Peacocks do it, bees and wasps do it — and many tribes in Africa do it by means of various natural colourful social dances and rituals for finding a marriage partner and for dealing with the eternal problems of life.

Should one compare what these indigenous people did — and still do — with to our less exotic current and mandated way of introducing men ad women, one can only come to the conclusion that we White Westerners may in general be a drab lot.

In the 1950/60s when I worked on that vast continent as a foreign correspondent and journalist from Cairo to Cape Town,  I was continually coming across various colourful tribal ceremonies that were far more exotic and mystical than anything we could produce today.

Take the Ndebele people, for instance, living in their rondavel mud-walled homes in South Africa. Here, when a family have a daughter ready to offer her hand in marriage, they very artistically paint an advertisement in tribal code on the walls of their home, accentuating all her feminine virtues.

These are also the people who bedeck themselves in the most exotic ceramic beads, even including women covering their entire necks with what they consider to be their most precious bottom drawer jewellery.

When a potential son-in-law should nonchalantly pass by and see the inviting ad, certain senior ladies of the village bedecked in beads comparable to Jacob’s coat of many colours, assemble around the girl’s home and sing and dance, imploring her to dress in her finest beaded apron to meet the curious, but probably highly  nervous visitor by this time.

Unlike the Ndebele, the Wodaabe tribespeople living near the River Niger in West Africa advertise their young men as suiters for the young women, rather than the other way around. Here, all male teenagers are required by custom to dress up like peacocks in their best warrior garments, complete with long ostrich feathers tied to their heads.

They are then paraded before the young excited girls of the tribe and are required to show their front teeth by smiling and, hopefully, catching someone’s enquiring eyes with an agreeable nod or two.

When I visited a Wodaabe village so many years ago, I was told that this was the only chance that young men had to find a partner for life. It was considered bad manners to make contact with the opposite sex on any other ordinary day.

According to my information, most of the young and eager men in the parade I witnessed managed to ogle their way to a friendly date by smiling at their heartfelt choice and receiving a joyous nod in response.

The San people of Bechuanaland’s ‘Garden of Eden’-like birthplace of humanity thousands of years ago are possibly the most serious tribe when it comes to finding a wife. Here, all the members of each small nomadic group of tribespeople first have what is called a “healing dance” in which they enter a stage of deep trance, very similar to the Whirling Dervishes.

When this is over, the tribal elders tell their unmarried youngsters which young man is best suited to one of the girls. The theory is that the elders know each of the teenagers in their relatively small group and, with the help of the Universe, they know which personalities will suit each other.

In Ethiopia, the art of being allowed to date within the Hamar tribe requires all their suitable young men to succeed in jumping over more than a dozen cattle held side by side. The backs of the animals are greased with mud and fat to prevent the young male contestants from running along their spines.

When I viewed one of these potential engagement parties, the eligible Hamar girls wait with baited breath, hoping that their secret for love will come true by their choice of young manhood managing to jump as far as possible across the animals’ backs before continuing without falling off.

The moral of the story here is that, if you succeed, you are allowed to choose the girl who has previously shown you a favourable glance or two.

But, for the hapless losing competitor, the script is very different. He is judged to be not enough of a man and has to wait for a year before the next cattle jumping session is held for a possible lifetime of love.