Paper short abstract:

The act of avoiding an unwanted marriage has long held the attention of the ethnographers of Guinea-Bissau region. But the recently increased presence of Evangelical churches in the hinterland adds new contours to intergenerational tensions, reconfiguring established forms of "secondary marriage".

Paper long abstract:

Classical ethnography pointed to secondary marriages as being key to understanding the ways in which conflicts concerning conjugality may be settled in West Africa. This usually meant that what Europeans would see as a dreadful marriage of a young bride to an older polygynic man might be destabilized by his acceptance of her extramarital sexual relations, which might then result in another marriage, as well as by her autonomy later in life, regarding obligations to her first husband and his household.

In Guinea-Bissau, amidst tensions between elderly men and their young cadets, when a woman avoids an unwanted marriage to a man chosen by her kin, that is usually described in ways where nubile women appear to be taken off the realm of regulated marriage transactions, through elopement and kidnapping, as if themselves had only two passive options: to "be clothed" by the man ruling the house where she has been brought, or "made to run away" by a younger lover.

With this paper I intend to discuss this set of narratives in the light of their inscription in a broader arena of political interventions, focusing on what in my fieldwork (2013-2016) emerged as a network of institutional support to runaway brides. Because even if female sexuality appears to be nowadays looser than before, a look into the changes brought by the growing presence of Evangelical churches in the hinterland may point us to a broader understanding of the moral disputes that surround the young-bodied and their destinies.