What the Bride Price Calculator Understood

The app was called Bride Price, built by Nigerian agency Anakle, and it did exactly what the name promised: enter a few variables—leg length, facial condition, body weight—and receive a monetary valuation of your girlfriend, complete with a short editorial comment. The coverage was predictably horrified. The creator cited Nigerian tradition and held his ground.

I spent longer with it than I’d like to admit, not because it was useful but because there’s something genuinely fascinating about the logic underneath—the idea that desire can be itemized, that affection has a spreadsheet equivalent. The app made explicit what most social systems prefer to leave implicit. That’s not a defense. But the response that framed it as uniquely African or uniquely retrograde was doing its own kind of flattening, as if centuries of European dowry systems and the ongoing cultural practice of measuring women by their youth and fertility had ever been anything but codified transaction.

The "tradition" defense is the oldest move in the book. Tradition is just the name we give to arrangements that benefited whoever was writing the history. Still, there’s a dark honesty in a tool that comes out and says: yes, this is a transaction, here are the numbers. No romance as cover, no performance of feeling. Just a price. The engagement ring industry would never.