Twins who married the same man share their traumatic experience

Owami and Olwethu Mzazi believe they are “two bodies with one soul”. They say from birth they have been sharing everything - and they now share a husband.

The two say they have a bond that is “too deep” to explain, and didn’t have a hard time marrying the same man. They married TV director Mzukiseni Mzazi in 2011 in a traditional ceremony.

The twins say they were raised by their grandmother and were very poor. They say they were so poor that they even had to ask for money from people and couldn’t even afford sanitary towels.

After matric, they wanted to pursue a career in acting. In pursuit of their dream, they met their husband Mzukiseni, who was then working as a director on television drama ‘Muvhango’.

Instead of giving them a break based on their skill and talent, Owami claims Mzukiseni made moves on them.

“Because he was our mentor before [becoming] our husband, we said to him 'we are young, passionate young girls who want to be actresses, but we need someone who can mentor us to be on TV'. He said 'okay', and later on we got an SMS saying 'I can’t help you if you can’t be my wives',” Owami says.

“We sat down and said maybe this is God. We said let’s take a chance. We said 'we don’t love you, we don’t see you as a lover, but we will take a chance and we will learn how to love you',” says Olwethu. 

The twins say he told them he was okay with them learning to love him.

“We were in a marriage whereby we didn’t enter because we were in love with our husband. We got married because we were escaping the poverty that we were in,” says Owami.

The girls married the man within a few weeks of meeting him. At that time, they were only 21, and their husband was in his late 40's.

The two aspiring actors say their husband took advantage of their poverty, and from the beginning of the marriage, the twins claim it was never easy.

“After three months of marriage, we found out that he has many kids and he wasn’t divorced. All those things he had hidden from us and the marriage started to be rocky, with lots of fighting. Since then we are living in a marriage where there is abuse emotionally,” the twins said.“We are tired now because there is a lot that we have experienced.”

The 29-year-old twins are currently in the process of divorcing their husband. 

However, the twins say there is a lot they can’t talk about until the divorce is finalised.

“We are still holding things that happened, but after the divorce, we will reveal everything that was happening in our marriage." 

Olwethu says she has been wanting to divorce for years but had “fear of the unknown because I have a child and I am a freelancer.” But she says this year she told herself “even if I stay in a shack, I don’t care, enough is enough.”

The twins say they don’t believe their husband ever loved them, but he married them because they were virgins, and he was doing it to brag about being married to twins.

“I don’t think he was loving us. I think he was taking chances because he was impressed by the fact that he is starting to see virgins in Gauteng,” says Olwethu.

“For me, Owami, I would say there was no love. You know sometimes in marriage, it’s hard to leave, but for me from the few weeks into the marriage when I was reflecting on the marriage and writing what was right versus what is wrong, I could only write one positive thing, and the rest were bad things."

“I always tell him 'you never loved us'. You took advantage of our innocence,” she adds.

The two say they regret entering into marriage for the wrong reasons.

“The mistake we made was not allowing the process to know the kind of person he is. We rushed to get married as virgins because of the church. We knew him for two weeks, and in the third week, he sent a letter to our family to request our hand in marriage. The process took a month,” says the twins.

The two say they are in the process of starting their own business and writing a book about their life.

“We have to start afresh," they say. 

They say their marriage taught them valuable lessons. 

“There are no shortcuts in life. Sometimes you do shortcuts, and life will take you back. Sometimes you try to run away from poverty, meanwhile, you are running to pain. Sometimes appreciate what you have and hold on there, because you don’t know what will happen the next day. Pray. There is nothing that beats prayer,” says Owami.

“I would speak to a young black child and say do not run away from poverty. Stay in your lane and wait for the process, wait for God’s blessings,” says Olwethu.

Another lesson the two say they have learned is the importance of self-love.

“Start by loving yourself. It starts there. Love yourself first before anyone else,” says Olwethu.

They say they hope to marry again and plan to marry the same husband because they are “two bodies with one soul”.

“This thing will continue. It’s too deep,” say the twins.

However, they say for the next relationship, they will “learn a person and how he will handle us as two” before tying the knot.

READ: “My fiancé shot me just three months before our wedding day”