The Woman Who Married a Woman in Igboland

She began the phone call with the usual ‘hello’. But beyond that initial greeting, the conversation carried none of the warmth or ease one might expect in a call between mother and son.

After an uncomfortably long pause—one deliberately created by my mother to help me digest the news—my mother euphemistically added: ‘She just came back with the new wife.’ Her attempt to lighten the mood failed, though, as that pause—the silence around speaking of the subject—extended into months, and then again into years.

Woman-woman marriage in southeast Nigeria is an age-long tradition, and involves a woman marrying another woman and fulfilling all the marriage rites of a conventional union between a man and woman. It presumably predates colonial times, though its earliest documentation was by British colonial officer, Amaury Talbot, between 1914 and 1915. However, its practice is not unique to the Igbo people of the South East alone, and also occurs among the Kalabari people in the Niger Delta region. The practice is also found among several groups in Ghana, including the Akan, Fante, Lobi, Baga and Nankani.

Although Angela married my uncle, Eleazar Azubuike, who is now in his 80s, nearly 30 years ago, they do not have their own children despite trying. Believing she had passed the biological age of childbearing, marrying a woman offered Angela the best culturally accepted alternative to having her own offspring.

I remember seeing Oluchi, Angela’s wife, who is from Abatete in Anambra State, weeks later when I visited my parents in my hometown of Umuala Nsulu, in Abia State. She was in her early 20s, always cheerful and ready to greet people with a wide smile. Yet, as you can imagine, her presence in the family often came with a touchable mist of unease, a strangeness, a lingering tension that was, at all costs, avoided during family meetings and ceremonial gatherings.

As someone whose understanding of Igbo woman-woman marriage was limited before the union, I was curious. Despite our closeness, though, I lacked the courage to approach Angela directly with my questions.

Why did she take this route of marrying a wife? What do the cultural intricacies of this practice look like? Who would be responsible for fathering her children? More importantly—is this culture a symptom of the deeply rooted patriarchal system in Igboland that debases women, or does it empower them by giving them the privilege of performing and fulfilling practices historically reserved for men in Igbo society?