One big, happy family?

wife that such a union is a long road and one needs to have a pair of the hardy tyre sandals (manyatera) ready.
In other words, polygamous marriages are well-known for bringing grief as Tongai Moyo’s tragic case illustrated when his first wife committed suicide.
But another singer, Alick Macheso, seems to have come up with a magic formula for keeping his two wives happy after recently moving with both women into new dwellings. If pictures shot recently do not lie, then Macheso has got happy marriages.
In an apparent gesture of balancing his act with the provision of dwellings of equitable standards, the first wife is in the process of moving to her new home in Uplands, Waterfalls while the second one is getting ensconced in Eastlea.
Both are more than decent Harare suburbs.
At a birthday party for Nyadzisai, the first wife, which was planned and arranged by Tafadzwa, the second wife, the two women seemed quite happy to share the man in their lives.
But the pictures of that cosy little scene splashed in the Press has triggered mixed reactions from the public, especially women – many of whom feel that the set-up should not be put across as an ideal.
“I am sure that if one sat down with Nyadzisai for an hour and spoke to her woman-to-woman, she would admit that deep down she is not happy.
“No woman can be pleased that her husband has found another wife,” comments Edna Moyo, Harare a woman in her 40s.
Another woman says Macheso’s polygamous union is offensive in a country that is battling with HIV and spending so much money in awareness campaigns against multiple concurrent sexual partners.
There are many billboards, posters and adverts around discouraging people from having more than one sexual partner so as to take personal responsibility to stop the spread of HIV. A man in his 30s, who declined to be named, believes women are blowing the case out of proportion and not being fair on Macheso.
“It is a fact that many men out there have other ‘wives’ their ‘small houses’. So in other words they are just saying that you need to keep it hidden so they can pretend that they are the only ones,” he asserts.
Whatever the true situation on the ground may really be, for now the Machesos are presenting a united front as one big family.