I love all my West African friends pondering on the recent events in Windsor and then going on some wakandian history binge, like: “they had a traditional wedding, so why can’t we stick to ours too?”

Great. We should. But not because of them. Because, in actual fact, they didn’t really go “traditional”.

This was not how the pre-Christian Celts, Pitts, “Saxons, and the other lots, in Britain married.

Heard of “handfasting”? Exchange of ancestral swords? Piercing the horn? Taking an extra bath in the year? Honey meld? Yeah, those were the real “traditional” wedding rites in Britain before they got christianised.

In fact, even many centuries after becoming Christian they used to follow the two-tier approach that should be familiar to most Africans.

The Groom-to-be would visit the family of the bride and pay three types of dowry (it wasn’t a joke). They will thereafter have the handfasting fun and “jumping the fence” and all ’em “traditional” rites. Then later they will do the church wedding.

Until some plucky, probably foreign monk, in the 12th Century declared some of the dowry and “family-consent” practices pagan. Then in the 16th Century, Canon Law caught up with the Council of Trent and tightened the marriage rites thing further.

Now that Christianity is on the wane, and the vestiges of Roman and Norman colonisation are being stripped away to reveal Britain’s “true native culture”, some of the “pagan” stuff is coming back.

Yep. It isn’t only Africa that has a “woke history” burden.