The Sunday Mail
Pastor Faith Mabhaudi Nyarambi
Tracing African Roots
THE white wedding has seemingly become a compulsory procedure in getting married, with many churches putting couples who do not go through this procedure under discipline.
In reality, is it necessary to have a white wedding, is it a biblical or a cultural prerequisite? Is it a sin not to have a white wedding?
A white wedding is a western, traditional, formal or semi-formal ceremony that originated in Britain. The term ‘white wedding’ originates from the white colour of the bride’s colour. This white gown became popular in the Victorian Era, when Queen Victoria wore a white lace dress at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840.
However, the term now also encapsulates the entire Western wedding routine, especially in Christian religious tradition. This practice emanated from the western culture and was brought to Africa through imperialism.
Many churches seem to have adopted it as a biblical concept, a Christian prerequisite. Thus they do not recognise the marriages of members who have forgone this procedure.
Today, the full white wedding experience usually sees the family printing wedding invitations, hiring musicians, buying a wedding cake, flowers, candles, clothes for bridesmaids and groomsmen. Then there is also the flower girl and a ring bearer.
With the amplified significance of the white gown phenomenon, many brides are now wearing the white gown, even when they wed at the Magistrate’s Courts.
Royal brides before Queen Victoria did not wear white, instead they wore heavy brocaded gowns embroidered with white and silver thread; with red being a popular colour in Western Europe. More generally, European and American brides were wearing a plethora of colours like black, brown, or grey.
But as accounts of Victoria’s wedding spread across the Atlantic and throughout Europe, elites followed her lead. In China, white was the colour of purity and perfection, and thus uniquely suitable as a colour associated with death.
In ancient Greek, white was the colour for bridal joy, and brides not only wore white gowns and white flowers, but they also painted their bodies white.
In Africa, white is associated with deities and worship in the Christian tradition and therefore white clothes were worn at the time of baptism to represent spiritual purity and the washing away of sins.
What about the accompanying wedding veil, how did it come into the picture?
Although women were required to wear veils in many churches until the 19th Century, the resurgence of the wedding veil as a symbol of the bride coincided with societal emphasis on women being modest and well behaved.
The portrayal of weddings in Hollywood movies, particularly after the Second World War, helped to crystallise and homogenize the white wedding into normative form. The white wedding was given significant boost in 1981 when three-quarter billion people watched Prince Charles of Wales marry Diana Spencer in her elaborate white taffeta dress with a 25foot long train.
Before the coming of the Europeans to Africa, African societies had long established their own ways of getting married.
In Zimbabwe, the dominant traditional methods of getting married included musenga bere, kutiza mukumbo, kutema ugariri and many others.
All these methods were commonly accepted and recognised by the society. In other words prior to the colonial inception of the white wedding phenomenon, African marriages entered into through the commonly accepted methods were recognised as complete and legitimate.
The Europeans who came to Africa seem to have demonised the African traditional methods of getting married. Typical African weddings were a spiritual and family affair. They were centred on combining the two lives, the two families and also the two communities.
In the absence of a white gown and a pastor’s blessing, should marriages be regarded as sinful unions? When does the marriage become a legitimate union, soon after lobola payment or when the bride walks down the aisle in white? Is the white wedding a Biblical doctrine or rather an imperialistic one? There is a significant number of people who believe that the white wedding is a Biblical prerequisite, in the same way they take any Western practice as Christian tradition or gospel truth.
In Biblical times we see our first marriage happening in the Garden of Eden (Genesis chapter 2); the union between Adam and Eve is complete and legitimate without the courtesy of a white wedding! Furthermore, we see Jacob going to acquire his own wives without the courtesy of a white wedding.
There had to be prior agreement with the family of his bride, and he had to pay a bride prize.
In our own African culture by accepting lobola (bride prize), a bride’s father gives his daughter’s hand away in marriage, and that’s a defining procedure that legitimises the marriage.
Some churches have since revisited the doctrine of white weddings and are now recognising couples who do not have white weddings but have fulfilled the cultural requirements for marriage.
In some churches, pastors are now attending the lobola payment ceremony and sanctifying the marriage soon after the payment of lobola. They not only bless the union, but also issue the marriage certificate. The couple is thus free after lobola payment, if they should desire to have a white wedding it will be up to them, but it will not be a prerequisite.
Many youths today are under pressure to have the white wedding and readily go into huge debts to have one. Apart from believing that a white wedding is the legitimate marriage, the couples also think to wed is to spend money. Horse chariots, helicopters and limousines hired to ferry couples on their wedding days serve as visible testimony that many couples are willing to go out of their way to have an extravagant wedding.
Sadly. the flashy white weddings do not seem to remedy the devastating increase in divorce rates in modern day Zimbabwe.
Perhaps it’s time to take a walk back into our history as a people and revisit our African wedding, our own cultural methods of getting married!
Pastor Faith Mabhaudi Nyarambi is the founder and chief executive of Faith Christian Media Centre. Email feedback at [email protected].
