Mbuya Sauti's marriage on the rocks

The couple treated neighbours and passersby to a public drama in the populous Sakubva high density suburb last Thursday morning with Mabhiza wanting to move out after he was taken to task for failing to sleep at home the previous night.

Mbuya Sauti had not bought his story that he had slept out assisting a client, suspecting infidelity instead.

A frustrated Mabhiza tried to walk out on the relationship with his elderly partner but did not want to leave any of his used clothes which she would not release claiming she had bought them.

"She is refusing with my clothes saying she bought them but as a rule, I don't leave anything that I've put on," Mabhiza told Eastern News during the fracas.

The acrimony, however, flies in the face of claims attributed to Mbuya Sauti that she would allow him to sire children with another woman since she is past child-bearing age.

She has five children herself while his only child passed on early last year.

He believes the girl died because he had violated his spiritual rituals.

Mabhiza maintains too that the couple is yet to be intimate in line with their spiritual rituals as they move towards the full consummation of their marriage.

While they appeared to have settled their differences - with Hwezhaz paMusau or Madzibaba Kheda - as Mabhiza is known in other circles, claiming all was well, they were back at each other's throats in the evening.

This time he was claiming he was leaving and even threatening to go to the police to help him move out.

"She is saying I can't eat because someone spotted me with a parcel of meat earlier so I can't take it anymore . . . she wants to treat me like her child. She should stay with someone her age," Mabhiza told Eastern News in an unsolicited interview.

Asked if his guiding "mermaid spirit" had not foreseen this, he said he was even being told by it to walk away from the relationship.

"She listens to so much gossip . . . my spirit is saying I should quit this," he said.

The couple grabbed headlines last month with their wedding-like ceremony which they said was a traditional ritual to unify and seek spiritual approval of their relationship to their mermaid spirits.

It involved Victorian wedding rituals of cutting a cake and feeding each other as well as a feast for friends and relatives but also an evening visit to a river near Mutare Girls High School just outside Mutare's central business district.

Mbuya Sauti had said the ritual was well received because a pot of raw rice floated in the water at the end of the ceremony when its career slipped and fell while they also saw a white chicken at their home the next day.

"None of my neighbours have any chickens, it's not a broiler and no-one has missed their chicken," she said with a smile then.

She also argues that it was normal for female traditional healers to marry younger men hence there was no need for anyone to cringe at their relationship.

Mabhiza, who revealed he also lived in with his former elderly employer in South Africa a few years ago, said he prefers older women as he should avoid too much sexual activity which would diminish his powers.

He said in an earlier interview that he had gone against his mermaid spirit's wishes and married a young wife but the child died because of his insubordination.

Mabhiza claims to having been initiated into occultism when a mermaid took him into the water and later brought him back to land in Bikita when he was a sixth grader.

He claims to have died and come back to life while in Form Three and to having been able to raise someone from the dead - right from the coffin for a night before he died again the next morning.

The couple is not traditionally married as Mabhiza has not paid lobola which is something that he said he was going to do as soon as he was bought a car as had been promised sometime this month.