Characteristics Of African Traditional Family

4. Traditional African family

Family Makes Us Who We Are

African is so broad that it cannot be adequately in any books. As we know Africa have beautiful traditional dance, music, art, religion they also have extremely broad traditional families, which has challenging variations across Africa. African’s have their own ways to regulate their families and their society. For example Arrange marriage, patrilineality/matrilineality and practices of polygyny are the three majors distinctive variations of African traditional family. Arrange marriage is when the bride and the groom don’t know each other and their family member arrange their marriage base on their family background. Patrilineality/matrilineality mostly practices everywhere, patrilineality/matrilineality is when the family inheriting or determining descent through the male or women line. Polygyny is a distinctive feature in African traditional families, especially in the patriarchal societies; polygyny is when the husband has plural wives. As Africa was colonialism and pressures of contemporary life, their traditional family started to fall in parts.

In Africa Family are the bases for social relationships, for example they don’t do anything because they think it’s the best they have to think about the sociality first.

African respects their elders, believes they knows the best; even marriages and divorce are decided by many elder people, they believes those should be decision by the elder because those decisions impact the societies, and the young people doesn’t know much about the societies. For example marriage, they believe marriages are not only between the couples, marriages are alliance between family’s thoughts and conjugal union and ...

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...n farms. Because of shortage of labors the rate of polygyny went up, and also understanding to have the children in one household “one more child is two more hands in the field”(Azevedo 371).

As Africa was colonialism and pressures changes Africa, it also impacted on their culture and their tradition believes. When Africa started to have industrial revolution and they were in the worldwide economy. Because the wages for most Africans have fallen far less than the amount needed to support their family, they started to move to cities for better life. Because of most men leave their family to work in the cities, which cause separation between families. Changes are good in life but when those changes started to impact in our culture and tradition it changes who we are. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”-Jacques Barzun