Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai on Saturday circumvented a court ruling blocking his wedding after an ex-lover tried to stop the union.
Tsvangirai, 60, dressed in a black suit and Elizabeth Macheka, 35, in a white gown exchanged rings before hundreds of guests at a plush Harare wedding venue overlooking a flowing river.
The prime minister, whose wife of 31 years, Susan, was killed in a car accident in March 2009, had originally planned his marriage under the country’s monogamous laws.
Photo: Reuters
However, Tsvangirai decided to get round the court order resulting in the cancellation of his marriage license by staging the nuptials under an alternative customary law that allows a man to have as many wives as he wants.
The court ruling on Friday was ex-lover Locardia Karimatsenga Tembo’s second attempt to block the marriage after a high court earlier in the week threw out her case on grounds that she failed to prove she was the prime minister’s wife. However, she went to a lower court armed with video evidence of the traditional marriage ceremony during which Tsvangirai’s emissaries were shown paying the bride price on his behalf.
An urgent appeal lodged by Tsvangirai early on Saturday at the high court to overturn the magistrate’s ruling was dismissed, forcing him to marry under a different law or cancel the ceremony.
Tsvangirai ended his union with Tembo last year, saying the relationship had been “irretrievably damaged” to the point where marriage had become “inconceivable.”
The magistrates court on Thursday dismissed a similar case by a South African woman who claimed the prime minister promised to marry her.
“Our celebration is a customary one ... We still have to celebrate [a monogamous marriage] when the climate is clear,” the Catholic priest who conducted the ceremony said.
The pair did not sign a register recording the marriage as monogamous, as they had wished.
A senior officer from Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party said the “wedding ... is different from the one that was denied by the courts.”
Macheka is the daughter of a senior member of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, which was forced into a compromise coalition government with Tsvangrai’s MDC after election chaos in 2008.
However, Mugabe boycotted the ceremony, which was attended by Zimbabwean Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara and Swazi Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini.
A pipe band from one of Harare’s top private schools played as Tsvangirai walked on a white carpet into the wedding ceremony, while a violinist played Here Comes the Bride for Macheka. A banquet reception was due to be held at Harare’s 25,000-seater Glamis Stadium.
Tsvangirai’s first wife died just weeks after he went into a unity government with his long-time rival Mugabe following failed elections in 2008.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS