Umabo - Day 2 of the wedding, the bride throwns sweets out for all to catch! 
Dancing out of the hall at the white wedding!This weekend we were invited to celebrate Chris and Sissy's wedding, a white wedding followed by traditional Zulu wedding in the valley. Chris is well-known in the valley and it turned out to be quite an event.
On Saturday, we arrived at the hall where the white wedding was to take place at 9am, as it said on the invitation. This being Africa, nobody else turned up until at least 10.30am! Typical. There was a further delay when the bus transporting most of the wedding guests, and the man who was giving the bride away, didn't turn up until about midday. Everybody was good humoured though.
Soon enough though, the ceremony was underway, with many many speeches in Zulu. Thankfully they brought the food out at the same time so we could feast on the usual beef curry, rice, and beans and mayonaise mix (my favourite!), followed by ice cream, fruit cocktail and custard. To the Zulus this is special occasion food. Delicious on any occasion. I remain constantly thankful that stinky cow's stomach is not the food of choice for weddings!!
The highlight of the white wedding was the bridal party who danced their way down the aisle out of the hall and then danced back in to sit at top table. It was a cross between zulu dancing and line-dancing and was brilliant. All bridal parties should be made to dance in and out, it adds to the fun! I'll upload the video onto youtube.com soon enough. It was hilarious.
After the white wedding, everyone headed to the valley for the traditional part of the wedding. Unfortunately, being slightly behind schedule, the festivities didn't quite go to plan as it got dark, but before the light went completely, we all headed to a local soccer field and there was a lot of dancing by the bride's party, complete with girls in traditional beaded costumes which were more than revealing. The groom's party marched on to the field with their shields and sticks and gave an impressive display of strength. Part of the tradition is that 5 virgins are paraded in front of the groom in case he wants to choose one of them instead. These girls were clad in only a small belt of white beads and walked across the middle of the field in a line with their heads down as a sign of respect and submission. Not the kind of thing you'd expect at a wedding, it was a bit weird. But for the Zulu people, breasts and nudity are not a problem and so nobody seemed in the slightest bit perturbed by this display.
As we walked back up the hill to the homestead, I was grabbed by the mother of the groom and helped her cope with the steep hill. Once at the top, she insisted I accompany her to a rondavel where she went on and on in Zulu about how wonderful I was and how she saw me as a daughter. Thankfully her grandson came in to translate and to explain that I wasn't interested in being married off to one of her sons. Steve and I managed to escape shortly after that as the party was rapidly descending into a drunken frenzy of dancing and zulu beer!
On the second day, for the traditional party called 'Umabo', we decided that the 9am start on the invitation was perhaps 'African time'... We arrived in the valley at around 11am and already most of the people we chatted to were extremely merry. On this day, the bride brought presents to her new husband's family. There was a blanket, pillow and reed mat for each member of the family. The blankets were all laid out in the cattle kraal, and as the bride's people handed over each one, there was much ululating and dancing by the women. The older women came in traditional beaded costume with extra padding to make their hips as huge as possible!
Whilst this was going on, men hacked up 2 cows which had been slaughtered for the occasion. There were bits of cow everywhere you looked and hopeful dogs loitered around to fight with the gathering flies. The meat was cooked for dinner later, but we'd left before it was ready. It was morbidly fascinating to see all the parts of a cow left out to dry in the sun and to watch the men try to crack the scull with a blunt axe! Hmm, lovely. The smell was just of beef, but it lingered in my clothes long into the evening. It was interesting too to see a fresh cow's stomach, having given them to the school on a couple of occasions to feed the children. It looks as disgusting as it smells!
After the present-giving, the bride presented a new double bed and toiletries to her husband and he lay down on it. However, pretty much as soon as he did so, all the young girls accompanying the bride chased him off with sticks and he had to run pretty fast to avoid a beating! Then the bride took bags of sweets and threw them out into the watching crowd of men, women and children, most of whom had been enjoying the sunshine and copious amounts of beer. The sweets were soon snatched up and not a single one lay on the ground. The bride's party then trouped around the various houses and rondavels, singing and dancing and leaving a small broom at the door of each building.
Later on, several groups of locals turned up in traditional dress, either Zulu warrior costume or just multicoloured trousers and tops. They performed all sorts of dances and everyone rejoiced! It was a real sight to see and great to be a part of it. Everyone was pleased to welcome us there as this was deep in the valley and white people are always welcome at Zulu feasts!
Nobody was worried about drunk people, especially the older women. Several extremely merry women accosted us and even the Zulus couldn't really decipher what they were trying to say. We ended up giving one woman and her bottle of stout a lift out of the valley to Inchanga although she couldn't really explain where she wanted to go to! We helped her a little bit on her way and hopefully she got home ok, although she couldn't tell us where home was...
It was a great weekend and a real insight into the whole wedding thing in Zulu culture. I'm thankful that I won't have to see another dead cow for a while though! ;-)
