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Words of Wedding Wisdom from Tanzania There's an interesting article about how the cost of weddings in Tanzania is starting to soar as couples and their families start to feel increased pressure from society to have a lavish wedding. The parallels to our own country are quite interesting:

"In Dar es Salaam, weddings are even more costly and very competitive, forcing some couples to travel to their rural homes to wed. Nowadays, a 5m/- budget is not considered enough for a proper wedding...

Assistant Bishop Methodius Kilaini of Dar es Salaam Roman Catholic Archdiocese has decried the large amounts of money poured into wedding celebrations that he says should be channelled into development endeavours...

Bishop Kilaini said many poor families who can't front the millions needed for lavish wedding ceremonies are under the false impression that their children are entering into less holy marriages...

'You don't need to spend millions of shillings on food and drinks for just a single day,' he said...

Acting Mufti, Sheik Suleiman Gorogosi said, his faith was against the habit of spending lavishly on wedding ceremonies, because it undermines the noble institution of marriage...

'Our experience has shown that after wedding ceremonies couples starve, when millions of shillings were sunk into the ceremonies and other people didn't care about their plight,' the Sheikh said, calling for a change of attitude that focuses on the post-wedding welfare of newlyweds...

The religious leaders said the organising committee should make sure the groom has thought about what is most important to him - getting married or making everybody else happy?...

Some weddings - single-day events - cost between 20m/- and 50m/-, amounts that some people say are unnecessarily high when simple, low-cost receptions could suffice to confirm a couple's love for one another."


Posted by Sara E. Cotner at 12:12 PM 
I know I'm late weighing in on this post (I just found your site recently - love it, btw!), but I have to comment that this is not unique to Tanzania. As an international health specialist, I lived in Uganda for a year, and attended about a dozen weddings of my local colleagues'. The same mentality prevails there as well - people are spending *far* more money on these events than they have, often at the expense of many of the basic necessities for themselves and their current/future families (including health care, primary education, transportation to get to/from a job).

However, I'd like to add another perspective on this too: it's not a coincidence that East Africans are spending extravagant amounts on their weddings like Americans do. In fact, I'd argue that it's largely *because* Americans do. I don't want to make a blanket stereotype of East African culture (this is not the venue to delve into that kind of thing), but I will say there is a *lot* of superficial parroting of American culture, especially in terms of wedding culture. I have witnessed a number of beautiful black brides who have purchased cake toppers with...a white bride and groom on top. Wedding cards often feature white brides and grooms (not to mention the Baby cards with white babies, and all of the white baby dolls in the toy isle). It's saddening. This is the result of a society being deeply impoverished without much sense of how to make things better than to parrot the rich Americans/Britons.

I'm rambling :o) But my point is that I think all of us should take a long hard look at the message that we're sending not only to our own societies but to others around the world when we plan weddings that are reflect something other than a loving union between two people.

June 23, 2009 at 10:19 PM