Beating chests over cheating

Someone wrote on social media, “Ladies please check on your boyfriends, they might have got married to someone else this past weekend”.

Many social media users will know exactly what I am talking about because year after year, instead of celebrating our heritage and diverse cultures, women will post shocking threads detailing how their partners have betrayed them and married someone else and the devastation of finding out on social media only makes it worse.

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I once met a girl who said her brother did the exact same thing.

Her brother had been with one woman for as long as they could remember, because she used to frequent their household and attend some of their family functions.

As black people, we often call these partners Makoti, which means wife, because in reality they have assumed wifely duties, they just don’t have the title.

I think it’s such things that give women hope because if you’re favoured by the family and they start calling you Makoti in the hope that someday you will be, you also start buying into this dream.

Unfortunately, for this woman who had been in a relationship for over 10 years, she was not the chosen one at the end of it all.

Instead, one day her brother called a family meeting with all uncles and extended family members and announced his intention to marry another woman, not the one known to them, and respectfully asked for their support in being delegates at the Kabila negotiations he wanted during the Month of Heritage.

Imagine the shock of that poor woman, whose partner did not even have the decency to break up with her but went a step further and married someone else, leaving her to find out through the grapevine.

With all that said, we all have a right to choose.

We choose our sexual preferences, we choose our partners, we choose the number of partners and we choose the types of relationships we have.

By no means am I saying a person should be forced to marry the partner they are involved, I am only denouncing the deceit part of it.

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It made me think of how, back in the day, men would leave the rural areas to go work in the city while they left their wives and children behind.

Having sworn to be in the city to just make money, many of them found themselves remarrying other women from the city and townships without the knowledge of their wives back home.

Although the circumstances and reasons may have been different then, in some way history is repeating itself.

Cheating is not necessarily toxic masculinity, but what is, is a disregard for emotional responsibility.

It promotes harmful stereotypes about masculinity, such as saying men aren’t emotionally accountable.

The threads I have seen on social media have some users applauding some of these men for their actions, praising them for being with many women as if it’s an achievement being with more than one woman.

No one is talking about the generational trauma this causes women and how families are an enabling party, as they are the ones who are part of the delegation at the negotiation tables.