I was full of joy when my two sisters announced me their wedding in a year ago. However I was fearfull and wondering I will be able to plan and organise a proper weedding ceremony in a city like Bukavu.

As anytiime I face a challenging situation or a big project in my career I started looking on the internet to check if there was any guide or any writing on weddding in Congo. Unfortunately,I was not successfull in my search. Reason why I decided to write this guid to share my experience acquire while palnning for my sister wedding.

In this post I will share my experience with the planning and the lessons learned during that exercice.

Context

Bukavu is a city in East of Congo, in the South Kivu province. The region is populate with two major tribes Bashi and Barega. Bashi are tradittional people and they have they was of organising weddings. I am Mushi and my sisters got married to bashis our wedding was celebrated according to bashi tribes. Despite the fact that the two weddings were celebrated according to bashi tribes, the traditions and ceremony related to this weedding are almost similar in both regions. Most of weddings I have attended in the Kivu region share the same ceremonies and rituals.

The ceremonies

A wedding in congo has a lot of ceremonies and sometime you can get lost in them. But the major one are:

• Discussion de la dot: This is equivalent to the introduction ceremony it is when the groom family come to meet the bride familly and discuss the dowery. The dowery ou la dot in french is the gift the groom familly give to the bride family. In bashi tribes it valued in cows. So For both of my sisters they gave 4 cows each. In later time people use to bring cows to the family but more recently they start to give the equivalent of four cows in money. A cow in south kivu is valued in USD which mean I received 4000 USD for each of my sisters a dowery. After the introduction the wedding dates date is fixed and the ceremony is announced.
• The real ceremony always happened 6 months after the introduction, for my sisters we had the introduction in December 2023 and the wedding for both of them was planned in six months later or in End of April 2024 and beging of May 2024.
• The first even of the wedding ceremony is the traditionnal wedding, or dot in french. It is the moment when the groom familly bring the dowery to the bride familly. Since my two sisters were married to differents men who came from different famillies we need to organize two different traditional wedding. That mean organizing two different parties on two differents dates. The budget for each ceremony was around 1000 USD for both food and drinks.
• Next to the traditionnal wedding there is a civil wedding, it is when the couple go and register the wedding ceremony to the registry office. For me understanding this is the official wedding ceremony. For this we need to make arragment and book a location where the couple and the registar will celebrate the wedding.

• After both the traditional wedding and civil wedding we need to plan for the part, or goodbye party. It is the party where the groom familly say good bye to their daughter. Some may ask why not having one single wedding party? It used to be like that in the ancien times, both famillies could come together and organize one wedding ceremony where they could invite both of they family. But as family get bigger it start becoming almost impossible to come together and agree to one way of organizing the party. Reason why the groom familly and the bride familly host a part of their own. As our familly was marrying two of their daugthers we had to host only one party for this ceremony. And this is the biggest party I planned.

• After the traditionall party and there is the religious wedding ceremony, where depending to the couple religion, they go to Church and celebrate the wedding ceremony. This is what europeans call white wedding.
• On the same day as the religious wedding, the groom familly host their own party where they invite they guests. As my sister were married to two different men, they husband need to host two different parties for their own. I was not involved in those ceremony reason why I will not talk about them in this post.
• After the traditional wedding, the civil wedding, and the religious wedding, we need to plan for another extras ceremony called for this ceremony the groom family went to visit the place where they daughter were married, most of the time the groom mother give the kitchen to his daughter in law. This is a small ceremony and does not involve a lot of people. It is just close familly member who are invited to it. I have talked alot about ceremonies, let me talk about them and how i planned them.

The planning.

A key of a successful party in DRC as anywhere in the world is around the following component: the venue, the guest, food, drinks, musics and service. Let me explain how I manage them to have a successfully party.

The venue,

The venue is the first element I booked for the party. We decided to host our party at the Elizabeth Room. Which is one of the best venue in Bukavu. I booked the venue 6 months in advance. In total the venue costed us 2000 USD but at the booking moment we paid an advance of 500 USD . A few week before the event we confirmed with the rest.

On top of the venue we booked the decoration, generally decoration cost around 600 USD but we managed to get for 350.

So in total the venue and the decoration costed us 2350. USD

Look how stunning the venue looked like

Put the picture of the venue.

Choosing the master of the ceremony

Food

With the venue, we started looking for food to give to people. We found a catering service that decided to give us food for 6 USD per plate. With 500 guest that costed us 3000 USD in total. The food was amazing, that was a great deal.

One of the best thing about the catering service we used was their punctuality. The were on time, which does not happens everyday in Congo. We invited them at 5:30 PM but there were there with the food at 6PM.

Look how the menu was presented and the food we have on the menu.

Drinks

The drinks, the drinks. Beside the food , the venue, the quality of a party in Congo is judged by the drinks. Bashi people are known to be drinking and they will judge your party based on the number of bootles of beer you serve. There is no proper heursitic for planning drinks in a party in Bukavu.

People always recomend to keep 1/3 of your drink to be non alchoolic and the rest to be alcoholic drinks(beer, liquors,wine etc). As we were expecting 600 hundred people our first goal was to have 3 serviing of drinks or 1800 bottles. In those bottle we had 600 for non alchoolic drinks or sucree and 1200 of alcoholic drinks or beers plus wine and liquors.

You can find more about how I planned the drinks on this excel spreadsheet. But for drinks we spend around 3200 USD.

Note that, we largely over estimated the drinks and we ended up with a lot of left over on alcohol. We ended up with drinks worth 300 USD or more. In Bukavu, with 2000 or 2500 you can host a good party. For the drinks.

Invitations

One of the most challenging part of this party was the invitation. As we were hosting the first wedding in our family we didn’t who to invite and who to not invite.

The first thing we agreed on was the number of guests. We set the number to 500. Then we had to find how to fit people in that number. It was not an easy task but we organised that into categories. We had a fixed number of guest for each category.

We invite my former dad friends, my mum friends, the member of our family, two in laws familles, the friend of brides and our neighboors.

We planned the party for 500 persons but we ended up having 600 person, and they are still people who felt left out because they were not invited to some ceremonies.

Another challenge was to decided which type of wedding invitation to use. The internet is filled with a lot of invitation template but we decided to make our inviatation locally. It costed us 300 USD to print 250 USD. We spent aorund 1.2 USD per invitation.

If we had time, we would have ordered the invitation from china. However it took around 30 days to get them delivered in Bukavu. I was able to get good sample from supplier in China but I decided to not go with them.

We got the invitation 45 days before the event, after getting the invitation, we decided to plan the sitting arrangement.

Sitting Plan

Upon making a list of invitation, we made a sitting plan and decided how to sit them in the party. This was one of the key for our party success. The sitting plan was not perfect, but with this done at 70% I was sure the party was a success.

On the ceremony day, I had to teach my protocole how to sit people and it took around an hour and they master this perfectly.

Delivering Invitations

Deliverieng invitation in Bukavu is not an easy task. With no post, or delivery service we need to find an efficient way to deliver them. Luckily we hosted a familly reuntion a month before the wedding where we invited most of our family member and from the event everyone got this his invitation. For the rest my mum and sister decided to deliver them door to door to the guests.

People without invitations

On top of the 600 persons who comes with invitations there is another group of people who does not come without invitations. Those are the groom and bride family, mostly 4 person! The friend of the bride 10 - 20 persons. So on top of the 600 persons you need to save place for another 40 persons.

DJ

Booking a dj was not a difficult task, I found a family friend who was willing to work play music for us for as little as 70 USD. We found him two days before the wedding . He had pre made wedding playlist, we made a few customization for us and we were well sorted.

host

On top of the DJ we needed a host of the event or what we call animateur in french. We picked a family friend who managed to host the whole ceremony for this. He was booked for 70 USD.

protocole.

Another key factor for the party success was the servant, or protocole. They are the group of guys who serve in the party. They are waiters. We managed to serve the 600 guest with around 30 waiters. Each waiters was serving 20 people on

I will say this is all for a successful wedding ceremony in Bukavu, please not that it only for the me a male hosting a party for my sisters. There are a lot of things I didn’t take into consideration here! Things around decoration of both the civil ceremony venue and the white wedding venues those are aspects of the woman deal with bride deal with the gromm.