wedding fever

-- The (white) Zimbabwean version: 120 guests (OK, so not 2,000). Booked into Mana Pools, a rapidly-regaining-in-popularity tourist resort in western Zimbabwe for the only free weekend in weeks. Camping for three nights. The bride's parents must provide food -- and loo-roll -- for all of them during that time. Wedding at sunrise (so coffee and rusks first) on the river (Zambezi) banks. ( Slight possible problem: last time crocodiles were feasting on a just-dead hippo. Do you really want that as background for your vows?). Ablution blocks seriously not up to scratch: no plugs, no toilet seats, no shower roses (Bride's father has had to redo the lot at his own expense, but National Parks and Wildlife Authority who run the place won't give him a discount). Another problem: the monkeys. They've been fed by ignorant tourists so now they're unafraid and vicious. The bride's mother is currently working on a huge gauze creation, not -- as you might imagine -- for her daughter's veil, but to slip over the thatched gazebo that's housing the food to keep the monkeys out (a kind of giant black see-through four-poster thing). Caterers -- for caterers there are a plenty -- want 1,000 US just to get themselves from Harare to Mana Pools. Another possible problem: water levels. Lake Kariba is spilling. If they open the floodgates (as they did in Jan/Feb), the bit of Mana the wedding's being held at will be.. wait for it... underwater. "I'd have put my foot down," sniffs my mother-in-law.

-- A prospective groom legged it from the wedding ceremony late last month when he spied his current wife in the congregation. Wife Mercy Ncube had come to watch Inspector Resistant Ncube wed his lover Sergeant Faith Kaseke in Kuwadzana township in April. When Resistant spotted Mercy he pushed aside his best man, "panicked and bolted out of the venue." She'd been tipped off by -- amazingly -- his relatives. Resistant Ncube is the editor of the police magazine The Outpost.