On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Biju Chacko <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 7:37 PM, underscore <[email protected]> wrote: >> tribal states , no baggage of indian/hindu religious or cultural dogma >> .... in meghalaya traditionally men pay dowry etc.... and of course no >> elaborate arrangement of marriages. > > Just to nitpick, in Southern Africa (and other parts as well, I > suspect) marriage contracts are also traditionally sealed by a payment > by the groom to the bride's family. As the name for this transaction > -- "bride price" -- indicates, this doesn't really correlate with > better treatment of women. They're often bought and sold like cows > that are the usual currency for these transactions. >
'bride price' is a bantu tradition... so you find it in west, central, east and southern africa as the bantus were the first 'colonizers' in africa. yeah, women may be bought and sold like cows -- but the transaction is fundamentally different from the indian system of dowry -- primarily, its not the families doing the match-making, secondly - the dowry demand is from the girl's side (since the girl's family are losing a working member )... there isnt much social stigma towards single mothers or divorced women (in fact many women will take on a man simply to have a child, and once that is done show him the door). my point is, it discourages prior / post birth gender selection. the evidence is pretty clear, most of sub-saharan africa has a slightly favorable gender ratio towards women.
