When marriage issues breed national political debate

In Ivory Coast, President Alassane Outtara sacked his entire Cabinet in a row over a new marriage law which stipulated that wives be joint heads of the house. Outtara’s party supported the new law that could have made a couple responsible for all major decisions. The coalition coalesced and voted against it. “You can say,” a presidential aide told the Associated Press, “that this was the drop of water that made the vase overflow.”

They are often attracted to diversity, power and uncertainty, and tend to have strong sexual drives and high-octane energy to cope with their demanding itineraries and strenuous diaries. “Maintaining a normal home, family and marital life,” Dr John M.Grohol notes, “is nearly impossible” for these types.

As the examples below show, the history of post-colonial Africa is a tale of political experiments that came to catastrophic grief for leaders cursed with streaks of destructive psychosis, in between tragi-comic farces on the domestic stage.

Kwame Nkurumah, Ghana
The BBC crowned him the ‘African of the Millennium’ in 2000, ahead of even Nelson Mandela. Never mind Nkrumah had been dead for 30 years. The Ghanaian leader had always wanted to remain a bachelor and, at 48, only got married “for the presidency”. He requested then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to fetch him a bride and only got to meet Fadhia Rizk for the first time during their wedding on October 30, 1957, five months after Ghana became the first African country to attain independence.

When news of the private wedding was broadcast on radio, Ghanaian women wept. Twenty-three years his senior, Fadhia spoke Arabic and French. Nkrumah spoke neither, notes Martin Meredith in his erudite 2011 effort, The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence.
In a 1965 letter to Erica Powell, his secretary and confidante, the Founder of Ghana lamented about intense loneliness “which sometimes makes me burst into tears”. “They (the people) see me in public smiling and laughing, not knowing the burden of loneliness and isolation that I carry,” he lamented. “Marriage did not solve it — it has rather intensified and complicated it.”

On his jacket
His publishers wrote on the jacket of his book on neo-colonialism that he was “married with three children”. Well, Nkrumah demanded the line be deleted. And when Shirley Du Bois, the director of television in Ghana, sent Nkrumah a request to film him and family, here was the terse reply he received: “My view — and this may jolt you a little, Shirley — is that marriage does not exist in nature and does not warrant the importance that has come to be attached to it.

It is a bourgeoisie imposition, a mere contrivance set up as a matter of human convenience for protecting of inheritance rights, capitalists and property owners.” Nkrumah’s rule was punctuated by grand corruption, dictatorial tendencies and economic degradation that resulted in two assassination attempts and eventual coup after he foolishly interfered with the army in 1966.

Fathia and children Gamal, Samia and Sekou went to live in Egypt. Nkrumah lived in exile as the “co-president” of the Guinean head of state, Ahmed Sekou Toure. He died of skin cancer in a Romanian hospital in 1972 at 62, but his ashes were not scattered across Africa as he had indicated in his will.

Fathia died in 2007.
Francuisco Macias Nguema, Equatorial Guinea
One of the most ruthless dictators in post-colonial Africa, Nguema’s country only enjoyed independence from Spain for 145 days in 1968 before the founding president became a “cross between Pol Pot and Mobutu”, as Martin Meredith writes in The State of Africa.

The son of a witchdoctor was gifted with low intelligence and failed exams to qualify for a civil service posting three times. He was to despise academics with a twisted passion. During his reign, the use of the word “intellectual” was treasonable, and Macias Nguema thought it a sign of scholarship to wear glasses, so the bespectacled were detained.

In 1974, the pot-smoking Nguema chased all teachers, alongside a third of the population, to exile, banned newspapers, and closed all libraries and schools. During his 11-year rule, all that children learnt were political slogans. Nguema had the governor of the Central Bank paraded in the capital and executed in 1976 and all the money transferred, alongside the national pharmacy, to his village.

When the director of statistics published a demographic estimate which “The Grand Master of Science, Education and Culture” considered too low. He was dismembered to “help him learn how to count”.

Papa Macias also “ordered all former lovers of his current mistresses killed”, notes Meredith, and the husbands of women with whom he entertained ideas of breaking a commandment murdered. “The National Miracle” was sentenced to death, at 55, in September 1979 after his cousin, Colonel Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the current president, overthrew him.

Nelson Mandela, South Africa
Madiba is considered, give or take, one of the world’s living beacons of moral authority, but has had his fair share of frailties that has been glossed over by biographers. When British journalist David James Smith went researching on the unknown Mandela, daughter Zindzi advised that he skirts “the icon image” as he (Mandela) “knows he’s not a saint, he has flaws and weaknesses just like everyone else”.

Smith’s 2010 book, Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years, has been hailed as “no nonsense hatchet job” where we’re informed that his first wife, Evelyn Mase, a nurse, was uncomfortable with Mandela’s peccadilloes with women in the Africa National Congress (ANC) and in particularly, Ruth Mompati, secretary at his law firm. Mandela often took her home to their bedroom, and not to type letters... since “showers shortly followed”.

When Evelyne warned she would pour boiling water on Mompati if their raunchiness did not stop, Mandela became increasingly cold and distant. Mompati later became an MP, South Africa’s ambassador to Switzerland and Mayor of Naledi.