The language spoken in the south-central part of the DRC, where we collected our data in the DRC, bride price is referred to as la dot (the French word for dowry, though the payment is made from the groom’s family to the bride’s family) or biuma in Tshiluba. Although, historically, there was clearly variation in marriage re payment traditions, today bride price is practised among all ethnic teams in this the main DRC. Bride cost also functions as appropriate evidence of wedding, and a few aren’t considered married until a bride pricing is compensated in complete. Consequently, bride cost can be necessary for inheritance and determining the lineage of every young ones of this wedding since, if your spouse dies, it allows a spouse to show which they had been officially hitched. Chondoka (1988: 158) writes that typically ‘marriages had been all legalized on distribution associated with the “main” payments’.
The present day training of br (p. 121) work with the bride’s household). Using more descriptive information from Vansina (1966) on 300 cultural groups inside the DRC, we now have coded historical bride cost methods at a far more disaggregated ethnicity level. These techniques ranged from no re re payment of bride price, bride cost re payments of varying financial value, bride solution, or re re payment of dowry. The distribution that is spatial of techniques is shown in Figure 6.1. The image that emerges through the finer information from Vansina (1966) is broadly similar to that through the Ethnographic Atlas, although with much more nuance and variation. Of these combined teams represented in Vansina (1966), around 80 percent practised some type of re payment into the bride’s family during the time of wedding. Continue reading Spatial variation in historic bride cost methods