Efya is allowed to change her mind

Efya got married this week. After a traditional ceremony in Accra, she wore a high-neck white lace gown with a long train, and her husband, the Nigerian singer Tomi Thomas, kissed her hand for the cameras. Most people did the decent thing and said congratulations. Scroll a little further, though, and you’ll find the other crowd: the people who treat a woman’s wedding as a chance to settle old scores.

Long before she was anyone’s punchline, Efya was a singer people respected. Born Jane Awindor in Kumasi, she went to Yaa Asantewaa Secondary School and earned a theatre and music degree from the University of Ghana. Her mother is the filmmaker and talk show host Nana Adwoa Awindor. Efya was runner-up on the first season of Stars of the Future in 2008, has won Best Female Vocal Performance at the Ghana Music Awards four times, signed to Wizkid’s Starboy label in 2016, and runs her own clothing line, The Native Chic (Wikipedia has the full run). Tomi Thomas is a working musician too. He came up in the Nigerian group L.O.S, whose 2013 single featured Banky W and Sarkodie, and in 2021 he toured the UK with Stonebwoy. Two artists in their thirties decided to marry. That’s the whole story.

The receipts

Within a day, someone had dug up a 2020 Adom TV street interview. In it, Efya says marriage isn’t in her plans, that she isn’t ready, and that being successful doesn’t mean she has to marry. She was in her early thirties then. Now she’s married, and the internet behaved as if it had caught her in a lie. One commenter said that if the marriage fails, she’ll learn to settle for any man who will have her. Another said she had some questions to answer. A third offered that wisdom comes with age, which sounds kind until you hear the smirk in it.

Questions to answer? To whom? She said she wasn’t ready. Six years later, she was. Some people call that hypocrisy. I’d call it a life. Most of us would hate to be held to everything we said in our early thirties.

The arithmetic

Then came the maths. The reports put Efya at 39 and Tomi Thomas at 33. A post on X pointed out the six-year gap with a grimacing emoji, called her a feminist who spoke against marriage in her twenties (the clip is from her thirties, but never mind), and said Ghanaians were wondering what changed. At least one outlet put the two ages right in the headline.

Flip it around. A 39-year-old man marries a 33-year-old woman and nobody counts. Nobody even notices. We only reach for a calculator when the woman is the older one, as if she must have trapped him or he must be settling. The man himself put it plainly at the traditional ceremony: he sent his parents with the marriage items because he wants Efya as his wife.

The guessing game

None of this is new for her. In 2022 a video from a birthday party set off pregnancy rumours because of her belly, and she laughed at how wild the comments were. In February 2025 she performed in Kumasi, slipped off a detachable skirt mid-set, and Instagram decided again that she was pregnant. Some of those comments were plain crude, though others pushed back and told people to stop judging women’s bodies. This February, when videos from a private event leaked, people announced she had married in secret. Her management said it was only a knocking ceremony, that the family hadn’t finished the process, and asked people to stop adding pressure.

So for years strangers have treated her body as a guessing game. Is she pregnant? Why not? Why now? And when she does what so many people expect of a woman her age and gets married, the goalposts move. Now she’s too old for him, or a hypocrite, or a feminist who gave in.

Congratulations would do

To be fair, most of the reaction this week was warm. Fans called the wedding beautiful, and one wrote that she was really happy for Efya because the young guy clearly loves her. The meanness came from a loud minority. But it’s a familiar minority, and it tells us something about how we treat women in public life. A woman who doesn’t marry is a cautionary tale; one who marries late is a punchline. And if she changes her mind, she apparently owes the rest of us an explanation.

She doesn’t. In 2020 Efya said she wasn’t sure she’d ever marry. By 2026 she’d found someone she wanted to marry. Both things can be true, and neither is anybody’s business but hers. If we can’t manage congratulations, we can at least manage silence.