Thu, 11 May 2017 10:54:28 +0000
By Philip Chirwa
Last Thursday’s story, “A Tale of Missing Bride”, provoked so much reaction from readers that I have found it necessary to devote this week’s column to their comments.
As expected, the reaction was a mixed one – some praised Margaret for doing what she did (failing to turn up at her own wedding because she did not want to marry a ‘ liar’ for a husband), some condemned her for acting ‘childish’ while yet others narrated their own stories of similar nature.
A Mr Mvula of Kabwe had no kind words for the groom, David. He felt the man deserved what he got.“Why cheat? David should have been frank with the lady that he was a Grade 9 school-leaver and that he was just a general worker at Zambia Airways,” he wrote. “Why cheat her that he was a Form Five working as an assistant engineer with the national airline when he knew this was a total lie?”
But a reader called Harriet Tembo thinks Margaret behaved in a childish way. She wrote:
“The fact that she claimed to have loved him even when the man had lied to her at first and disclosed it to her then was evident enough that he too was in love with the wife- to- be and didn’t want to leave (any) stone unturned .
“I think the best thing she would have done was to sit down with elders and talk before the due date unlike what she did , that just showed the type of human kind she was. At least she should have considered all the time she put in with the help of family and friends. I think if at all she had a heart she would have at least showed it,” wrote Harriet.
Meanwhile, former Zambia’s envoy to Japan, Ambassador Godfrey Simasiku, wrote:“I always admire your well articulated articles in ‘Here and There’ column in the Daily Nation.” According to him, last
Thursday’s article rekindled memories of a wedding between a Bemba lady and a Lozi man that took place in a Lusaka Roman Catholic church some years back.
“Guests were seated in the church awaiting the arrival of the wedding parties. As per tradition the groom arrives first but in this case this is not what happened. The bridal party arrived as scheduled with the usual pomp and splendor associated with such ceremonies. But there was no sign of the groom. Meanwhile, the priest to solemnize the marriage was there waiting.
“As you can imagine, this created a tense moment in the church. Where is the groom? people started asking themselves. Finally, after frantic consultations, a search party of close friends and relatives were tasked to go to the groom’s home to investigate what was going on. As luck would have it, they found him.”
The tragedy of the matter, however, wrote Ambassador Simasiku, was that the search party found the groom, clad in his wedding suit, lying sprawled on the ground, dead drunk and unable to walk! Meanwhile his bestmen, all smartly dressed for the big occasion, just stood there, helpless, not knowing what to do.
“Things fell apart, to quote Chinua Achebe.,” he wrote. “Upon receipt of the shattering information, the priest had no alternative but to announce the cancellation of the wedding and that marked the end of this ‘Stranger than Fiction’ episode. People just trooped out of the church, shaking their heads.”
And in a follow up telephone interview with this writer, Ambassador Simasiku said it was not clear what motivated the groom to behave the way he did. He however dismissed the suggestion that “ jealous people” might have deliberately “poisoned” the groom with a strong alcoholic drink just to embarrass him on his wedding day.
“The information we gathered after the abortive wedding was that the groom had told close friends that he was no longer interested in marrying the girl and that earlier that day he had been seen drinking at a local pub. Why he had made such a sudden decision to dump his would-be bride at eleventh hour, that I don’t know,” Ambassador Simasiku said.
And a former senior civil servant, Mr Phillip Daka, now a farmer in Petauke, Eastern P:rovince, sent in another interesting, but moving, piece concerning a wedding without a reception! Now let us listen to him:
“In 1978, I was in the People”s Republic of Benin on a UNESCO assignment. My host told me this true story. A young man from Benin was working in the Cameroon as an expatriate. He went back to his home country on a short leave to marry. On the day of the wedding, the father of the bride died.
“It was decided that the wedding in church should go on and that the dead body be kept in the mortuary. The following day, the burial took place after mass in the same church. The food for wedding reception was consumed at the funeral. True story told to me by Jacob, Secretary, National Commission for UNESCO, Benin.”
Another reader, who preferred to remain anonymous, sent me the following story:
“UP TO this day, Umphawi Banda and his bride, Harriet, still can’t believe that such a thing ever happened to them. But then it did: what promised to be one of Ndola’s most colourful wedding ceremonies one Saturday afternoon in 1997 suddenly turned into a sad affair when, at the eleventh hour, a pastor assigned to bless the marriage refused to perform the rite!
”And come to think of it, this was done in full view of the congregation, which had packed the Broadway Reformed Church in Zambia building to witness the momentous occasion: The bride and the bridegroom were already seated at the altar, ready to receive the pastor’s blessing, when the man of the collar sent word that he would not solemnise the marriage!
“As the reader may imagine, the reaction from both the wedding couple and the congregation was one of shock and disbelief. Everybody was stunned. Never before had anyone in the congregation experienced such a thing: a priest refusing to bless a marriage at the very last minute!
“About an hour earlier, the young couple had been at the Ndola City Council where a registrar of marriages pronounced them husband and wife and subsequently issued them with a marriage certificate.
“The church was the next stage and then there would be a reception at the National Vocational Rehabilitation Centre later that afternoon.
“Umphawi had been the first to arrive at the church where arrangements had been made long before for the blessing of their marriage. Harriet and the bridemaids arrived a little later along with an excited bridal party. After Harriet had taken her place by Umphawi’s side at the altar, the church spokesman called for silence.
“Then he delivered the bombshell: ‘I’m sorry to announce to you that the priest will not be coming to bless this marriage. Please accept our apologies. Thank you’.
“Umphawi’s mother, a staunch member of the church, was so shocked that she broke down and wept uncontrollably. Harriet, too, started weeping while the groom’s father, Mr. Davison Banda, and others were stunned into silence, not knowing how to react to the situation.
“The embarrassed young couple managed to quickly get over the shock and walked out of the church without the usual pomp and splendour associated with such ceremonies. They jumped into their cars and proceeded to the National Vocational Rehabilitation Centre for the wedding reception.
“The Lusaka-based pastor was later to explain that he had refused to solemnise the young couple’s marriage because Harriet had just joined the church from the Watchtower Sect. The other reason, he said, was that the couple had come too late for his blessing.
“Umphawi’s father, Mr Daveson Banda, refused to accept the excuse advanced for refusing to bless his son’s marriage and demanded an unreserved apology from the church for the embarrassment caused to his family.
“The old man, a former magistrate turned businessman, explained that he had arranged for the ceremony a month earlier and had been told to incur all the expenses for the pastor who was to travel all the way from Lusaka for the function at the church’s insistence.
“ The reasons given for refusing to bless my son’s marriage are not convincing and I reject them in toto,” Mr Banda said.
And in a similar story which happened in the early 1960’s, a Zambian girl had been engaged to a Zambian-born Congolese boy. According to the story-teller, the boy’s family in Congo had insisted that the wedding was to be conducted by a pastor from that country and everything had been arranged to this effect.
The Congolese pastor would come to Zambia and conduct rehearsals with the young couple in preparation for the wedding. But for reasons only known to himself, on the day of the wedding, the Congolese pastor sent word that he was unable to come!
Placed in such an awkward situation, the bride’s uncle, who was a pastor in a different church, decided to do something about it. He felt that since the young couple loved each other, he was not going to allow the Congolese pastor to ruin their happiness.
“There and then, our uncle decided to officiate at the wedding himself. To this end, he told the people who had come to attend the wedding to shift to his church, where he performed the wedding rites and married the couple,” the reader wrote.
The story had a happy ending in that the young couple were later to be blessed with eleven children, clearly showing that where two people are in love, there is nothing you can do to separate them, and therefore the Congolese pastor was put to shame!
The author is a Lusaka-based media consultant who also worked in the Foreign Service as a diplomat in South Africa and Botswana. For comments, sms 0977425827/0967146485 or email:pchirwa2009@yahoo.com
