Living in regret: ‘He denied me an education but took another woman to school and married her’

Financial independence is crucial for everyone because it allows you to make important decisions based on your own resources, rather than relying on someone else’s income.

Often, those who are financially dependent — particularly women — lack control over their lives and are more susceptible to various forms of abuse.

*Annah Morema, 56, is one of the few who openly admit that relying on others financially was detrimental to her life and left her in a state of despair.

“I regret not going to school, I stupidly believed that a man would support me for the rest of my life, but he turned against me and left me with nothing,” she said with a sigh.

Morema grew up in Winterveld, a township located in the north-western corner of Pretoria.

Explaining her upbringing, Morema said it was marred by poverty and strife following the death of her mother when she was eight and she was raised by relatives.

She said she never had a relationship with her father even though she knew where he lived.

“Things were hard, I dropped out of school when I was doing Standard 5 (Grade 7), things were different then, if you had no money for school fees, you were kicked out of school, they didn’t want to hear any excuses,” she said.

“I stayed at home and met my late husband when I was 16 years old and we got married when I was 21 years old,” she said with a smile.

Reminiscing about her first husband, Morema's face beamed with joy as she was seemingly flooded with memories they had created.

“That man loved me and our two children; he did everything in the house while I was a stay-at-home mom. I enjoyed being a wife because he was also a good husband, he also didn’t want to see me cry,” she said.

Morema, who still uses her first husband’s surname, said she lost her husband in 1998 in a car accident.  After his passing, she settled the bond on their shared home in Mabopane, a township on the outskirts of Tshwane. She achieved this by using funds from an insurance payout and started her own business to generate an income.

In 2001, she met her second husband, and they got married in 2003.

“When I met him, I used to run a small business, selling cold drinks and operating public phones. When he came into my life, he was good to me, he provided for me and my children, he would buy electricity, groceries and also give me R2,000 allowance. He had a good job as a technician at Eskom.”

Morema said as time went on, her business started dwindling especially the public phones because cellphones were slowly killing the market.

On the other hand, the cold drink business was unsustainable as there were months sales would be down due to cold weather conditions.

She said she sold her public phones and intended to use the money to attend a sewing and catering school because she already had skills and wanted to enhance her abilities. Additionally, she wanted to complete her matric and pursue a course in business management.

“I told my then-husband about my plans, and he was against it, he refused and didn’t want to hear anything about it, his reason was that he’s providing enough for me and the children and me empowering myself means I’m belittling him as a man and his efforts as a provider,” she said.

“I really wanted to do something for myself, but I didn’t want to be a disrespectful wife, that’s what they tell us before we get married, that we should respect our husbands. Besides, he was providing without fail, so I decided to be an obedient wife.”

Even though Morema's second husband had paid lobola, they didn't register their customary marriage at Home Affairs.

“Every time I raised the topic, he would dismiss me and tell me we will do it.”

She said as the years went by, she started to notice that her husband was slowly withdrawing from their marriage.

“He no longer provided like before; I now had tedious a mission of constantly reminding him about groceries and other things in the house. He also reduced my allowance to a point he completely stopped giving me the allowance,” she said.

Morema said she subsequently heard rumours that he was dating a younger woman in another section but didn’t confront him.

“I started going through his bank statement and that’s when I saw repetitive payments for hotels, restaurants, child maintenance and [the University of South Africa] Unisa,” said Morema.

“When we met, he only had one boy and we lived with the boy, I didn’t know where this child maintenance was going. I didn’t confront him immediately, I gathered evidence for at least six months and when I went to him, I confronted him with evidence. He couldn’t explain any of the transactions or try to defend himself. He just said sorry, and I also decided to let it go. I wanted peace and to hold on to my marriage," she said.

“After that conversation, he was with me for another year or so, but things were not the same, he was really horrible towards me. I couldn’t leave because we were living in my house. Again, he was the one providing and my children were still in school, so I couldn’t exactly tell him to leave.

“But one day in 2015, he came back from work and took his clothes and told me that he was leaving, I begged and asked him that we at least sit down and talk but he refused. I sent his family a letter asking for a meeting and no one came,” she said.

“He left around May, in October, he had a white wedding, and they went to Morula Sun for pictures. He had invited some of my neighbours who were his friends and you know people, they will talk, so I knew everything. One of his relatives who I had a good relationship with, later told me that the new wife is a teacher and my husband was the one who took her to school.”

Regarding the unexplained child maintenance, Morema said the relative told her he had fathered a child with a colleague while they were still married. Most relatives knew about the colleague because every time the husband would visit his mother in Mpumalanga, he would be in the company of the colleague. 

Morema said she was not surprised that his mother knew about the other woman and never took a stand against their relationship.

“He also provides for his mother and because of that, she doesn’t reprimand him as she will lose the benefits. And to know that he was paying school fees for another woman while he refused that I get an education is the same as burying me alive,” she said as her eyes welled up with tears.

“I was hurt, I cried, it was painful, the pain stayed with me for at least two or three years. I tried to be an obedient wife, and he betrayed me, he left me with nothing.”

To make a living, Morema said she works at a day-care, and his son works temporary jobs.

“I’ve never seen him since he left, but my son has seen him many times with his young wife. They bought a house here in Mabopane, almost 30-minute walk from my house,” Morema said trying to fight back the tears.

“It still hurts when I think about it, because everything he claimed not to want, he did it with another woman. Even the house, I wanted us to buy our own house and leave my children in the house I had bought, but he always came up with different excuses as to why we can’t get a new house,” she said despondently.

“He was against me going to school, he didn’t want children with me, he didn’t want us to get a big celebration for our wedding, he didn’t want to us to sign for a marriage certificate, there’s a lot, but he did all of these things with another woman, they even have a child together and go on vacations, something he never did with me."

Morema said she tried to pursue the matter with legal aid and annul her husband’s marriage and fight for compensation, but she decided to give up because the lawyers were not helpful.

sinenhlanhla.masilela@iol.co.za

* Name changed to protect her identity.

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