Summary Of To Be Neither Seen Nor Heard

In To Be Neither Seen Nor Heard: The Life of Faith Alexandra Kamya Nasolo Mulira by Jessie Ruth Gaston. Originally from Mississippi, Gaston received her B.A. in psychology at the Occidental College in Los Angeles, and received her Master’s in African Studies and Ph.D. in African, African American, and Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Gaston currently works as a professor at California State University in the History Department. Moreover, she has also traveled broadly to Africa and has served as the co-director for two Fulbright-Hays Seminars in Africa: one being in Ghana (2001) and the other in Rwanda (2004). In 2007, Gaston was welcomed as a member of a CSUS Educational Delegation to the Republic of
Women in certain societies often married at a very young age some as young as 15 and were expected to have children soon after marriage. Those who could not have children or had labor issues such as a miscarriage or infertile were seen as outcasts. Marriage became a concern as Faith reached her twenties and began to get older. Yona Mukasa Mulira who visited his brother at the hospital that Faith worked at found interest in her. Yona later proposed to Faith and asked her father for his blessings. Yona was one of the few men who dressed in rich like attire. He often wore his military uniform with his badges indicting his rank. When he wasn’t wearing his uniform Yona would wear a striped shirt with wool trousers. “During those days, very few men could afford to wear such attire. We girls thought highly of those few men who could afford to wear such trousers. We could even count the few families whose menfolk wore them.” (Gaston 35) Unlike western marriage traditions, most African marriage traditions required the groom to give a dowry or bride wealth. “In the Baganda tradition, a groom-to-be provides the parents of the bride-to-be with a ‘bridal wealth,’ referred to as Omutwalo in Luganda. It is an important customary tradition, and the tradition can be found in most African societies.” (Gaston 40) Westerners have misunderstood the meaning behind the tradition of bride wealth. In African cultures bride wealth is a way to compensate the bride’s parents for taking her daughter whom they have raised and feed for years. This form of bride wealth is paid in many ways. Some pay with cattle, money or service to the bride’s family. The price of the gift or value is determined by the brides social and economic class, parents also as from bride wealth that will last a long time and remind them of their daughter. However, Faiths father who was influenced by westerners abandoned