In this article, I will outline central transformations of African marriages and link these changes to four broad anthropological approaches which I label as metanarratives. I use the term ‘metanarrative’ to stress the rather high degree of coherence within these four anthropological interpretative frameworks. Similarly, James Ferguson applies the concept of a ‘metanarrative’ to analyze the way anthropologists among others have perceived and constructed ‘modernity’ and ‘urbanization’ in the Zambian Copperbelt (Ferguson, 1999: 14–17).