Brides attend a mass wedding ceremony at the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, south of Johannesburg.
Ihsaan Haffejee/AFP via Getty Images
The Marriage Bill should strike a balance between preserving non-discriminatory cultural and religious practices and promoting liberal values.
Church Wedding in the Eastern Cape, 1920.
Image courtesy Monica and Godfrey Wilson Collection BC880/African Studies Library/University of Cape Town
Before colonialism black South Africans viewed sex and morality very differently than today.
The Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Angela N Perryman/Shutterstock
South African customary law should be understood from the perspective of dissonance between the past and the present.
A Zulu household, from an 1895 book called The Colony of Natal: An Official Illustrated Handbook and Railway Guide.
J Causton and Sons /University of California Libraries/ Flickr
A new history book shows how entanglements of race, gender, class and sexuality in South Africa flow from the moral contradictions of the settler colonial state.
South African President Jacob Zuma and Tobeka Madiba, his fifth wife, celebrate their traditional wedding with a dance.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Both South Africa’s courts and its legislature have failed to do their bit in creating a culturally diverse society.
South Africa is taking a tough stance against the practice of abducting and forcing young girls into marriage that’s still rife in some parts of the country.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
The reasons for the phenomenon of child marriage are complex and include the fact that in customary law, marriageable age was never reckoned as an actual number but depended on puberty.