The marriage alliance based on bridewealth transferred a woman's reproductive rights and labor from her kin group to that of her husband's (Berger and White, xlii). These traditional customs were particularly important among the rich; the poor, with fewer resources, were less likely to arrange marriages.
Parents rarely deferred the decision for marriage to the woman; she was meant to accept her parents' wishes. Because marriage was a financial transaction between two kin groups, rather than two individuals, it could not be left up to the changing and unstable emotions of an adolescent girl (Berger and White, xli).
This fact is important because pre-colonial marriage in Africa subordinated the desires of the individual as second to those of the collective, a custom that was disturbed and undermined when African culture absorbed European values during the colonial period.
Through marriage, women were an important source of cultural exchange. When women married into cultural groups outside of their own, they created a culture of female mobility (Luise White, 33). Reiterating this idea, a Maasai man told Luise White that, " A woman is a woman; there is no tribe" (33).
Women traveled from place to place in search of food; often, they intermarried and took on the ethnicity of their spouses. Intermarriage spread ideas, cultural customs and agricultural techniques (Berger and White, 77). For example, during the early fifteenth century, intermarriage between Arab men and (Christian) Nubian women spread Islam across Nubia.
In portions of eastern Africa, Muslim law was implemented in the early sixteenth century due to intermarriage (Berger and White, 19). For Arab men, marrying Nubian women was instrumental to establish themselves in the community - to gain political power and to obtain rights to settle and own land.
In West Africa, female slaves sometimes became important facets of marriage. Slave traders sold men to foreign destinations; women were in demand domestically. Women slaves could become wives. Unprotected by the normal protections that accompanied marriages arranged by kin, slave women could be abused without repercussions. The children a slave-wife or concubine produced had no obligations to another kin group; their use for labor gave non-slave females time to trade (Berger and White, 71).
