The Philosophy of Marriage Among the Meta People of Cameroon

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UNIVERSITY OF BAMENDA, CAMEROON DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY TERM PAPER ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE AMONG THE META PEOPLE OF CAMEROON BY IJANG BIH NGYAH NOVEMBER 2010 INTRODUCTION A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one (Ephesians 5:31).It is an occasion of joy in the society to see a man and a woman coming together in holy matrimony. Marriage is a relationship between one or more men (male or female) and one or more women (female or male) The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines marriage as a legal relationship between a husband and a wife2.For the African, marriage is a combination of two lives, families, and sometimes even two communities. The union of man and woman is the celebration of the natural continuity of life. An African proverb holds that “A man without a wife is like a vast without flowers”3Philosophy on the other hand is popularly understood as “a person’s or a group of person’s attitude to life”4 Philosophy comes from two Greek words ‘philia’ meaning love and ‘sophia’ meaning wisdom thus philosophy is the love of wisdom .Meta is a tribe in the North West Region of Cameroon located about 35km to the North West of Bamenda. It is situated on the western highlands of Cameroon which essentially a volcanic plateau is offering a landscape towering up to 2100metres. The major economic activities of the people include farming, petty trading and handicraft. The most common language used by the people is their mother tongue which is the Meta language catalogued in the Atlas Linguistique du Cameroon (ALCAM) under No 6845.Today unlike the pre-colonial era, the indigenous traditional marriage system exist in conjunction with civil and Christian nuptial practices. The major pre occupation of this paper is to examine what marriage is to a Meta man and how significant this institution is
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