Marriage and Family

Yoruba marriage was an alliance between two lineages that happened to be enacted by two people, not a contract between two individuals that their families attended. The formal transaction, ìdána, transferred defined rights in the woman to the husband's extended family rather than to the husband alone, which is why the bridewealth was assembled and received by families and why a marriage could be reviewed by families rather than by the couple. This is the single structural fact that makes the rest of the system intelligible, including the parts that look strange from a modern vantage: the position of co-wives, the persistence of a wife's standing in her own natal lineage, and the grounds on which a marriage could end.

Marriage was also close to universal and close to compulsory. Fadipẹ's summary is that for a man or a woman of marriageable age to remain single was against Yoruba mores 1.

Courtship and the approach

Marriage negotiations were conducted between families, with intermediaries. A man's family identified a prospective bride, made discreet inquiries into her lineage (its reputation, its diseases, its history of longevity, whether it carried a stigma, whether there was any bar of kinship or of eewọ̀), and then made a formal approach through a go-between, the alárinà, who carried messages, gifts and refusals between the two sides so that neither family could be humiliated by a direct rejection.

Ifá was commonly consulted on the compatibility of the match. The consultation was not a formality: an unfavourable outcome could stop a marriage, and this is one of the concrete points where divination had jurisdiction over ordinary life. Ifá practice itself is treated in section 05.

A period of engagement followed, sometimes years, during which the suitor's family made regular prestations to the bride's family: gifts at festivals, labour on their farm, contributions at their funerals. These were not the bridewealth. They were the demonstration of reliability that made the bridewealth acceptable, and they built an obligation on both sides well before the marriage.

Ìdána and bridewealth

Ìdána is the formal marriage payment and the ceremony organised around it. It transferred to the husband's extended family the rights that constitute marriage in this system: rights in the woman's domestic and economic labour, sexual rights, and above all rights in the children she would bear, who would belong to the husband's ìdílé 2.

Bridewealth, ọwó orí ìyàwó, is best understood by what it does rather than by what it costs. It is not a purchase. Its functions are to make the marriage publicly and legally valid, to establish the husband's lineage's claim to the children, to compensate the wife's lineage for the loss of a member's productive and reproductive capacity, and to create a debt that must be returned if the marriage is dissolved at the wife's instance. That last function is the important one: the returnability of bridewealth is the mechanism by which the wife's family retains an interest in the marriage lasting, and by which a wife who wants out has to persuade her own people to fund the exit.

The prestation was substantial but was rarely a single payment. It consisted of money, kola, palm oil, salt, cloth, drink and other goods, delivered in stages, with different components going to different recipients on the bride's side, including her mother and her lineage's elders. The list has changed considerably in the twentieth century and now typically includes items keyed to Christian or Muslim usage, but the staged structure and the family-to-family character have persisted.

Marriages were exogamous with respect to the lineage. A man could not marry within his own ìdílé, and prohibited degrees extended further than the strict patriline. Beyond kin bars, some lineages carried standing prohibitions against marriage with particular other lineages, usually founded on an ìtàn of past injury.

Polygyny and what it was actually like

Polygyny was normal for men who could afford it and, importantly, was an economic and status system as much as a marital one. Additional wives meant additional labour, additional trading capital in circulation, additional children, and additional affinal alliances. A large compound with several wives was the visible form of a successful man's success.

Two things are usually said about it that flatten it. The first is that it was universal, which it was not: it was a possibility available to men of means and a substantial share of marriages were monogamous by default. The second is that the household was a simple hierarchy under the husband, which understates how much of the actual governance ran between the wives.

Ìyálé and ìyàwó. The senior wife is the ìyálé, literally mother of the house. Each subsequent wife enters as ìyàwó and remains junior to those already there. Rank among co-wives is by order of arrival and is fixed at entry: a woman who marries in later never overtakes one who married in earlier, regardless of their birth years, and Oyěwùmí's formulation is that the in-marrying wife loses her chronological age and enters the lineage as a newborn, gaining rank only as later arrivals accumulate beneath her 3.

The ìyálé's position carried real administrative authority. She allocated domestic work, mediated among the junior wives, represented the wives' side to the husband and to the compound head, and had a formal role in receiving and instructing a new wife. In an ordinary compound this made her the operating manager of the household's labour.

The politics. The relationship between co-wives is proverbially difficult, and the Yoruba language marks it: orogún (or ìjàlé in some usages) names the co-wife relation specifically, and the associated proverbs are uniformly about rivalry rather than solidarity. The competition was substantive rather than merely emotional. Co-wives competed over the husband's attention and resources, over the standing and prospects of their own children (since each wife's children formed a distinct set, the ọmọ ìyá, within the larger body of the father's children), and over the allocation of domestic burden. The distinction between ọmọ ìyá, children of the same mother, and ọmọ bàbá, children of the same father by different mothers, carries the emotional weight of exactly this: full siblings are the reliable bloc, half-siblings by co-wives are the arena of inheritance disputes.

That structural rivalry has a legal echo that survives into modern Nigerian courts. Yoruba customary inheritance recognises two competing methods of dividing an estate among a polygynist's children: ìdí ìgi, per stirpes, in which the estate is divided into as many parts as there are wives with children, each wife's set of children sharing one part; and orí ojorí, per capita, in which it is divided equally among all the children individually 4. Which one applies determines whether a wife who bore one child and a wife who bore six get the same share, and it has been litigated in the Nigerian courts, notably in Dawodu v Danmole 5. The existence of both methods is a fossil of exactly the ìyálé and ìyàwó politics described above, and the fact that Yoruba custom generated two incompatible rules and lived with both is itself informative about how customary law worked.

Where wives were not subordinate. A wife was economically independent in a way that surprises readers who expect the opposite. She traded on her own account, kept her own earnings, was not obliged to pool them with her husband's, and could accumulate substantial capital in her own name. She was expected to feed herself and her children from her own trade in many arrangements. Household finance was not a common pot. This is directly connected to women's dominance of markets, treated in Economy and the Market, and it is the material basis for the political authority documented in Gender.

She also remained an ọmọ ilé of her own natal lineage for life. She kept her name and her lineage's oríkì, she was buried in relation to her own lineage in many places, she had a claim on her father's compound for refuge and support, and she held insider standing over the women married into her natal lineage. Her marriage did not absorb her.

Divorce

Divorce existed, was recognised, and had procedure. It was not simple, because it was not a matter between the couple: dissolving a marriage meant dissolving an alliance and returning the bridewealth, so both lineages had standing and both would try mediation first. The sequence ran through the family court structure described in Law and Dispute Resolution, with the compound head, then the quarter head, then in serious cases the palace.

The recognised grounds differed for the two parties and this asymmetry is real and should be stated rather than smoothed. A husband's grounds included the wife's adultery, persistent refusal of domestic and conjugal obligations, theft, witchcraft accusation, and in some accounts persistent quarrelsomeness. A wife's grounds included the husband's failure to maintain her, impotence, physical cruelty exceeding what her family would tolerate, neglect, and desertion. In practice the operative constraint on a wife's exit was the bridewealth: her family had to be willing to return it, which meant they had to be persuaded the marriage was intolerable rather than merely unhappy.

Onadeko records one practice that shows how much of family discipline stayed inside the family: a woman accused of an offence such as theft would generally not be arraigned in the Ọba's court but sent to her husband or father to be reprimanded, and the husband might simply divorce her and the matter would end there. The exception was witchcraft, which was the one charge that would bring a woman before the Ọba or Ògbóni court, with severe consequences 6. This is a striking illustration of the general principle that Yoruba adjudication routed matters to the lowest level that could contain them, and of the specific fact that the accusation of witchcraft was the mechanism by which that containment was bypassed.

Children of a dissolved marriage remained with the husband's lineage, since bridewealth had transferred rights in them. Young children commonly stayed with the mother for a period and then returned. A woman who left without bridewealth being returned created a live dispute rather than a completed divorce.

Child fostering

Children moved between households routinely and this was not exceptional or a sign of family failure. A child might be sent to a grandmother, an aunt, a father's senior brother, a wealthier or better-placed relative in a town with a school, or a master to learn a trade. The purposes were varied: sharing the cost of raising children across a wider kin group, giving a childless or bereaved relative a child in the house, placing a child where an education or a craft was available, cementing a relationship between households, and providing labour.

Two things should be held together here. Fostering within the kin group was a genuine and reciprocal institution with obligations running both ways, and the fostered child had a recognised status rather than being an unattached dependent. And the same channel, under twentieth-century urban conditions, became a route into unpaid domestic labour for children placed with unrelated urban households, a practice that has been documented as child labour in contemporary Lagos and elsewhere 7. Both are true, and it is the transformation from a kin-based reciprocal arrangement into a market in domestic help that produced the second from the first.

What Christianity, Islam and the city changed

Christianity. The mission churches made monogamy a condition of full membership and of communion, which forced a choice on converts with more than one wife and produced a long nineteenth- and twentieth-century argument inside Yoruba Christianity that has still not fully settled. The African independent churches that emerged from the late nineteenth century, treated in History: The Twentieth Century, took a range of positions on this, and the willingness of some of them to accommodate polygynous members was among the reasons for their growth. Christian marriage under the Marriage Act also introduced a second, statutory form of marriage alongside the customary one, with different rules of inheritance and dissolution, and the resulting collision of the two systems is a permanent feature of Nigerian family law.

Islam. Islam permitted polygyny within a limit of four wives and imposed its own requirements of maintenance and equal treatment, together with Islamic rules of inheritance. Because it did not require the abandonment of an existing plural household, it produced less rupture than Christianity did on this specific point. Islamic marriage forms coexist with customary and statutory ones across Yoruba Muslim communities.

Urbanization and cost. The decisive pressures on polygyny in the twentieth century were economic rather than doctrinal: urban housing, the cash cost of schooling multiplied by the number of children, salaried employment that does not scale with household size, and women's own rising education and earnings. Polygyny has declined markedly among urban, educated and salaried Yoruba, and persists more in rural and in some Muslim contexts.

What persisted. The family-to-family character of marriage has proved remarkably durable. The Yoruba wedding as generally performed today is still two events: the traditional engagement, complete with the alárinà's descendants in the form of a hired master and mistress of ceremonies, the formal letter from the groom's family, the prostration, the prayers and the presentation of the bridewealth list; followed by a church or mosque ceremony. The persistence of ìdána alongside a Christian wedding, performed by people who would describe themselves as entirely Christian, is one of the clearest everyday demonstrations that the social institution and the religious one operate on different layers.