Ugandan Wedding

My friends at the Kasiki (pre-wedding party) liked me so much that they invited me to the wedding. Weddings in Uganda tend to be full-weekend affairs and, indeed, mine was as well. It began with a rainy drive through the smoke-filled slums teeming with roadside shops full of passion fruit, sugar cane stalks, and animal carcasses hung out to dry. I held Cindie on my lap and used my arm as her seatbelt. She studied my features intently and couldn’t stop touching my hair. “Children like mzungu (white) hair,” said Sylvia. “They like that it’s soft and slippery.” We continued on a road surely not meant for driving, and after bottoming-out and bruising the car’s under-belly on what felt like small boulders, we arrived at Rita’s house for tea and bananas under the palm tree in her back yard. Then we proceeded to the Anglican church. Four couples exchanged vows and swapped rings, one after the other with a few “intermissions” of hymns from the choir. Periodically, the congregation got up to bring money to the alter. Sometimes there was raucous laughter punctuated with ululations. Women in the congregation wore bright head scarves and colorful dresses with pointy shoulder sleeves. When I got tired of sitting in the pews, I walked to the back of the church and read an exhibit that chronicled the church’s history up until 1977.

The reception was outdoors in an Indian-owned garden over-looking the city. The bride and groom and their respective families danced their way down the aisle, keeping to the beat of the drum. They circled around the cake, and played a game of hide-and-seek in which the groom hides and the bride seeks. The wedding is not allowed to continue until the groom is found, much like the Seder with the seeking of the afikomen. There were a number of long-winded speeches, a gift-giving procession for the bride, traditional Ugandan food buffet, African dance troupe entertainment, and some raucous dancing of our own to top off the evening’s festivities. The mzungus out-lasted the Ugandans on the dance floor. We danced until about 1am.