Paper short abstract:

Conflicts over large lobola (bridewealth) speak to the meaning of kindship and value in South Africa. Women claim that large lobola indicates a man’s love and commitment to gender equality in marriage. Men and elders wonder what is being paid for if not gendered and generational privilege.

Paper long abstract:

The persistence of bridewealth is often referenced to explain the exceptionally low rates of marriage in South Africa today. In an era of widespread and worsening unemployment, researchers argue that the cost of bridewealth is prohibitive for most young South Africans, and a range of scholars have attempted to account for and explain the persistence of this practice in the face of economic circumstances that render bridewealth payment largely unachievable. In this paper I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Xhosa village in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, to analyse debates over the meaning of large lobola (bridewealth) payments in a community where few young people can afford to marry. Specifically, I document disagreement and ongoing negotiation between young women, young men, and elders over the meaning of these payments. Drawing on discourses of human rights and gender equality that are pervasive in South African public life, young women claim that large lobola indicates a man's love, and, therefore, his intention to treat a wife with egalitarian respect. Young men and elders, however, take issue with young women's claims to gender equality following bridewealth payment: what, they wonder, is being paid for if not gendered and generational privilege? In analysing such claims, I contend that interpersonal conflicts over the meaning of large bridewealth payments are indicative of broader conflicts about the meaning of kindship, status, and value.