How COVID-19 has radically changed Uganda's wedding culture

Joseph Kiva and his new wife Debbie after their “scientific” wedding in Mukono, Uganda. Photo courtesy of Kiva.

KAMPALA, Uganda— After Joseph Kiva was introduced to his fiancée’s family late last year, he began organizing a huge wedding ceremony set for April 25, 2020. He invited 400 guests to attend a church service at Sts. Andrew’s and Phillip’s Cathedral in Mukono, some 13 miles from Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, church weddings in Uganda were a display of financial prowess. They were attended by hundreds of guests, drinking and dining deep into the night.

Now the threat of the virus has radically changed the way church weddings are organized.

When Uganda declared a total lockdown March 23 to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Kiva’s ambitious plans were brought to a screeching halt. The government issued a ban on huge congregations attending church weddings. Instead, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni introduced what he called “scientific weddings” to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Scientific weddings, President Museveni announced, can be attended by no more than 10 principal participants—the bride and groom, the best man, the maid of honor, two relatives from each side, plus a maximum of just two clerics.

Although Museveni had closed all of the country’s churches and mosques, he said that he allowed small-scale weddings on grounds that they are crucial for the creation of strong families. “Strong families are important for the good upbringing of future citizens,” he said.

The new normal requires that those attending church weddings wash their hands with soap or use a sanitizer before being allowed into the wedding hall. To organize their wedding, the bride and groom to be must also seek permission from Resident District Commissioners (RDCs), the President’s local representatives. Normally, requiring people to seek permission from government officials to organize a wedding would involve bribes. However, the president cautioned the RDCs against corruption.

For Kiva, the new restrictions meant he had to go back to the drawing board. He had already paid for some services involved in a big wedding and many vendors were not inclined to give refunds.

Kiva was however quick to accept his losses and realized that the new normal meant that he had to accept a simple, basic wedding, rather than an over-the-top, spectacular celebration. “The most important thing was to appear before a priest in a church to make our vows, remember that the coronavirus situation was only getting worse by the day,” Kiva said. “Everyone encouraged us to go for a scientific wedding and get it done.” 

However, seeking permission from the RDC to organize a scientific wedding wasn’t easy. “You had to register all the vehicles you wanted to use and their respective drivers and these could not change; at one point, one of the drivers I had hired and registered dropped out and I had to hire another one; it took me two weeks to secure the permission for the new driver and his car from the RDC’s office,” he said.

Normally in church wedding, the bride and groom and their entourage would be transported in a convoy of some of the latest model cars that chauffeured them around the town before taking them to the church. The display of splendor drew the attention and sparked the admiration of onlookers. Wedding guest would then be treated to a sumptuous buffet, with all the beer and wine they could drink, and with live music in the background.

“Nearly every female Ugandan who finished school and found a suitor dreamt of organizing a church wedding,” said Rita Mukisa, a college senior.  Weddings pre-COVID-19 were a display of class and social know-how. To properly mount such an event, the groom and bride to be mobilized financial support from their families and friends and sometimes even took out bank loans to make the event truly memorable.

Economist Prof. Augustus Nuwagaba told Religion Unplugged that he supports the scientific weddings. “They are cost effective. The money that is saved by organizing scientific weddings can be used to support the development of the newlywed couple after,” he said, suggesting that small-scale ceremonies honor the essence of what marriage really means, a couple starting a new life together.

Church weddings in Uganda were also preceded by expensive introduction ceremonies at which the groom was paid a dowry worth millions of shillings to the bride’s. The dowry would include gifts like cars, sofa sets, expensive clothes, as well as cows and goats.

The Ugandan government is not about to relax the ban on huge wedding celebration anytime soon. President Museveni recently said that it wouldn’t be wise to change the new normal of scientific weddings before a vaccine against the pandemic is found. Museveni stressed that large wedding gatherings can potentially further the spread of the coronavirus.

Most of the scientific weddings also lack what was usually a major component of marriage proceedings: the honeymoon.  Today, most couples return straight home after the ceremony. That is quite a contrast with the recent past, when newlyweds would spend their  honeymoon at flashy spots, like  five-star hotels, wildlife parks or holiday spots abroad. In any case, those destinations have been closed during the lockdown and some are just slowly beginning to reopen.

Wilson Turyashemererwa, a security guard who married his fiancée Mercy Kamusiime at a scientific wedding at All Saints Cathedral in the western district of Mbarara, said he felt lucky to have done it. Turyashemererwa said he spent only 300,000 shilling (about $100) on the wedding instead of the millions he had budgeted before the outbreak of the pandemic.

The Rev. Bobs Mwesigwa the Archdeacon of Mbarara, who presided over the wedding, urged Ugandans to stop thinking that weddings are about big entourages and inviting hundreds of guests. “Marriage is about two people, a man and a woman,” he said.

Before the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic, most Ugandans actually belittled couples that held small wedding ceremonies.  And Ugandans looked upon the small weddings in Europe and the US as a matter of being selfish.

Ugandans used to shun small wedding ceremonies so much that they avoided civil marriages, where the bride and groom and only one or two other people appear before the registrar of marriages to seal their marriage vows. And at the start of the lockdown, many Ugandans who had wedding plans considered postponing them until after the restrictions were lifted so they could throw a big wedding.

However, when the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Stephen Kazimba Mugalu organized a scientific wedding for his son Enock Musasizi in April, many followed suit. During his son’s marriage ceremony, Archbishop Kazimba said “that marriage is not made by big numbers of people who attend, but by the love between the bride and groom.”

Love and relationship counselor Hilary Bainemigisha (known as Dr. Love) told Religion Unplugged that he doesn’t condemn couples organizing scientific weddings as long as they adjust their expectations.

But Bainemigisha has reservations about scientific weddings. “Scientific weddings hurt the symbolic value of the wedding history in Africa. A wedding is not a private or family affair, but communal,” he said; “it is treated as a communal affair to announce that someone’s daughter has been married off and that she is now free to officially have sex and bear children.”  

Bainemigisha added that the hundreds of people who used to attend Church weddings as witnesses become stakeholders in the couple’s marriage so that it becomes hard to dissolve it. “In the West, where scientific marriages are the norm, marriages don’t last because they are a private affair. For a marriage to succeed, it needs that perception of no retreat,” he said. 

Bainemigisha added that organizing scientific weddings particularly for the sake of saving money denies the marriage a rich foundation of stakeholders, who would intervene in case of a fall-out between the couple, which could result in divorce.

Despite the fact that most Ugandans have accepted the new normal, there are still many couples who will wait for the end of the pandemic in order to put on a big wedding. Some couples who had scientific weddings have said they want to do a repeat—on a large scale.

John Semakula is a Kampala-based correspondent for Religion Unplugged. He also reports for New Vision, Uganda’s leading daily newspaper.