Is dowry/lobola a reasonable request when a girl is not a virgin?

Growing up I always thought why. Why do teachers teach people to do jobs that they themselves are not willing to do? Why do I have to go to school? Lol I am sure every child has asked themselves that question when they were being dragged out of bed in the morning. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the other day I asked myself the question, 'why are @Africanindiaspo men still paying dowry for women who are not virgins on the day of marriage?' Grab some milk and a cookie and let us do this.


You see I grew up with a strong desire to get married young and have children with a woman who would have been my childhood sweetheart. In my young, 'churched'/traditionalised mind sex outside of marriage was a taboo. One had to get married by paying a bride price which we call 'roora' in my vernacular language in Zimbabwe (also known as lobola/dowry in other countries) before enjoying the pleasures that matrimony brings. At least that is what our elders instructed us to do whilst many of them, men especially, engaged in adulterous affairs which cost many of them their lives as AIDS ravaged the country. I digress but will have to touch on this 'four letter word' in another post.


So yeah I grew up with the idea that sex was not something to enjoy before its time as a result of the traditional and religious instructions I received. That, coupled with my father's threats about how he would strike me with an axe if I had ever had sex as a young man helped to keep me in check when I was back in the Motherland. However, that fear subsided when I moved to the UK and started to realise just how promiscuous Britons, as well as @Africanindiaspo brothers and sisters in the UK, were. Although I was somewhat of a Mack back home (ask Mark Morrison) my contact with women had been limited to chat up lines and innocent hugs but here I was, not in the land of milk and honey, but the land of liberal expression of sexuality. Needless to say I was the butt of many jokes as I was constantly mocked for being a virgin by my friends and colleagues - something I was not ashamed of growing up back home. Shamefully, I adjusted in order to fit in and in no time I was having casual, sexual relationships with @Africanindiaspo sisters as well some British women. Knowing what I know now about the effects of a loose sexual lifestyle I wish I had remained a virgin until I was ready to commit because there is absolutely no shame in not whoring yourself around as a man. In fact it protects you from the likelihood of contracting STIs/STDS and also protects you from having unwanted children which the government will penalise you for having.


Another reason I wish I had remained a virgin is that now that I am in a committed relationship I hate to even imagine that anyone could have done something with my partner. That makes me realise the number of men I have robbed of the privilege of being the first and last man their other half enjoys. I regret my part in that although the women I was involved with were equally responsible for what we did which brings me to the next point.  As I mentioned, some of the relationships I had were with @Africanindiaspo sisters who claimed to be virgins (it's not for me to call it) who may already be or are yet to be married. Each of these girls' families would have asked or will ask for a bride price for their daughter as a prerequisite for giving her away. I'm sure you see where I am going with this.


In my limited understanding of lobola/dowry it is meant to be a token of gratitude extended, by a man and his family, to the family of the bride to be. Some gifts are given to the father, others to the mother, aunts, etc. as a way of saying thank you for raising a well-mannered, home-centred and pure/virgin wife who will take care of me and my people and bear us children - the key quality being a pure wife. I believe this to be true because in all traditional/patriarchal cultures there is an expectation of a woman's father to keep her chaste for the day he hands her over to his son in-law. In historic Jewish culture if a man married a woman who turned out to not be a virgin (one who would not bleed on the marital bed) the groom would take the bed sheet and present it as evidence to the woman's father and subsequently stone her to death outside of his house. In Zimbabwe the purity of a bride is also a big deal. Growing up there I understood that your average man did not want to marry a woman who had been with other men as he felt it would be an indication that she is capable of infidelity as she would have tasted something different and thus able to generate comparisons that would send her into the arms of other men. Additionally, in Zimbabwe if a young woman does not turn out to be pregnant she is assumed and expected to be chaste, so much so that if she became pregnant her father would demand the impregnator/terminator to marry his daughter. It is felt by most elders that no one would want to marry her if she remained single and a surcharge termed 'damages' is added to the cost of the dowry or lobola to punish the young man for damaging his daughter's purity/marketability without a licence to thrill/kill. So important is it to appear to be a virgin that women devise means of seeming to be one on their marriage day. One friend even told me that Chinese folk in Zimbabwe are selling rehymenation kits which allow women to give an impression of chastity to their new husbands. 


Can you imagine the deceit that forms the foundations of these kinds of marriages and the fraud being carried out by these fathers by requiring a bride price for damaged/faulty goods? Fathers and families are no longer guaranteeing the chastity of their daughters and the girls are not confessing their promiscuous ways to their fathers. At the end of it a simpleton of a man is left to acknowledge a harlot as a virgin. That just shows how far we Africans have deviated from the moral fibres that made us once laugh at the moral decay of the west. In my opinion when a non-virgin woman is married off her father has two options. He can either trace the steps of all the men his daughter has slept with and use the occurrences and frequency of intimacy with all these men to apportion to them the lobola he would charge to an individual man were she a virgin. Alternatively he can just be glad that any man still wants her and ask for nothing at all. Otherwise (taking the melody from the Encore song by Jay-Z and Linkin Park that says 'what the hell are you waiting for?') men 'what the hell are we paying for?' 
 

Really what is the purpose of this transaction? I think parents are not facing up to the state of the daughters they are raising, many who, on top of being non-virgins typically cannot cook or clean. They should be happy that someone wants to marry their princesses rather than trying to adhere to traditions in a way that only benefits them. Things have gotten so bad that one friend of mine even said to me that a woman without children today is the equivalent of a virgin. Imagine that. Last I know some of the most promiscuous women of our time such as Rihanna, Lady Gaga, etc. are childless. Such a premise leads us to accept then that if an @Africanindiaspo woman led such a lifestyle as Rihanna’s whilst at university abroad or away from home and then found a man who wants to marry her later in life her father can acceptably still charge a bride price. Put yourself in the shoes of the poor man marrying an untrained, unsubmissive, emotionally-wrecked Rihanna wannabe who has been beaten up by a Chris Brown wannabe and having to pay for her. It is a true shame. Some fathers should really be recompensing some men for being brave enough to marry their 'experienced' daughters. And for the fathers who do have virgin daughters please do not commodify them by charging extortionate amounts unless you want them to be treated like cooking oil and sugar by their husbands.


I have said my peace. Until next time, let us share let us grow!

'We Africans need to be fair and honest in the observance of our traditions/practices' - @Africanindiaspo