Online Reporter
Bruce Ndlovu Sunday Life Reporter
IN July, a video of an alleged Bindura woman disrupting a lobola ceremony went viral, ricocheting across social media timelines and capturing the attention of Zimbabweans from one end of the country to the other.
In five short minutes of footage, the unnamed woman became an unlikely internet star. With a child strapped securely on her back, she weaved her way between immaculately arranged tables and carefully placed decorations at what was supposed to be an auspicious occasion.
However, there was little auspicious about the commotion unfolding before the camera. As she paced around the venue, she shouted and grappled with some of those who tried to restrain or reprimand her. Yet, despite the fury boiling over, she did not smash a plate, overturn a chair or send a table crashing to the ground.
The only casualty that fine July morning was the peace.
Her grievance was simple: she had come to protest and if possible, stop the ceremony at which her husband was preparing to acquire a second wife.
If her pleas and protests were anything to go by, she had not been consulted about the process and was vehemently opposed to it. This was her last stand, a final and very public protest against a marriage she clearly did not want to see taking place.
The video provided plenty of amusement around Zimbabwe, with social media users liking, commenting and sharing the spectacle of a woman seemingly disrupting the prospect of her husband bringing home an unwanted “companion.”
As dramatic and headline-grabbing as the incident was, however, it was neither the first nor the last time a lobola ceremony would be gate-crashed by a disgruntled wife. Across Zimbabwe, lobola ceremonies have become an unlikely battleground, with husbands and wives settling their matrimonial differences while the once sacred ceremony is taking place.
However, beneath the spectacle lie complicated questions: who is to blame for all this? Are husbands going behind their wives’ back to marry second wives or errant women using such ceremonies as an opportunity to embarrass their once better halves?
Historian and culturalist Arnold Nkala argues that, contrary to the popular modern understanding of polygamy as a man’s unilateral decision, traditional practice placed the first wife at the centre of the process.
“The custodian of a polygamous marriage in our culture is the first wife,” he told Sunday Life.
“Polygamy was meant to acquire help for the wife and not the husband. That is why the man always had to first go and ask from his wife. When the man of the house wanted to take a second wife, he would go to his wife and give compelling reasons why he needed to take another wife.”
This meant that a second wife was not simply an additional romantic conquest for a husband who had grown tired of monogamy. It was, at least in Nkala’s account, an expansion of the household that had to be justified to the woman already at its centre. Under this arrangement, first wife could resist the entrance of a new party in the marriage.
“The first wife had the option to resist such a move but she also needed to have very strong reasons for why she was doing so. She needed to counter what her husband had stated as the reason why he wanted to take a second wife while also putting forward her own reasons for why this would be a bad choice. If they were not able to come to an agreement, elders would then be brought in to address the issue,” she said.
The negotiations could be remarkably practical. A wife might, for instance, remind her husband that his obligations to her family were still incomplete.
“The wife would state that, for such and such a reason, it would not be a good idea to bring in the second wife. Then the man would ask her what needed to be done for a second wife to be brought into the marriage,” Nkala explained.
“If, for example, a man might have been charged eight cows as the bride price and he may only have paid for two, the wife had the right to complain that he now wanted to take another wife when he was still in arrears with her family. She would then demand that he gives a few more cattle to show that he was really committed to her.”
The logic in situations was straightforward: the arrival of another woman should not mean the abandonment of the first.
“By doing this, it would be proof that he was indeed expanding their home and not dumping her. At other times, she would perhaps point out that certain things that needed money had not been done in the home, yet he wanted to add more expenses by taking another wife. So, he would be told to fix certain things before he was given the go ahead,” he said.
According to Nkala, polygamy was never supposed to be a licence for a man to accumulate wives while neglecting the one he already had.
“At the end of the day, whether the polygamous marriage rested on the approval or disapproval of the first wife. The problem we have in the modern age is that people now think that the decision rests with the man because he is the one that decides. That is not our culture. That is why we end up with these dramatic, sometimes violent incidents on lobola days”
Despite this, modern Zimbabwe presents an intriguing contradiction. Polygamy is often publicly shunned, discussed in hushed tones or treated as a relic of an older social order. For many couples, the expectation remains that marriage means one husband and one wife.
The law itself draws an important distinction between different forms of marriage. Under a civil marriage, the Marriage Act provides for a monogamous marriage, meaning one man and one wife.
Once married under this form, a person cannot enter into another marriage recognised under the Act, apart from a civil partnership.
The situation is different under customary law. A registered customary law union is potentially polygamous, meaning that one man may potentially have several wives. Such a union involves the payment of lobola and registration, and subsequent marriages must be contracted under customary law.
An unregistered customary law union is also potentially polygamous. It is characterised by the payment of lobola and allows a man to marry multiple wives under customary law. While such a union is supposed to be registered within three months, there is no sanction for failing to do so.
On paper, therefore, Zimbabwe’s legal framework recognises both monogamous and potentially polygamous forms of marriage. In everyday life, however, another arrangement appears to occupy the grey space between the two.
With many men gravitating towards a “small house” or “side-chick” in the modern lexicon, many men are in polygamous marriages in all but name.
Unlike the second wife of old, the small house may never sit at a family meeting where her arrival is debated. She may never have her relationship formally acknowledged by the first wife and there may be no elders summoned to mediate and no cattle discussed across the family table.
Instead, she exists in the shadows. A man may maintain a second household in another suburb, another town or even another country while returning home each evening to the woman who believes she is his sole wife.
Sometimes the arrangement lasts for years and sometimes there are children. Sometimes, the first wife only learns the full extent of her husband’s parallel life after he is gone.
At funerals, during the reading of wills, when relatives gather to divide property or simply when mourners arrive from places and families unknown to the widow, long-hidden relationships can suddenly acquire names, faces and children.
A woman who had existed as a secret partner may appear as a claimant and children whom the first family had never met may arrive carrying the deceased man’s surname or seeking recognition from relatives they did not know existed.
The formal second wife, whose existence was openly negotiated and incorporated into a household, is often treated as socially controversial. Yet the hidden “small house” can flourish without any of the consultation, accountability or communal negotiation that Nkala describes as part of traditional polygamy.
“Of course, cultural practise change over time but there was also some wisdom in the way that polygamous unions unfolded. Everything was out in the open and it was not meant for the sole benefit of one partner. Now, there is a bit of deception in how some handle their business,” he said.
