Urbanised City Modernised Marriage: Examining Internal Dynamics of Marriage Institution in Contemporary African Societies

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of urbanisation on marriage institutions in contemporary modern African cities. The study use contemporary modern African cities to depict and construct how the internal dynamics of the structure of marriage system in Africa has been affected by modernization and increasing urbanization in the colonial and post-colonial period. It examines   how modernisation has spurred new socio-cultural and economic contest and reshaped power relations within marriage institutions in urban centers. In doing this, relevant empirical data are drawn for this work from oral interviews and documented instances of divorce cases in urban cities in Nigeria. The data for this work are analysed within the frame of modernism which promotes self-consciousness and views traditional socio-cultural ways of life as unsuitable for the spatial-order of socially progressive system of modern industrialised cities. The study argues that modernisation and high pace of urbanisation significantly reshaped internal structure of marriage institution in colonial and post-colonial African cities as against African cosmological view of marriage as a stage of human trajectory of birth, growth and death