By Nondumiso Sibanda

LAST week we looked at how donors seem to constantly inform the agenda for non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Whatever project we seem to see coming from the NGOs has its origin in the West.
Sadly one of those projects which has been ongoing has been that of the marriage laws in Zimbabwe and this week we are going to be looking at how it all begun.
Yes dear readers, we are looking at the start of the turmoil and why we are now finding ourselves in this very precarious position.
When the white imperialists first invaded Zimbabwe over a century ago, we had our cultural ways of getting married.
Just the payment of lobola or roora was enough to say that two individuals had gotten married.
With the coming of colonialism and the British imperialists led by Cecil John Rhodes, we were informed that there now was a new certain type of marriage which was immediately called a civil marriage also known as the white marriage.
They stated that this was the best marriage that was needed and they called upon Africans to repent of their evil marriages and take the civil marriage route.
They did not totally banish our marriages, but they already began the course of making them look inferior.
They called them ‘Native marriages’ and they were governed by the Native Marriages Act. They then ensured that natives who were blacks in this case, would have to get married before a native commissioner so as to validate their marriage otherwise it would not be valid in their eyes.
Aya ndiwo atinoti pachishona mashura!
In the Shona and Ndebele culture a marriage is between two families and the moment that the marriage is validated through the payment of roora/lobola, it is enough.
The two parties are then deemed married and they have the blessing from their parents and the community.
They are husband and wife.
However for the white settlers, this practice was deemed barbaric.
They wanted to keep account of everyone and to monitor everything and in so doing they deemed such a marriage illegal as long as it was not done before a native commissioner and registered.
Thus begun the journey of tearing our culture and our way of living.
It was never necessary for Africans to register any marriage.
The agreement was between two parties and their families at large.
Now came this new creature of registration and it has been haunting Africans since then.
So the long battle begun and more Africans to gain acceptance started buying into the idea. It was the in-thing to have the civil marriage and those who did not want such marriages were mandated to get married in terms of the Native Marriages Act.
It was so bad to an extent where some black African men, when they had their spouses visiting them, their wives would be arrested for prostitution because their marriage was not registered.
In other words just mere payment of lobola/roora was not enough.
One’s wife would be arrested and called a prostitute if there was no paper to prove that the two were married.
Our culture and way of life was slowly being fried and set ablaze by the new Western ways. What we knew as a valid marriage was immediately looked at as a non-event; a non-event dear readers all because our way of doing things was different from theirs.
So the battle continued and more and more women were made to feel inferior and to feel like prostitutes and with time our brains were also washed to believe that the customary marriage in itself was not enough; after all its non-registration made it null and void.
The Native Marriages Act was eventually called the African Marriages Act and today it is called the African Customary Marriages Act, a carry-over of the inferiority alluded to right from the beginning by the colonialists.
As we are speaking right now, there is a war dear reader.
A war between the NGOs and the Registrar Generals office since the NGOs are once again calling for the compulsory registration of all marriages and the harmonisation of all marriage laws.
I ask once again then, as to whose agenda and project this is.
The face of colonialism is back once again with the face of NGOs.
In this case one is finding that the so-called women’s rights organisations are getting funding from the West to carry out this project.
We have evidence ladies and gentlemen which shows just how far these people are willing to go to stop this s called barbaric practice.
For this week I thought I should share with you the historical context so that as we go on to delve into the documents supplied to us by the Registrar General, we will begin to see the sense and understand the struggle for identity that we are currently under as a nation.
At this current juncture our marriage laws and even inheritance laws have been poisoned by NGOs and our children are losing out all because of this donor meddling.
We shall continue to go deeper with the story in next weeks’ article as we see why NGOs really want this achievement and what the donor agenda is.