Patience and Mark at their wedding. ‘Getting married as an African feminist felt like the pope renouncing Catholicism – uncomfortable and unlikely.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Patience Akumu View image in fullscreen Patience and Mark at their wedding. ‘Getting married as an African feminist felt like the pope renouncing Catholicism – uncomfortable and unlikely.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Patience Akumu Opinion Global development Can an African feminist have a white wedding? It’s complicated Patience Akumu I wanted to be a beacon of black feminist love; my friends and family teased me for being a sellout
About this content Wed 4 Nov 2026 07.00 CET Last modified on Wed 4 Nov 2026 07.01 CET Share W e had been together 20 years, had two children and had a customary marriage with our village sub-county two years ago without any real plans for a church wedding. So we called our second ceremony a celebration of love and not a wedding. How else would a self-professed African feminist survive being the centre of a colonial and Abrahamic religious ceremony that also manages to reinforce the most male-centred aspects of African culture?
Our invitations came directly from me and my partner Mark, not – as is traditional – from our families, and in the form of a playful gif featuring the song Love Potion from the South African group Mafikizolo, a reminder that this was a wedding on our terms. I thought they screamed “liberated African feminist”. But when my cousin Moses received his, he asked, “So, the patriarchy has won?”
He added the power and glasses of wine emojis to his WhatsApp message. I felt his judgment and victory reverberate from his London flat to my Kampala home. So I looked for reassurance from my professional network, a group of people I met 10 years ago when we worked at Oxfam, arguably the most feminist NGO of our time. Surely they would understand that me undertaking a white wedding was simply a celebration of love and not the greatest feminist sellout of all time.
When they received their invitations on the WhatsApp group, the first comment was sharp and swift: “Patience is wedding. Colonialism is powerful.”
The idea of getting married as an African feminist always felt like the pope renouncing Catholicism – uncomfortable and unlikely. My mother, in her wedding speech, said she never thought my relationship with Mark, who I met when I was 18 and just completing my A-levels, would last because I had been admitted to law school – and female lawyers never get married.
The guests laughed when she talked about how she thought a man like Mark could not possibly distract her academically oriented daughter. My husband and I joined in – intoxicated from dancing to a mix of old-school songs such as Sean Paul and Sasha’s I’m still in love with you , Next’s Wifey and African classics such as Quex’s Kachumbali .
Love is complex and the African feminist is not immune to it. For love, many African feminists have bowed to Uganda’s decidedly discriminatory marriage laws, humbly submitting the consent from their parents that is a prerequisite for grown women to have a ceremony in a church.
In 2023, the Ugandan constitutional court dismissed a human rights activist’s case that a church’s requirements for marriage were discriminatory because they required consent from the woman’s parents, not the man’s, and subjected couples to compulsory HIV testing. At the time, I wrote about how the court’s decision cemented the affront to women’s rights and inf…