Questions and Answers – 13

How is family life and structure in Ghana?

There are two main features of family life in Ghana that are generally absent from family life in the United States: polygamy and a very close-knit extended family.

While Islam permits men to take up to four wives each, African Traditional Religions impose no such limit. Most men can’t afford to take too many – having one wife is not uncommon, but neither is having two, three, or four wives. Chiefs generally take more – 7, 15, even 50, depending on the size of the region they rule.

“But there can’t be enough women to go around for all the men,” I exclaimed when I first started to understand the natural order of things here. “There are more women than men,” was the explanation I was given the first few times I tried to investigate this issue. But as I’ve since discovered, of course the fact that more women are born and survive to adulthood than men doesn’t nearly supply every man with multiple wives. Ghanaian society contains plenty of single men who sleep with other men’s wives (especially the chief’s wives – how can one man keep up with 50 women?!) and with prostitutes, and who rabble rouse because they have simmering energies that aren’t being settled at home. Meanwhile, the married men struggle to keep up with providing for the 10-25 children their wives may bear. They can’t really provide adequately for the children’s needs, and it doesn’t take much in the way of brains to realize that a polygamous system keeps the country from developing as quickly as it might economically.

And as for the extended family feature – many a new wife moves in with her husband under her in-laws’ roof. It is very common for aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents to all live together in a compound house (which will be defined in a future post). Ghanaians feel much closer to these family members than do Americans. “My sister” or “my brother,” I finally realized, can actually refer to a person’s cousin; and “my mother” or “my father” can refer to a person’s aunt or uncle…or grandmother or grandfather. It is all very confusing, and I’ve learned to clarify all introductions. “This is my brother,” my fellow Sunday School Madame introduced me to a young man recently. “Your brother or your cousin?” I asked curiously. “My cousin,” was the nonchalant reply.

A friend’s social studies textbook revealed that many Ghanaian households are moving away from the “traditional” family structure referred to above to a “nuclear” family structure that is being imported from the West, encompassing only husband, wife (or wives), and children. Countercultural indeed.

It is interesting to note that a Christian I met four years ago specifically mentioned that his countercultural decision to move out of his father’s house upon marriage was not based on looking to the Western model, but on literally following the Biblical injunction to leave one’s father and mother in order to cleave to one’s wife. I’m not sure whether I would have said that it’s always a sin for a family to live with the husband’s parents; but my friend’s decision was a good reminder that the Bible is ALWAYS a wise point of reference when evaluating differences between cultures. ;)