Marriage: whiteness and the poor whites

It is hard to exaggerate the importance placed on the distinction between European and African marriage, and the insistence on a legal separation between the two forms. A basic way of expressing the difference was to emphasise the incompatibility between Christianity and paganism. As in many colonial situations the focus was on the gulf between monogamy and polygamy. We may gather some of the tone set for our period from the report of the major South African Native Affairs Commission of 1903–5. The ‘one great element for the civilisation of the Natives’, they wrote, ‘is to be found in Christianity’ (Cd 2399 1905: 41). ‘Christianity’, they averred, ‘teaches that marriage is the sacred union of one man and one woman for life, and that fidelity to a single love is as much the duty of the man as the woman.’ But polygamy was a central feature of African life. While it was an obstacle to the advance of Christianity, it was nonetheless better than the ‘state of licentious confusion’ that would have been the alternative. ‘On analysis’, they pronounced, ‘the objections resolve themselves into the undeniable charge that the custom is essentially material and unchristian. The Commission has no wish to defend it and looks forward to the time when it shall have passed into oblivion.