A Wedding Crasher's Paradise

When I was told that my friend Ajara was getting married and that a bunch of us were going to get matching outfits made I naively thought, "Oh snap! It's just like an American wedding, complete with bridesmaids' dresses and EVERYTHING!" As is often the case here, I could not have been more wrong...

To start with, no one in Mali agonizes over where to place Great Aunt Murkle on the seating chart for dinner. Anyone and everyone who hears about the wedding is welcome, rendering guest lists and any idea of planning completely useless. This fact makes Mali a virtual wedding crasher's paradise: no alibi necessary. Although if it was, you could just claim to be Fatoumata's cousin, since approximately 10% of the women in my village are named Fatoumata and they all have at least 20 cousins.

All of Ajara's friends and family members helped cook up massive vats of rice and tigedegena (peanut butter sauce) for the guests to eat. After an appropriate rest period to allow for digestion (since you don't want any cramps on the dance floor) the best part of the wedding got going. A group of musicians began to play jenbe drums and a large wooden xylophone known as the balani. Everyone got up and danced... and I do mean everyone. The 93-year-old wife of the village chief shook it like a Polaroid picture. After a couple of hours myself and my two best friends, Wasa and Fatoumata, took a break from the dancing to go visit Ajara in her bride hut. She was sitting and eating with all the unmarried teenage girls from our village (at the ripe old age of 22 I'm lumped into the married-women crowd) as one of them played music. Wasa's last name makes her a griot (a musician), so she started singing a call-and-response song and beating on a calabash bowl that had strings of shells attached. I don't know how to describe it... all I can say it that it was absolutely breathtaking. We spent the rest of the night dancing and went to sleep on the ground around 3 AM.

The second day was totally unlike anything I've ever seen before. Ajara and the 14 other brides being married that day were covered with blankets and led to the wash area to be ritually bathed (see pic below).
They then donned new bras, tight capris (Malian underwear, called the 'mpogo'), sunglasses, a necklace, and a headwrap. A woman dressed as a man (to signify the bridegroom) then sprinkled each bride with oil and baby powder and put strings of traditional baya beads around her waist. The brides were then paraded around the village under umbrellas which kept them shielded from the sun, while I was dragged around by an excited 95-year-old woman who insisted I take multiple pictures of each and every bride. Given the extremely conservative way women usually dress, the brides' bra-and-underwear-only outfit, worn without bashfulness in front of men and women both, absolutely shocked me. It's the Malian equivalent to walking around Costco dressed only in sexy lingerie.