adminLAST week we provided possible factors that in our view hedged the sacrosanct traditional marriage against the possible marital scourge of infidelity. We then referred to the judgment of the South African Supreme Court which led, in the final analysis, to the scrapping of the law that relates to adultery. The thrust of the argument of the Supreme Court was that there have been changes to the morals, resulting in moral decadence which has led to a rethink on the adultery of the innocent spouse.
This second instalment on the “small house saga” seeks to interrogate the claim of the South African Supreme Court regarding changing morals. That there have been changes wrought on African societies following conquest is not in doubt. Proselytising Christian churches were on the prowl preaching their new forms of piety. The Africans were expected to abandon some of their values in favour of the new ones as espoused by the various Christian denominations and Western education in general.
Wendy Urban-Mead writes, “The BICC missionaries came to their African field of evangelisation in the 1890s and throughout the twentieth century with a fairly static view of piety. The Christian in good standing with the church was expected to abjure fashionable clothing, practice abstinence from sex until entering a monogamous marriage, abstain from alcohol, remain aloof from worldly political associations, practice daily devotions of prayer, Bible reading and hymn singing in the home, and have regular attendance at church (Urban-Mead 2015:9).”
The church provided welcome intervention to the womenfolk who felt the oppression of the patriarchal society. The churches were at work dismantling what in terms of values principles, ideas, ideals and beliefs had held traditional society together.
The missionaries hoped the Africans were embracing their new values. For some this was not entirely true. They conveniently abandoned their traditional values but pretended to be embracing the new Christian and Western values. The African was “liberated” and, in reality, became a loose cannon bobbing freely without any rootedness in either of the two worlds.
The missionaries had a three-pronged approach: evangelisation, education and health provision. The three reinforce each other and had the ultimate net effect of undermining the cosmology and worldview of the African and in the final analysis his behaviour. That freedom was symbolised by the physical migration from the rural areas to the sprawling urban centres. In a recent interview a Mr Rusike who was an agricultural demonstrator at Enqameni in Gwanda described how the first bus to take people into Bulawayo was described as “uthathekile imota yamaswina”.
The movement was symbolic — a rupture with patriarchal controls of men in rural areas, a departure from the past and its values and the adoption of new, but not necessarily Christian ideals.
As captured in the above quotation polygamy was perceived as iniquitous. For a society such as that of the Ndebele there were far more women than men. Only the latter went to war and suffered heavy casualties at times as was the case during the Anglo-Ndebele encounters of 1893.
Surviving men married the widows and in the process avoided the creation of a growing pool of independent women who philandering men would have preyed upon. Polygamy became unfashionable but was never abandoned.
Instead, it was forced to reconfigure and go underground where it survived, only later to be branded as the “small house”.
Perhaps one of the several reasons why widows remarried was their economic status. A male-dominated society ensured that wealth was in the hands of men. Cattle in particular were acquired through war in which women did not participate. With the advent of urbanisation young girls and single women were moving into towns in search of employment opportunities. Many of them were engaged as “nannies” who raised the children of white families, did cooking for the family and did household cleaning. Meanwhile, the racist white authorities did not want the male labour force to bring their spouses into the townships where they lived. It is said Makokoba, or the location, got its name because the township native superintendent used to walk stealthily to check on the occupants of the houses.
Women were forbidden to live in the townships hence the names of some of the townships suggesting males-only settlements. Mabutweni was one such place where only male workers were supposed to live.
Nature being nature has its own pull forces that bring men and women together regardless of how hard we try to separate them. The “bachelors” in the townships began to prey on the ladies that sneaked into town illegally and those who provided domestic service. These were the humble beginnings of the “small house” saga. The labour-created bachelors with their wives in the reserves engaged in extra-marital relations with the women in town. That was the time for invented traditions. Married men living separately from their wives sanitised the forced separation and made it appear the right and traditional thing to do. The local labour migrancy led to changing ideas about adultery. Urban centres were becoming dens of iniquity created and sustained by the racist policies of the whites who did not want the African to live side by side with him and yet needed his labour in the factories.
Local labour migrancy soon developed a new breed of long-haul labour migrancy to cities, farms and mines beyond the national boundaries. Absence from home was prolonged. Working male migrants returned at the end of the year and sometimes after longer working stints. The separation of families to serve labour interests was at the root of the creation of adultery and related disease such as HIV-Aids in later years. Essentially, ideas regarding morality as pertaining to extra-marital sex were changing to facilitate the demands of labour which was coloured by racial considerations. The injiva social phenomenon, actually an economic reality, has its roots in the labour practices in southern Africa where invented traditions were crafted to sanitise an iniquitous and adulterous relationship resulting from the separation of families for extended periods.
Westernisation saw the supportive extended family shrink considerably. Individualism was taking root and that meant each person minded his or her own business. Morality was no longer a group, let alone a group-enforced issue.
Liberated individuals defined their own sense of morality independently of the traditional authority limited only to the rural areas. The towns were free from patriarchal control and ideas regarding morality. The towns became cultural melting pots in terms of morality and general values. The centre could no longer hold and things began to fall apart as Chinua Achebe the iconic Nigerian novelist expressed it.
The white men in the towns, mines and farms breached racial protocol to access the black girls and women. Only the males constituted the disgusting natives but not the females who they ravaged without let. The abused women were fast changing ideas about sexuality. The whites were by and large not marrying the African maidens. The emerging coloured population bore evidence of what the white males were doing with the African maidens. Sexually transmitted diseases took root.
Sex underwent perceptual change. Whereas in the traditional set-up the fundamental reason for sex was procreation now it was sex for fun or sex for entertainment. After all, in the towns the white councils did not provide adequate entertainment facilities for the black folk. A bachelor’s room became an unofficial slaughter pole both in the sexual sense but also as far as morality was concerned.
The sanctity of the marriage institution was eroded. New ideas regarding the institution and how to preserve it were under severe and relentless onslaught. In southern Africa the racially designed labour laws were uniform.
The social effects were felt broadly in the region. While South Africa faced tougher labour laws than Zimbabwe, the latter also faced similar moral decadence with regard to sexuality. In that regard, the Supreme Court ruling is not without foundation or justification.
Online Reporter
Londile Moyo