AN EXAMINATION OF FEMALE HUSBANDS AND GHOST HUSBANDS AS A TALETELL OF THE CENTRALITY OF CHILDREN IN IGBO MARRIAGES
Marriage sits at the very heart of Igbo life. It is an important aspect of the life of the Igbo that once one reaches a particular age, he or she is expected to marry. So, despite the contemporary trend seeping into Africa, which has seen to the trivialization of marriage as a mere contract, a choice, and not an achievement, the Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria have been largely impervious to the poisonous fluids of these ideologies. For the Igbo, without marriage, one is incomplete. Hence, for the Igbo, marriage is not a choice; it is a duty that must be fulfilled. It is as a result of the overwhelming relevance of the marriage institution among the people that apart from the common polygamous and monogamous marriages present in the culture of the people, we see other forms of marriages such as ghost marriages, where a wife is married for a dead man; and female to female marriages or female husbands, where a woman traditionally marries a fellow woman. It is in light of this that this paper seeks to investigate the overwhelming relevance of marriage among the Igbo and why they would go to any length to get married, even to the point of marrying the dead. Hence, the paper raises the following questions: What is the central purpose of marriage among the Igbo? Why do the Igbo go to the extent of engaging in ghost marriages or female-to-female marriages? Adopting a critical analytical method, the paper, the paper seeks to explore the ghost and female husband’s type of marriage among the Igbo. It is in discovering the reason behind such marriages that we can exhaustively explore the above research questions. The paper, relying on sources such as books, journals, articles, and the internet, seeks to exhaustively explore the above questions. The paper is significant in that it sheds light on the core underpinnings of Igbo marriages.
Keywords: Marriage, Ghost marriage, female husband, Igbo people