Afrikaner weddings provide an equal chance of becoming the party of the year or the most grotesque event the guests have ever attended. And the main actors often feel the same way: the wedding is either the best day in the married couple’s lives, or they burn all the pictures and pretend it never happened.
Afrikaner culture has a minefield of customs and traditions that may leave the bride and groom wondering why they didn’t head to Mauritius for an anonymous beach ceremony. That choice will itself break a slew of tribal taboos, a calumny that will bring down the wrath of their extended family at every braai they attend for the rest of their lives.
Planning the wedding starts the day you are born. Your grandmother, who may not survive to your wedding day, will happily deposit her finest Africana teacups into your dowry kist to get the process started. The delicately painted scenes of Bloedrivier and the Transvalia Vierkleur on the cups are only suitable for proper children of the volk.
Church is an important factor in the life of a good Afrikaner family. Like the Voortrekker Monument, it is a hulking part of your past, something you try to escape in the present, but know you won’t be able to shed in the future.
Though the three sister churches — the Gereformeerde Kerk, better known as the Doppers, the Dutch Reformed Church (NG Kerk) and the Hervormde Kerk — basically preach the same Calvinist values, they must not be confused with each other.
My father is a stoere (unflinching) Dopper and was all for keeping this faith down the family line to eternity. This argument disappeared like wine at a Dopper communion when my hubby-to-be revealed that his father was a dominee in the NG Kerk — a dominee’s kids count at least double in the marital stakes, whatever the minor ecclesiastical peccadilloes laid on their parents.
The church business gets even more complicated if the vestal virgin and her eligible boereseun decide to move in together before exchanging their marital vows. Tannies wink at each when they pass the fallen couple at the weekly service. Sunday after Sunday the dominee will urge the congregation to pray for those living in sin as the perps cringe in embarrassment.
Announce your engagement and a finely tuned machine incorporating mothers, tannies, cousins and oumas springs into action. Ouma soon lets you know that no chic, satanic, one-stop venue may even be contemplated instead of the Old Dopper kerk where she was married.
Those who have been living in sin soon realise they cannot hope to get away with a white wedding. The tannies’ gimlet eyes would strip the white dress off your frame as you waltzed down the aisle. But if your sins were less obvious, wearing anything other than white would set tongues wagging. I pleased my mother and went with the virgin white ensemble she had dreamed about before I was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
Don’t consider anything but the most extravagant wedding: every single relative, no matter how removed, is an honoured guest. This is your parents’ last opportunity to brag and nothing but the best will do, though the expense could have set you up for life in a riverfront mansion rather than the one-room flatlet you land in.
Obscure members of the extended family should be expected to turn your wedding into a fiasco. Tannie Katryn may not be seated at the same table as her ex-husband Oom Os, because he has found himself a new heifer that Tannie Katryn is none too fond of. Oom Kees has promised to eviscerate his estranged wife’s new lover, and she insists on bringing him along.
The rest of the family waits with glee to witness the confrontation; you can only pray that the postal service will lose at least one of their invitations.
An Afrikaner wedding is based on the sound theology of a good party, which demands copious quantities of suitable liquor. My husband paid a king’s ransom to ensure that no guests would be left dry. We restricted the hooch to wine and beer because we had seen the fallout after Klippies was introduced to wedding parties.
One couple we met at varsity took the plunge before us. The police had to break up a fight between the groom and bride’s well-lubricated families after they fought over her chastity.
The success of any Afrikaner wedding is measured against the culinary delights dished up at the reception. Afrikaners are carnivores and a lamb spit guarantees instant fame.
I didn’t even consider vegetarian cuisine, seen as an expression of confusion and self-hatred. A vegetarian friend and her husband decided to enforce their culinary preference on their guests — the wedding is still trotted out as an example of volksverraad (treason).
Good food and good dop cannot fail to impress Afrikaner guests, who will excuse wilted flowers and the skedonk you call a wedding car. A stuffed guest will forgive anything, even a dominee who keeps them inside the zinc-roofed church for more than two hours in the sweltering heat of a December afternoon.