Nigeria’s Bride Price app: reason behind debate, but is it just a sly social commentary on yesteryear?
Honey, which means that your life shall be sweet. Palm oil, to lubricate life’s aches. Salt, to protect and keep you. Kola nut, i can not keep in mind exactly, it is it maybe maybe not enough that it’s probably the most symbolically Nigerian thing, across all lines that are ethnic?
What exactly are these? Collectively, they form section of a “bride cost” – money and gift suggestions written by a guy’s household to a lady’s upon their wedding. At school in Nigeria, during Yoruba history course, we had been told about ladies who attracted extremely high bride costs, determined by their characteristics. Inversely, there have been females whoever bride costs had been therefore paltry, it had been an embarrassment. I do not keep in mind the certain gift ideas and whatever they signify any longer, but I really do keep in mind that these lessons by which we had been taught about our history had been, for contemporary budding feminists, a difficult pill to swallow.
I will be considering bride price again this week, however, as a result of a brand new application that’s been doing the rounds within the African corners of my internet life. Initially, I became reluctant to create concerning this application after all. The narrative of Africa and Africans in the united kingdom along with other Western, mostly white areas is indeed old, therefore outdated and false, so wearying, that I conserve African tales for my safer areas, places where there isn’t any empathy space. I love speaing frankly about Nigeria without some internet complete stranger telling me personally to “simply get over it! ” Dealing with Africa – its good and its own that is bad on internet wears me down. So when we third-culture kids meet up, occupying that center room within the Venn diagram that overlaps our moms and dads’ cultures using the West’s, we could laugh about this. That is what this software is mostly about.
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The Bride Price app calculated that I happened to be well worth the “Premium Babe”-ly amount of 494,500 naira that is nigerianNGN) –about ?1,816. Exactly exactly How did it get to this figure? Via a number of concerns www.brightbrides.net/korean-brides/, and they’re the star that is real of software. There is the choice to check always “we are always aware of, even when we cannot see or hear them, is our enemy for yourself” or “for your friend/enemy” – because as Nigerians, one thing.
Therefore, also I was smiling before I clicked. Then came the actual concerns: my height; my fat (choices included the extremely standard “medium”, and the harder-to-decipher “Mama Ronke” – so what does that even mean? ); my leg form (“straight”, “sexy bow leg (Beyonce)” etc); my facial beauty (from “intimidating” to “complete no try”) an such like. Each solution features a value that is monetary no kola pea pea nuts here – often a “discount”, 60 percent if you should be regrettable adequate to end up being the indecipherable “Mama Ronke”. The software does take time to determine the bride cost and provides a jaunty message by having a blinking green shekere (a West African guitar): “Please wait – the elders are consulting. By the end of the test”
The expression “if that you do not laugh, you are going to cry” appears, inside your, to be manufactured particularly for Nigerians. The accepted narrative is one of woe, a country lurching from pillar (of calamity) to publish (of disaster) despite a reference wealth that may effortlessly function as the reply to our dilemmas. The idea of bride pricing is a screen to the past, a past that is not necessarily glorious or edifying whenever seen through a lens that is modern.
But this application is sly – the nuance might not be noticeable to all optical eyes, but it is here. Under skin color – which could or might not have had a direct effect on bride cost when you look at the days that are olden truly things within the hierarchy of beauty today – comes five groups. “Half caste”; “Light epidermis”; “Dark”; “Whitenicious”; and “Lupita” (like in Nyong’o). The worthiness for every decreases while you get along record, you start with +NGN50,000. Issue – and response choices simultaneously acknowledge the colour-struck manner attribute of a swathe of Nigerians, along with noting without fuss the product range of tints we are offered in naturally. There clearly was a level regarding the Lupita skin, that is a tiny thing, although not.
There are more markers. On teeth, a “white with gap” gets the value that is highest (my mom has expressed dismay that none of her kids inherited our grandmother’s “beautiful” diastema), while “Ronaldinho” includes a -NGN40,000 label. The positioning and citizenship concerns are fine “don’t cry laugh that is– examples (America happens tops in both), and a Masters is desirable, however a PhD has a penalty of -NGN100,000. Employment views oil and fuel show up trumps (+NGN100,000); my journalism job has a value of just +NGN20,000. Fortunately, i will be “redeemed” by my English accent – the– that is highest respected at +NGN45,000.