Knocking on the door
The first formal step is ịkụ aka, knocking on the door. The groom goes to the bride's family with his father or a senior relative and says why he has come. In some towns he stays home for this visit and his father speaks for him.
Kola nut is broken and palm wine is poured, and the mission is announced in a riddle: at Umuchu the spokesman says there’s a ripe ụdara in this compound, or a goat that ran in here, and they’ve come to ask about it. Nothing is agreed on this visit. The bride's people say they’ve heard, and that the answer will come after enquiries. In Things Fall Apart the visitors talk about everything except the thing they came for.
In some places the answer used to come with the firewood. Suitors' families sent firewood, coconut and fried breadfruit to the girl's parents, who ate the gifts of the one they accepted and returned the gifts of the ones they didn’t.
Both families ask around
Then each family goes and asks about the other. This is ịjụ ese, the enquiry, and both families have to be satisfied before anything else happens.
The first thing being checked is whether the two are related. You don’t marry inside the ụmụnna, and in many towns not inside the village either: a kinsman marrying a kinswoman is an abomination against Ala, the earth. The enquiry also asks about character, conduct and capability on both sides.
Families also ask about illness in the family and about the standing and reputation of each household. It’s not a formality. What comes back can delay a marriage or end it.
The list, and the middlemen
Next comes the list of what the groom's family brings. Palm wine, yams, gin, tobacco and kola nut are on every list. At Mmaku it runs to sixteen jars of palm wine and twenty-one tubers of yam, with drinks and cloth.
It’s worked through in stages across several visits rather than delivered in one day. Alongside it sits the bride price itself, settled through a middleman on each side, onye aka ebe, who carries the money, stands witness, and is the one sent to recover it if the marriage ever ends.
Today the bride price is usually a token, and people say so plainly: a woman isn’t for sale. It wasn’t always symbolic. At Awgu an ordinary marriage took two or three bags of cowries, or two hundred yam seedlings before cowries, and the haggle had a script: the bride's family hands over a bunch of broken broomsticks, the suitor's party withdraws, removes some, and hands them back, in rounds, until both sides are satisfied. Achebe's elders close it with the line that marriage should be a play and not a fight. What is paid is then shared: the father, the mother's own portion, the ụmụnna, the married daughters and the unmarried girls each get their due.
Igba Nkwụ, the wine carrying
This is the wedding day. The bride kneels before her father, who hands her a cup of palm wine, and she goes out into the crowd to find her husband, with her friends around her.
The guests get in her way on purpose. Young men pretend to be her husband and beg for the cup. She keeps looking. When she finds him she kneels, drinks some of the wine, and gives him the rest. He drinks, and follows her back to her father, who puts her hand in his and blesses them.
That’s the marriage made public, witnessed by both families and the town. What makes it binding is the bride price: ask in any Igbo town and nearly everyone will tell you the payment, not the wine, is what authenticates the union.
After the day
The bride leaves with her husband's people at the end of the day. Her parents send her off with idu obu, the gifts for starting a new home: cooking utensils in the old days, and now anything from a broom to a car.
Then the visiting runs the other way. The groom invites her family to his home and feeds them, ọgọ bịa mara be, so that they see where their daughter is living, and go home content.
Not every marriage finishes with a wine day. At Mmaku the rites can stop at the third stage if money is short or the bride is already pregnant.