My African Wedding

On April 9, 1976, K and I were married. It wasn’t the wedding we had planned. Ours was to be a bucolic event in the French countryside. Instead, we were married – along with 13 other couples – in a hot and dingy municipal building in the capital city of one of the poorest countries in the world.

It was civil ceremony. In French. We were the only foreigners in the group. And – to our surprise and unexpected shame – K was the only bride without a dowry.

Here’s how it happened…

Separation and Reunion 

About a year earlier, I had received a phone call from the Peace Corps, telling me that I had been accepted into their program as a volunteer. I was working as a bartender, and was looking for work as a teacher. The Peace Corps gig would have me working as an assistant professor of English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Chad. Getting accepted into the Peace Corps was a big thing at the time, and being able to go from slinging beers to parsing poetry was an opportunity I could not ignore.

K and I had been dating for a while. It felt like it was time for us to get married or break up. We decided that I should seize the day, she would stay behind, and we would see how the separation felt.

Flash-forward eight months… I wrote to K, telling her that I missed her terribly and asking if she would consider leaving the comfort of her hometown and family to fly across the ocean to France and then fly again to Chad to spend the next 15 months with me.

She said yes.

A Plan and a Budget 

Our plan was to meet and get married in Paris, have a honeymoon in Normandy, and then fly back to Chad to begin our life together. To cover the travel and honeymoon expenses, we would each save every penny we could possible save.

I was making just $200 a month, which covered my rent and food quite nicely, but didn’t leave much for anything else. But I was determined to make this happen. So over the next six months, I reduced my spending to the bare necessities. I limited myself to two very small meals per day and managed to save about half of what we needed, while losing about 15 pounds that I didn’t need to lose.

My wife-to-be was apparently not so motivated. Although her earnings were several times greater than mine, at the end of that six months she had managed to save… nothing!

It looked like we’d have to wait at least another six months and I’d have to lose another 15 pounds. But K’s father – perhaps thinking it was time for her to leave the nest – came up with the other half of the money.

We set about making to-do lists and researching hotels and wedding venues in Paris. Alas, we soon came up against French bureaucracy, famous for its haughtiness, arbitrariness, and inefficiency. As foreigners in Paris, we discovered, it would be impossible for us to be married there in so short a time.

Thus, Plan B emerged: Meet up in Paris. Honeymoon in Normandy. Fly to Chad. Get married  there.

So that’s what we did.

We spent several days in Paris, in a tiny room on the fourth floor of a small hotel on Rue Saint-André des Arts. The room was barely large enough to contain a twin-sized bed and a miniature armoire. No TV. No AC. And the bathroom was a cubbyhole beside the stairwell that we shared with the other hotel guests on our floor. But the cost was $25, and we had a window that overlooked the French Quarter. It was perfect.

We spent the rest of our “honeymoon” touring Normandy, staying at little inns, visiting churches, monuments, and graveyards, eating croissants for breakfast, baguettes avec jamon et fromage for lunch, and dinner in the local bistros.

Then off we went to N’djamena, the capital of Chad…

K’s First Night in Africa 

I can only imagine K’s culture shock – what it must like been like for her, after a week in the French countryside, to find herself in Chad.

As I said, Chad was, and is, one of the poorest countries in the world. It was also, at the time, being rattled by tribal antagonism, rebellion in the northern states, and an economy that was absolutely medieval.

I had been shocked myself when I first arrived. But Homo sapiens, as we know, are adaptive animals. Our primary evolutionary skill is to adjust to our circumstances. When you are older, such adjustments can be difficult. When you are young, as we were, it is fairly easy.

By the time I brought K to N’djamena, I had been there for nine months. I was inured to the ubiquity of poverty. I no longer noticed the unpaved roads, the tin huts and wooden shacks. I no longer smelled the stench of the open sewers. I no longer heard the droning in the fly-infested food markets. I no longer saw the cripples hobbling along on their elbows or the ribs of the shirtless beggars as they lifted their cups towards us as we passed by.

In contrast to everything K saw on the streets, my apartment (which was the size and had the furnishings of a freshmen dorm room) was a refuge from the outside world. It was located on the fourth floor of a six-floor building that resembled the sort of buildings you might see in a bare-bones housing project in America. But each unit had a small balcony with a view of the Chari. The Chari was the living artery of N’djamena, a river whose shores were littered, but whose water was clear and beautiful and glinted at night, reflecting a blanket of stars that was thicker and brighter than any we’d ever seen before.

This was to be our home for a while – and despite its limitations, K seemed happy with it. At least for the first week or so.

Until…

Cocktails and Fireworks 

It was a quiet evening. K was in our apartment reading. I was in the parking lot talking to Sergei, a Russian friend who was also a teacher (of history) at the university. He was proudly showing me his new motorbike.

“Even in Moscow, you can’t get a motorbike like this,” he boasted.

“I’ve been asking for a moped since I got here,” I admitted with a twinge of jealousy. “The Peace Corps said I’d get one, but it won’t be new and fancy like this.”

“I guess your Capitalism isn’t so great,” he teased.

And then, suddenly, an explosion! Then, moments later, another one. And then the sound of something flying through the air. And then machine gun fire.

Sergei covered his bike with a tarp and we rushed upstairs to our apartments. When I opened the door, I saw K standing on the balcony.

“What are you doing out there?” I shouted.

“What’s going on?” she shouted back.

I had no idea, but the noise was very close and very loud and very scary. It felt like our building was being attacked. I flashed back to an experience my parents had, early in their marriage, when they were living in Guatemala. One night, they found themselves in the middle of a civil war. Their building was bombed. A shell casing actually flew into their apartment. (I remember my father telling the story of how he baptized my eldest sister that night under the kitchen table.)

I turned off the lights and urged K to take cover under the bed. I stayed there with her for a while, and then, keeping as close to the ground as possible, crawled onto the balcony to see what was happening.

It was, indeed, a military assault. But our building was not the target. The target was the Chadian president’s compound, which was about 200 yards down the street.

I could see tracers lighting up the sky and then, in flashes, armed vehicles with soldiers behind them, firing their weapons and being fired upon.

I stood up, went back into the apartment, and was assuring K that we weren’t in any danger when the doorbell rang. It was Sergei, with a bottle of Johnny Walker in his hand. Beside him was François, holding a bottle of Pernod.

“We have come to enjoy the fireworks with you,” Sergei announced. I introduced them to K, who smiled at them and then looked at me quizzically.

For several hours, we stood there on the balcony, enjoying our drinks and speculating on the origins of the conflagration. We suspected (correctly, it turned out) that it was some sort of attack by the Muslim rebels that had been active until then only in the north.

Finally, the explosions ceased and then the gunfire stopped. And since our bottles were now empty, I bid my friends goodnight.

When they were gone, K turned to me and asked, “Has this happened before?”

The Church and the Agnostic 

I was born a Catholic. And though I had lost my faith when I was 14 or 15, I knew that a “proper” Catholic wedding would make our families happy.

As it happened, there was a beautiful Catholic church in Ndjamena – a stately cathedral in the center of town. But when I went there to arrange for our service, I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t as easy as it was in the States.

No. To be wed in the cathedral of N’djamena, Father Jean Pierre explained, we needed to do more than write a check and fill out a form. We were required to pronounce ourselves to be true believers and observant members of the faith.

“I’m pretty sure my fiancée believes in God,” I told the priest. And I did my best to convince him that, although I had lost my faith, I was sure I could find it again. “And don’t forget,” I added, “both of us come from families that are very serious about their Catholicism.”

Father Jean Pierre was not impressed. He could not help us, he said. Unless I was willing to atone for the very mortal sin of leaving the church and spend several weeks relearning the catechism under his supervision, we could not be married in the cathedral.

Shuffling Towards I Do

And so we found ourselves several weeks later in a large, austere room on the second floor of a concrete structure that served as the city hall. At one end of the room was a table, where the “officials” sat. Facing that table were rows and rows of chairs.

We had been instructed to arrive with four witnesses. Two of our witnesses were a couple. (The husband was my colleague in the English Department at the university.) The third one was a fellow volunteer that I’d befriended during our early weeks in Chad. The fourth was an unfriendly American that worked at the embassy. He was rumored to be a CIA agent, perhaps because of his fluency in French and gruff manners. He made it clear that he didn’t want to be there, but he was obliged to witness the marriage and sign some documents so our marriage could be recognized in the US.

I wore my best pair of khaki pants and a blue dashiki (which I still have). K wore a simple cotton dress. She looked, as she was, beautiful and innocent.

There were, as I said, 14 couples. And since each couple had four witnesses, that meant a total of 84 people, with each couple and their witnesses sitting in their own row. First, there was a longish speech by the mayor. That was followed by 14 rapid-fire marriages that consisted of the couple answering a few questions, signing a document, and then leaving the room.

This produced a weirdly comical effect. As each couple left the room, the rest of us were required to get up and seat ourselves in the row in front of us. It seemed like an absurdly unnecessary procedure, but the mayor insisted upon it. So, we did it, obediently, as instructed.

The ceremony was done in French, the official language of Chad. This put K, a monolinguist at the time, at a disadvantage. Oddly however, notwithstanding the fact that she could not understand a word that was being spoken, she somehow picked up on some things that I was hoping she wouldn’t notice.

The most problematic was the little speech that the mayor gave before each marriage. It began like this: L’homme il es chef de la famille; ce que il dit, la femme doit suivre. (The man, he is head of the family; what he says, the woman must adhere to.) The moment those words came out of his mouth for the first time, K turned to me and said, “What did he just say?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I whispered. “Just say oui when he says it to us.”

The Grand Finale 

Being a university teacher gave me privileged status with the embassy that the other Peace Corps volunteers did not enjoy. On top of the list of privileges was that my fellow university prof and I were often invited to embassy functions. The embassy crew generally looked down upon Peace Corps volunteers, but it was diplomatic to invite one or two to such events, and the ambassador’s wife seemed to believe that university teachers were the least reprehensible. So, we eventually became friendly with several embassy personnel.

One couple in particular adopted us socially. And when they found out about our dismal wedding, they offered to throw us a party. It was a full-blown affair, with music and food and several dozen invited guests. There was even a two-tiered wedding cake, with a miniature plastic bride and groom on top.

And so, despite setbacks and unanticipated surprises, we had everything we could ever have hoped for… just in different places and in a different order.