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.”

Evelyn, who later became a halcyon in the Mandela story, filed for divorce in 1955 citing desertion, cruelty and repeated assaults. It was finalised in 1958, the same year Mandela wed Winnie.

During his 90th birthday, most of his children snubbed the event at his home in Qunu, Eastern Cape. When she surveyed her family closely, Zindzi Mandela, who was “really upset with how he was treating my mum”, concluded that Tata’s domestic dictatorship and endless spats with Winnie had ripple effects on them as adults: “No wonder, all of us — Madiba’s kids — have had rocky relationships. I filed twice for divorce... tried again... it fell apart. My sister was also having difficulties, she’s separated now. Makgatho also had a second marriage. There is a pattern here.” Ndileka painted a family canvas of melancholic hues and tension that simmer every now and then, “but wait until he dies. They will come to a boiling point”.

Mobutu Sese Seko, DR Congo
Mobutu never missed Sunday mass in over 30 years, in between consulting witchdoctors — such as Senegalese guru Ndiuga Kebe — before taking important decisions while presiding over a brutal, thieving dictatorship.

In the disillusioned manner of most dictators, images preceding television news bulletins showed ‘The Redeemer’ descending, godlike, from the clouds. On his way to having nine children, Mobutu married Bobi Ladawa, his uncle’s widow, as a second wife in 1980. His first wife Marie Antoinette had died, but he also kept Bobi’s twin sister, Kossia, as a mistress with whom he had two sons, his Belgian son-in-law Pierre Janssen recalls in Inside Mobutu’s Court.

It didn’t end there.
“The president enjoys an almost feudal droit du seigneur,” a former Cabinet minister told Time. “He uses sex as a tool to dominate the men around him. You get money or Mercedes-Benz, and he takes your wife and you work for him.” “If I ever leave power,” he told Time, “it will be only in conditions of beauty, never under pressure.”

Alas! ‘The Great Leopard’ fled under a hail of bullets and all when Laurent Kabila’s ragtag militia took Kishasa, the capital, in May 1997. The man who kept Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince as his bedside bible died of prostate cancer two months later. Tablets for “rheumatism and syphilis” were found on a table inside his luxury yacht, the Kamanyola.

Jacob Zuma, South Africa
Zuma (right) currently has four wives of the six he has married. Dlamini-Zuma, the former Home Affairs Minister, divorced him in 1998, while Kate Mantsho Zuma wrote a suicide letter in 2000 terming their marriage as “24 years of hell”. This April, Zuma, the father of 21 children, wed Gloria Ngema, his current fourth wife. For his proclivity to women, the tabloid press has nicknamed the 70-year old “Pants of Love.”

Kamuzu Banda, Malawi
The ‘President for Life’ never married and had no children, at least officially. However, he kept Cecilia Kadzamira as Malawi’s ‘Official Hostess’. The man who demanded that his portrait be hanged on the highest wall points, including in churches, and who banned mini-skirts, beards and kissing in public, died in ’97 aged 99. Thirteen years later, Jim Jumani Johannson appeared claiming to be Banda’s son from an affair with Merene French, Banda’s English secretary when he was in England.

Jonas Savimbi, Angola
Savimbi was a ruthless dictator who led the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) with a messianic sense of destiny, notes Meredith, but possessed a twisted sense of lust: He made one of his teenage nieces, Raquel Matos, one of his concubines. Her parents protested. Savimbi had them executed.

According to his biographer, Fred Fridgland in Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa, he chose the wives of his senior officers, but had to sleep with them first before they were married. After escaping a dozen-plus assassination attempts, Savimbi succumbed to gunfire from government troops in 2002. The widely read intellectual, who was fluent in seven languages, was 68.

cmutunga@ke.nationmedia.com