will come round. The other, heard from elders in both mosque and church, says marry within the faith and the tribe and avoid trouble that can be seen from a distance. The cautious version deserves more credit than it usually gets. The elders are describing real collisions: a lineage that claims the child through the mother against a faith that claims it through the father, a register that permits 1 wife against registers that permit more, a burial within 24 hours against a funeral 6 weeks later. That is an accurate reading of how the systems work.

Where the elders go wrong is in what they conclude from it. Their objection, read closely, is a list of unanswered questions, and families raise those questions on top of their lungs at engagements because they fear meeting them later at a hospital bedside or a graveside with no answer ready. The mixed couples who last in Accra tend to be the ones who answer the questions early and put the answers on paper: the register, the faith the children will be raised in, and the burial each partner wants, stated in a will. A family can still disagree with a written answer. It has far less room to fight over one.

Ghanaian couple sitting in a parked car at night in a hospital car park in Accra, lit by the glow of a phone

In Achimota, Akosua's auntie, acting on behalf of her family, accepted the cash for the drinks. She said she would buy the Bible herself, and Saeed's uncle thanked her for it in a voice that settled the room for a while. The question of the register went home with both families, unresolved.

At 11:40 p.m. on a Thursday, 3 weeks later, in Saeed's car in the Korle Bu staff car park, the couple opened a shared document on her phone. Akosua typed a single heading, "The children", and under it a blank line. They looked at it until the windscreen fogged. Neither of them typed anything else that night, and neither of them closed the document.

PG Sebastian

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