Death of family values worrying

resulting in joblessness, infidelity and domestic violence. These three causative factors of divorce, among others, do appear to derive from the demise of the African extended family systems that had for generation upon generation, stood guardian over the stability of marriage and family through an inculcation of values that bound together families into a solid institution rather than divide them.
In the warm ashes of the extended system of old, we now have in Zimbabwe and indeed in other “post-modernist” African societies a reconstituted extended family system more or less modelled on the West and with a nuclear family of between two and three children the in-thing.
Because of modernisation and industrialisation, the parents of nuclear families are working people who meet and socialise after work and over weekends, most of the time away from home at a pub. That scenario relegates the important role of socialisation of children by parents to domestic workers, the pre-schools as well as other institutions of early learning.
And so what do we see happening in the passage of time with the old custodians of good family values also falling away in the autumn of their lives? We see socialisation of serial womaniser by serial gallivantor with “small houses” the nemeses of marriages in “modern” Zimbabwe.
In the past “small houses” were integrated into the family home through polygamous marriages and divorces were a rarity, thanks to the role played by elderly relatives in protecting the family unit. Today, marriages are no longer regarded by young couples as sacred as life itself. For even while making marriage vows before an officer solemnising their union some young couple will say with their lips:
“Till death do us part”, while under their breath Satan commands: “Say after me: “Until joblessness, small houses and domestic violence do us part.”
But neither of these things should surely shake the foundations of marriage strongly anchored in Christ, as marriage vows suggest. For instance, a job or money should not be conditions upon which the stability of a marriage is based. But love and God’s blessing should be the pillars of a strong marriage and family unity.
That husbands become pugnacious on becoming jobless and harass their spouses into seeking a divorce just goes to show the hopelessness of marriages that lack Christian and family values as their bedrock. Wanton lasciviousness, often driven by “the right to do” what one wants aggravates an already sorry state regarding the vulnerability in today’s “rainbow” society.
Which suggests that the foundering of large numbers of marriages recorded by the High Court in Bulawayo at about 216 between January and August this year with obviously many more cases of divorces taking place but unreported across the country – that social change is taking place at a dizzying pace and degree, leaving behind many families without breadwinners and might send hapless, starving children foraging for leftover food in street rubbish bins.
Sociologists will contend, controversial in some cases, that some domestic violence is provoked by women, trying over zealously to re-assert their “rights” in the spirit of “women’s liberation” to the extent of challenging the husband’s authority over them as heads of the family.
It should be obvious to anyone that the death of marriage means also the death of the Zimbabwean family and society and, at another level, a big threat to the church for which the family is an integral and critical constituent. And so to save the institution of the family from total disintegration a new, wholesale re-socialisation of Zimbabweans young and old, with Christian and African values that made marriage resilient in the past must necessarily and as a matter of agency, be considered and applied.
Any scapegoating by merely blaming this or that deviance by man or that woman will only prolong a situation whose boomerang effects might eventually become too ghastly to contemplate. What is more, a strange new “small housing” phenomenon of aggravated sexual assaults whereby women abduct men drug them then gang rape them, has set itself in motion in this country, leaving civilised society aghast.
If these sexual aberrations are allowed, the country might eventually become a case study for others as a prototype of Sodom and Gomorrah. For highly literate Zimbabwe, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah should invoke ghastly memories accompanied with the wrath of God visited upon connoisseurs of flippant sexual indulgence which quashes any values of self-respect and dignity both of which make the difference between human beings and dogs.
Zimbabweans should stop sinking so low by relegating holy matrimony into acts of inconsequential unions similar to those acted out by little children when playing house.

l Stephen Mpofu is a former Editor of the Chronicle.