Introduction

South African President Jacob Zuma has been married six times and currently has four wives—wedding two of these wives since assuming the presidency in 2009. The expense of these unions and related upgrades at his lavish family homestead in rural Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, have engendered considerable controversy, in a national context marked by economic crisis and declining marriage rates. But this very married president has also earned the admiration of some South Africans, who see him as proudly upholding the responsibilities of an ideal Zulu patriarch (see Hunter 2014). Debates around the propriety of Zuma’s polygyny reveal broader concerns around the connections between family life and leadership in a deeply unequal, diverse democracy. Is it right for a leader to use the public funds of a modern state to broadcast his commitment to a traditional form of marriage? Should a leader’s marital relations simply be a private matter, as they largely have been for Zuma’s rival, former president Thabo Mbeki, and his wife of four decades, Zanele? Nelson Mandela’s recent passing has similarly provoked discussions about the role of marriage in shaping leadership: from Mandela’s abandonment of his first wife to become a leading African National Congress (ANC) activist, to his nationalist romance with Winnie Mandela, to his statesmanlike marriage as president to former Mozambican first lady Graça Machel (see, e.g., Harris 2013).

This ASR Forum, “The Politics of Marriage in South Africa,” is based on the conviction that such debates are not sideshows to the stuff of politics. Indeed, marriage offers an ideal lens through which we can apprehend the making of political communities. In 2014, as we have celebrated the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, both the country’s strides toward a common society and the tenacity of many forms of social division have been striking. As a unifying institution that has nonetheless operated quite differently, in law and practice, for South Africans of different classes, genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and regions in the past and present, marriage provides intimate insights into the making of these connections and inequalities.

We build upon an impressive and growing body of scholarship on transformations in marriage, family, and love in colonial and postcolonial Africa (see, e.g., Parkin & Nyamwaya 1987; Thomas & Cole 2009). Three decades ago, Kristin Mann saw the unique potential of studies of marriage to “present the African past as it really was: a world inhabited by men and women and shaped in fundamental ways by the interaction between them.” While pioneering social histories of Africa predominantly focused on male experiences, leaving “the study of women to women’s studies,” Mann argued that “we will only begin to understand basic problems in African social, economic and political life when we start to examine the relationship between the sexes.” Studies of marriage offered fertile ground for this exploration, as her work on colonial Lagos showed. “But if the perspective is to fulfill its potential, others must carry it beyond the study of domestic life,” Mann urged (1985:10). Heeding this call, scholars working across the continent have since demonstrated the mutually constitutive relationships between domestic transformations and political and economic change (e.g., Comaroff & Comaroff 1992; Hunter 2010; Osborn 2011). They have highlighted how disputes over marriage and family speak to the production of historical knowledge and expectations for the future (e.g., Cohen & Odhiambo 1992; Thomas 2003).

Yet major questions remain for scholars of South Africa in particular, and of the continent generally. The articles in this forum speak to two overarching issues with relevance for postapartheid South Africa: How have marital ideals and practices created and subverted racial, ethnic, gender, and class categories? And how have the economic dimensions of marriage changed over time and across space?

The articles in this forum suggest that marriage has been critical in constituting categories of difference, even while creating new forms of community. My article, “The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa” (7–28) examines how marriages between Christian mission-educated women and men bridged ethnic divisions, creating new forms of racial and national consciousness in...