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Christian Marriage between Tradition and Modernity: Catholic and Protestant Women and Marriage Education in Late Colonial Cameroon, 1939–1960

On 20 February 1958, Sister Marie Madeleine Handy, a Cameroonian Protestant deaconess, along with over one hundred women delegates from the parishes of the Evangelical Lutheran and Baptist Churches in Cameroon, opened the territory’s first Protestant Women’s Congress. Also in attendance at the assembly were Dr Madeleine Barot, a French human rights activist, theologian, and director of the World Council of Churches, African pastors Thomas Ekollo and Jean Kotto, and fifty women delegates from the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon (EPC) and the Lutheran Churches of Togo and Gabon. After several days of deliberation, the delegates adopted three resolutions, which were sent to the synods of the newly autonomous National Council of the Evangelical and Baptist Churches of the Cameroons (CEBEC) and the EPC.1 All three resolutions concerned marriage and proposed explicit and weighty obligations to be undertaken by African women to ‘defend women’s dignity’ against ‘customary’ marriage practices like polygamy, bridewealth and child marriage.2 Throughout their proposal, the Protestant Women’s Congress claimed that Christian marriage was under attack not only from unscrupulous members of society, but also from ‘undisciplined’ and ‘indulgent’ churches which neglected to enforce doctrine and failed to invest the resources necessary to instil the basis for moral marriage among their followers. The first resolution called for ‘stricter measures against women who marry polygamists’. The second instructed a revision to the catechism curriculum to ‘reflect the needs of youth today . . . who forget that the Bible orders that man and woman unite exclusively within marriage’. This resolution proposed that catechists and instructors – a great many of them women – standardise Christian marriage preparation courses. Bridewealth, or forms of wealth exchanged between families and lineages as part of marriage agreements, was the focus of the third congressional resolution, and was condemned as ‘exploitation’, ‘encouraging polygamy and prostitution’ and ‘an attack on women’s dignity, liberty, and biblical teachings on marriage’.3 This final