Traditional leaders have urged unmarried couples to stop cohabitating, arguing that the practice is not traditionally encouraged.
This follows a woman’s post which went viral after she claimed on social media that her long-term partner and father of her children betrayed her by unceremoniously marrying someone else.
Ondonga Traditional Authority spokesperson Frans Enkali says a man living with a woman for years and having children with her should face pressure from the involved families to formalise the relationship.
“In the parents’ house, especially the culture we are in, it’s very difficult to stay with a woman in her house for so many years while having kids. You would naturally be pressured to get married to that person,” Enkali says.
One woman, who asked not to be named, says she met the father of her son in 2014 and they were together for five years before their relationship ended.
She says the relationship ended about five months after she gave birth in 2019.
She says her former partner moved on and met another woman around September 2019. They had a child and later proceeded to get married.
For her, watching her former partner build a new family was difficult to process.
“There is a particular kind of sadness that comes when you watch someone you spent years loving continue with someone else the life you once imagined for yourself,” she says.
She struggled with sadness, disappointment, loneliness and the feeling of being replaced.
However, she says she has since come to understand that the end of the relationship does not erase the years they spent together or the fact that they became parents.
“I am learning to build mine too not around what I lost, but around what remains,” she says.
Enkali says young people living in towns are often separated from traditional structures and elders who would have guided such relationships.
“They may be excluded. They may not be given the same privilege,” he says.
Tswana traditional leader Andrew Kgosiemang says his traditional understanding does not support a man taking another wife while cohabitating with someone.
“In our culture we haven’t had cases where the head of the household lives with a woman and goes looking for another, and economically I don’t think it would allow for that either, because you would have to sustain them equally,” he says.
Kgosiemang says where a man has more than one wife, the first wife would traditionally give consent for the second marriage and could even be involved in identifying the second wife.
“Normally your first wife would give consent to the second wife, and the first wife goes to look for the second wife,” Kgosiemang says.
He says he has not encountered cases where a man simply left a woman with whom he had established a household and had children with before marrying someone else.
Kgosiemang says economic realities also make polygamous relationships difficult because a man would have to support both households.
Gender activist Rosa Namises says women have for generations been left vulnerable by men who keep them in long-term relationships without providing clarity about marriage.
“Women have been suffering the lies, brutality and deception of men for quite a long time,” she says.
Namises says the consequences can be particularly painful for children, who may experience changes in their relationship with their father after he starts a new family.
Stronger support systems are needed to help women identify warning signs and make informed decisions before spending years in relationships without clarity, she says.
“This kind of marriage needs to be regulated, because if it’s not, we’re running into trouble,” Namises says.
Lawyer Bianca Boois of BB Boois Attorneys at Ondangwa says the law does, however, not criminalise it if a person ends a relationship and marries someone else.
“It is not a criminal offence to break up with your partner and go and marry somebody else,” she says.
Boois says the situation becomes different where children are involved, as both parents continue to have legal responsibilities to them.
Boois advises women in long-term relationships to protect their financial interests and establish clear expectations about the future of the relationship.
“My advice to women in this type of long-term relationship is to protect yourselves,” she says.
Former Council of Churches in Namibia secretary general Ludwig Beukes says people should not allow years to pass without discussing where their relationship is heading.
“If the person does not have plans with you, is it not your right to say, if that is the case, let me move on?” he asks.
Beukes says both partners should have their own goals and should not allow one person’s indecision to determine the other’s future.
