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Ruth is the first wife and she has three children, all girls. Spiwe is the second wife with one child, five-year-old boy Zivanai named after Ngoni’s father.
Ngoni has successfully managed to keep this polygamous situation away from Ruth for over seven years now. He does not want to upset Ruth’s Christian beliefs in absolute monogamy.
Over the past 20 years, Ruth has tried to convince Ngoni to come to church without success. But she did not give up. Sometimes she casually pointed to New Testament passages like Matthew 19 verses 4-5 which clearly state that “ a man must leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife and they twain, shall be one flesh . . .”
This way, Ruth was gently warning Ngoni not to even consider taking another wife because one flesh meant one wife. Although some aspects of their marriage had changed since they got married 20 years ago, they were still very much in love.
In the village, we all protected Ngoni’s privacy.
Nobody mentioned Ruth’s name in front of Spiwe.
Similarly, we did not mention Spiwe in front of Ruth.
We all pretended that Ruth was the only wife and the only muroora we loved. My other cousin Piri even went as far as saying that giving birth to three girls and no boys did not matter in the modern age.
Yet we all knew that my mother, Mbuya Chigondo, Beatrice and everyone here was so pleased to meet Ngoni’s son Zivanai.
The bride price for Spiwe had already been paid.
When Spiwe brought him to the village for the first time, we all commented on how much he looked like his father. We hugged and welcomed Spiwe with enormous warmth. Although Spiwe knew about Ruth and the girls, we tried not to talk about them.
Once, when Ruth asked Piri where she got the pink Caftan and brown wig from, Piri said she bought it at the flea market in Avondale.
Ruth said, “Ah Tete Piri, kunyepa! You lie. You do not even know where the flea market in Avondale is. Tell the truth. Who gave this to you?”
We all looked at each other with embarrassment, laughed and said nothing. Piri had a tendency to talk too much especially when she wanted to show off new things. Someone looking for favours from Ruth was bound to drop the bombshell one day and tell Ruth that Piri’s clothes, the new plastic cups, dishes and some groceries came from Spiwe, Ngoni’s second wife.
It was going be a big shock to Ruth.
On Christmas Day, Ngoni came home with Ruth and the children. Ruth brought her maid along to help her with the daughter-in-law duties like cooking, washing, fetching water and sweeping the village yard.
Then Ngoni took them back to Harare, swapped the wives and children and brought Spiwe and Zivanai to the village for two days. Spiwe came without a maid.
On arrival, she quickly put on her wraparound cloth, flat shoes, covered her wig under a head scarf and started washing the dishes without any helping hand.
We admired her strength, pace, ability to light a fire and prepare a meal so quickly.
Everyone wondered why such a beautiful young woman with a degree and a good job had accepted to become Ngoni’s second wife. But then again, polygamy in this village was nothing new.
In 1940, Sekuru Dickson asked Mbuya VaMandirowesa for approval to take a fourth wife, VaMaidei. Mbuya said no, three wives were enough because there was a severe shortage of land. A fourth wife was going to increase levels of jealous, competition and hatred among the women. Besides, as chief translator for the missionaries, Sekuru had been told several times that polygamy was a barbaric and savage practice, a sin that must be got rid of.
Why would Sekuru want to add more to his sins by taking a fourth wife?
One day Sekuru took the Old Testament to Mbuya and pointed to several verses in Genesis, Kings, Deuteronomy, Samuel and many others.
He said “Look, the missionaries have been keeping the Old Testament away from us. Our culture is no different from that of the old patriarchs in the Bible. It supports the practice of polygamy. We can marry more than one wife the way Abraham, Jacob, King Solomon and King David did.”
Mbuya did not care much about what the Bible said.
She said land shortage and managing time between four wives was going to be very difficult for a man like Sekuru who was no longer young.
But Sekuru did not listen. He said he loved VaMaidei more than he had ever loved a woman. Mbuya warned that such a beautiful woman would cause conflict between the other two wives. But Sekuru was adamant that VaMaidei would help light the fire of his youth and keep his blood veins flowing.
Mbuya gave in and Sekuru married VaMaidei.
They had two children, Zivanai and Stella. Sekuru loved VaMaidei more than any of the other wives. He called her VaNyachide, my beloved.
Whenever he came back from hunting game, he stopped at VaMaidei’s kitchen hut first to offload quantities of meat then he took the smaller portions to the other wives. Filled with jealous, the other wives went around saying VaMaidei had so much dry meat that she was using some of it as door strings.
Then one day tragedy struck. VaMaidei came back from the nhimbe, the collective harvesting of millet, complaining of stomach pains. Sekuru stayed in her hut with her. She vomited blood all night.
At dawn, Sekuru stood in the courtyard and called Mbuya shouting, “Mandirowesa come and see! The python has been swept away, mhungu yaerera.” For when death occurred, they only spoke in metaphors and did not mention it by name.
Mbuya came and cried for her co-wife. She shut VaMaidei’s eyelids. Then she closed her mouth. She called Mbuya Chigondo, my mother and all the other women and they prepared VaMaidei for burial.
“It was Dickson’s love that killed her. Someone gave Maidei a poisoned drink at the nhimbe. In polygamy, pabarika, a man must not give too much love to one woman more than the other. It brings trouble,” Mbuya said.
And yet, they all knew that it was not possible to love all the women equally. Everyone was convinced that Sekuru’s third wife poisoned Mbuya VaMaidei. They chased her away from the village and handed over her children to Mbuya Chigondo to bring up because she never had children of her own.
But polygamy did not stop with Sekuru Dickson.
At one stage, my own father took three wives when he was managing a store in Buhera on the banks of the Mwerahari Rivers near Nyashanu Mission.
The store had everything from maize, grounds nuts, and petticoats to paraffin. My father was big. He drove a red Honda motor bike, always wore a suit and spoke impeccable English. That in itself attracted women to him. They each had a child or maybe two, I cannot remember.
Resources were scarce. My mother then asked my father to make a choice between keeping all three young wives or educating us. My father must have chosen education because we saw the women leave one morning with the babies. We never saw them or our half brothers and sisters again. Sometimes when I meet someone who looks a bit like me on the streets of Harare, I am tempted to ask if, by any chance, his mother might have met my father in the 1970s in a store owned by a white trader called Jack in Buhera.
Mbuya Chigondo and my mother asked Ngoni to come out in the open about his barika. “How long will keep playing chihwande hwande, hide and seek with your women? That is not how it is done. Show some respect for your first wife.”
Ngoni just laughed as if it was nothing at all. “I am prepared to face the music one day. If I was monogamous, where would I have got a son? Who would carry my father’s name into the next generation? My father Zivanai was a polygamist and my grandfather Sekuru Dickson was a polygamist. I am simply following our tradition.”
My mother and Mbuya Chigondo reminded him that by not telling his first wife about Spiwe, he was breaking the laws of tradition. Such disregard for respect was bound to bring pain for Ruth when the truth finally came out. Was it not stressful for him to maintain such a secret for so many years?
Ngoni dismissed their concerns by saying he was not the only man in Harare keeping a secret about “small houses” from the first wives. Harare was full of small houses.
He was going to introduce the wives to each other only when hell broke loose, kana chabvondoka.
When that happens, both women were free to make a choice to stay in a polygamous relationship or to walk out. Given the shortage of eligible good men in Zimbabwe, Ngoni said Ruth could get really angry for a while, but eventually she was going to accept that she was man sharing.
Where else could she go, given that she did not have any income and relied on him for everything? The only risk was HIV and Aids. But once he was found out, Ngoni said he expected his wives to be faithful to him alone.
The stage for modern day polygamy was set. But one player may very well choose to opt out.
l Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.
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