Marry Me in Africa is an invitation to discuss approaches and processes in African marriage ritual. As one crucial institution in African culture, marriage in its traditional African definition has helped many of the continent's cultures maintain a sense of community and identity. This book invites especially students and researchers into exchanges on some African marriage traditions and their roles in African societies. It concerns those aspects that fascinate me and many other Africans that we believe will interest people in the New World, particularly the Caribbean. Researchers of the African Diaspora might want to use some of the marriage practices for reconstructing models for analysis and interpretation of the formation and transformation of the African heritage in the Diaspora. Marry Me in Africa is particularly useful for scholars not familiar with the different cultural practices among African societies, their sources of identity and diversity, and the implications of these for understanding African social systems. This book will be a useful companion for other scholars who know about some of the cultural practices but are unable to identify exactly their relationship to specific ethnic groups, traditional concepts, social, political, economic, technological, and other practices that have constituted the patterns of cultural behavior among African societies through marriage. Individual or local cultural traditions and practices are presented within the context of the general African cultural heritage, leading to cross-cultural comparison and generalizations. The convergence of traditional marriage patterns and continuities in specific aspects of traditional values and behavior of various societies are examined over the common-ground sense of community among Africans that may not be the same today as in the past. For this reason this book takes the liberty to discuss present manifestations of a transformed past in the present.
This book addresses general aspects of the elusive realm of African religious experiences, using selected examples of evidence of how Africans have acted in their encounter with the unknown world from ancient times. Religious concepts and symbolisms such as identifying the "supreme being" the supernatural, spirits and spiritualism, ancestral veneration, ritual and ritual objects and obligations, kinship and community relationships, spirit possession, libation, divination, festivals and festivities, birth, initiation, marriage and death rites, notions of witchcraft and witches, are discussed. The central issue is that in African religious thought and practice, the known and the unknown worlds are not separated; also, science and religion are not in separation - the two worlds must always flow and float together in harmony. Religion and spirituality, as real life with a strong community role, personification of the collective desire and the dual power of a combination of spiritual and physical in healing and God as personal are discussed in a global perspective, acknowledging the African religious experience and associated conceptssuch as behavior and symbolisms, as continuities that reflect the past and represent basic elements of the rich and authentic aspetcts of the African religious heritage. The book takes the liberty to present the material in the ethnographic present although such practices may belong to the past.
Love, perceived through the norms of romantic incidence, quite often comes of her own staging. Were it not for the extraneous events that bring and lead the two into the fortuitous haven of linking their paths, the romantic ecstasy may likely have been withdrawn to another time and place. Not at all so with the staggering affects of Love At First Sight. Brought to being by the will of an enlivened Latent Force, long smoldering, the mystic stage is set. With the finality and suddenness of a lighting strike from out of the east, Love has made Her claim. Lovers, strangers no more, catching but a fleeting glimpse of the other from passing trains, so quickly is it done. For Professor, Geoffrey Thorne, and Marrianna Joule, First Year college student, Love At First Sight came as a gem unsought. Where out of an act of common event, in a New England Coed College, an English professor and his first year student were literally swept into each other's arms. What proceeds is a tastefully told love story. Tenderly sweet, surprising and challenging; for there are significant hurdles/as the student is the only daughter of a wealthy and powerful industrialist with strong plans for her in a life of High Society. It is quite surprising to discover the subtle maneuvers of The Latent Force in an otherwise hostile field.
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