Conscious coupling – More Africans are marrying spouses of different ethnicities | Middle East and Africa

IN 2018 A dating app was launched targeting African diasporas in America. CultureCrush was described by its founder as an “inclusive ecosystem”. And if that were not romantic enough, the app promised to be the first to allow users looking for love to search mates by “nationality, ethnicity and tribe”.

For lonely hearts in Chicago or New York it may well be a useful feature. But in Africa, love, or at least marriage, is increasingly transcending ethnic boundaries. That is according to several studies published in the past two years, all of which find that it is becoming more common for Africans to get hitched to partners from other groups.

A paper published in January by Juliette Crespin-Boucaud of the Paris School of Economics found that the share of marriages that are “interethnic” ranges from 10% of the total in Burkina Faso to 46% in Zambia. The average share in the 15 countries she looked at is 20%. Another study, published as a working paper in 2018 by Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay and Elliott Green, respectively of Queen Mary University of London and the London School of Economics, found a similar figure among a sample of 26 countries: 22%.

All researchers note that younger generations are more likely to spurn ethnic barriers. About 17% of women’s first marriages in 1984 were interethnic, rising to 26% in 2014, according to Ms Bandyopadhyay and Mr Green.

Urbanisation is one reason for the increase. In cities there are more people from different backgrounds with whom to consort than in villages. It is harder for nosy relatives to interfere. Education matters, too. More schooling means higher incomes and more choices.

Yet there is more to the trends than schooling and cities, says Ms Crespin-Boucaud. Also important are changing cultural attitudes. These days marrying outside one’s group is less likely to be taboo. Why this has happened faster in some countries (such as Uganda) than others (such as Niger) is unclear.

Whatever the reasons, boundary-spanning marriages are good news, and not just for the happy couples. Another paper, published in 2018 by Boniface Dulani of the University of Malawi and three co-authors, suggests that children of mixed marriages are less likely to vote along ethnic lines. Ethnically driven politics has been used to explain many African woes, from conflict to corruption. So if love can blur these boundaries, all the better.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline “More Africans are marrying spouses of different ethnicities”