Summary
- A man died while married to two women, one customary, one civil, without divorcing the first.
- The High Court ruled the second marriage invalid due to lack of consent.
- The case reaffirmed women’s rights in customary unions under South African law.
“Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” For decades, these words ushered in each episode of the famed soap opera that captured hearts across generations.
But beyond the screen, real life scripts its own dramas, messy, poignant, and more unresolved than fiction dares to be. In one such story, time slipped quietly through the hourglass for a man entangled in the fragile lines of love, culture, and law.
On the early morning of 6 February 2023, a 43-year-old man died in a tragic motor vehicle accident. In life, like so many of us, he’d wandered through love’s many chambers, filling them with promises, leaving some with silence. When death came unannounced, it froze not only his breath but the legal fates of the women who once held his heart.
The first love
Six years before his passing, on 28 January 2017, he had sent emissaries to the family of his lover, seeking her hand in marriage. In line with Bapedi and Swati customs, lobola was negotiated, R12 000 in cash and 13 cattle. While the cattle were to follow, the union was sealed in celebration, and the two lived together as husband and wife. A child, TM, was born from their union.
They never registered the marriage with Home Affairs. But to her, and by custom, she was his wife.
The second chapter
In 2019, the man moved out of the home he shared with her and into the life of another woman. Their romance culminated in a civil marriage solemnised in 2020, followed by customary rites and lobola in 2021. The price of this love was R20 000, 10 cattle at R2 000 each, paid in full.
The first woman watched from the margins. At his funeral, she stood silently as the second wife, was hailed as chief mourner. The obituary bore only her name. But the law, unlike love, asks not who was mourned loudest, but who stood as wife under its statutes.
The courtroom hourglass
This dispute landed in the Mpumalanga High Court in 2025. The first wife petitioned the court to recognise her customary marriage as lawful, and to declare the second void. Her argument: she never consented to the second marriage, and her union was never dissolved. The court agreed.
Quoting the Mayelane v Ngwenyama precedent, Judge TV Ratshibvumo reaffirmed a vital truth: consent of the first wife is not a cultural courtesy, it is a legal requirement. Without it, the second marriage was invalid ab initio. The judge lamented how quickly life moves, how we, like characters in a soap opera, often don’t notice the sand running out until the hourglass is bare.
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