A wedding is, by definition, a glitzy affair. Only a few families or individuals take away from its showy ways. Even then, its meaning as a grand decision of persons to live together until death parts them overshadows any form of human union. It often outruns blood ties. That is why it is big deal and a manifestation of the essential extravagance of human love.
Even the wedding of the poor played out in the most rural reaches carries in the society a sense of a celebration with peer. So when the world’s most famous monarchy decided to endorse in a series of marital rituals the coming together of one of their own with someone else, citizens from all meridians turned their curious eyes on Buckingham Palace.
The day came, and it was about the stars that came. But it was more than that. It was about two people who were well-known to those steeped in the British royalty and on Hollywood. But it was not that alone. It clearly was about money, the splashing of millions of pounds on flowers, attire, security, organisation of minutiae of order. But we know it was beyond that as well.
The wedding of Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle was the first of its kind in the world’s gaze for its statement about an interconnected earth. Prince Harry is royal, Meghan was not only not regal, she was far lower in provenance in terms of her class at birth than anyone that wedded a royal. She came from black neighbourhood in California where gangsters roost. Again, Prince is white, Meghan is mixed, her mother being black and a social worker.
Prince is royal, Meghan is an actress and that implied she represented a freewheeling profession as against the stiff propriety of the House of Windsor. It was royalty coming to terms with a modern world. A generation ago, it would be unimaginable that a prince would marry out of the circle of the upper-crust citizenry. Prince Harry’s mother, Diana, ran into royal tempests for trying to show romantic whiff of affection for men out of the soar-away world of English elitism. It did not matter if the man was a well-bred professional as in the case of the medical doctor with whom she tried to pursue an underhand dalliance. He is an Asian. Nor was wealth a winner for her hence the queen frowned at her open involvement with Dodi Fayed, an Arab with a great vault of money.
Meghan, who is now the duchess of Sussex, is an American as well, and it gives this union an international appeal and flavour. But in Diana’s day, she would not be in the reckoning. But it is a triumph of a tolerant world that Meghan married Harry, that the wedding had an arch bishop who came from a famous black Chicago church, that the melodic memory of the event came from an African American choir, that the bride did not wait for a man, a father, not even Prince Charles to give her away in marriage. It was royalty bending to the imperative of the 21st century, far away from the suffocating attitudes of Harry’s mother’s time.
But for us in Nigeria, we should learn from the British how they organise events of this magnitude. There was no chaos, no sense of desperation in trying to tie things together. It happened as though choreographed. The special invitees walked alone without the typical Nigerian retinue of security detail, hangers-on or relatives. Time was adored, even the time of the intending couple’s arrival, the arrival of Prince Charles and that of the queen were stated, and they arrived to time.
The royalty is found revolting because of the idleness it invokes. But the royalty is not a parasite on the British economy and its princes and princesses have turned it into a platform to do good in the world. We cannot say so of our royalty that turn kings into political tools when they are leeching their so-called subjects.
Again society weddings in Nigeria have become less about the wedding partners as about their peacocky parents. They use it as example to show off their wealth. The society learns about how big they are, their cars, their mansions, the honeymoons abroad. This happens without respect for a pauperised majority.
We live in a republican era, where no room should go for kings and princes. The British royalty seems the exception for today, but what it has done with the wedding of Meghan and Harry is to recognise that if monarchy does not recognise a republican reality, the reality will outrun it.
Our elite need to understand that.
