Marital bliss for monkeys

WE LIVE and learn; I never knew that; we learn something new every day... they are expressions we hear often, and say them ourselves. Well, I don’t know about you, but I do.

Gazing out the window on a cold and wet Sunday morning, the sun was shining, and then it was raining. “Monkey’s wedding”, I offered to Mrs Chiel who was pottering about in the kitchen. There were any number of monkeys’ weddings that morning as sunshine, interspersed with showers, passed.

It was cold too, but we are grateful for the 20mm or so recorded in the garden. The soil is cool, so moisture stays longer and doesn’t evaporate when the sun comes out. What’s more we’ll use less of the more costly stuff that comes out of taps.

Then I got thinking, “monkey’s wedding”! I remember using the expression as a small boy; my parents also, and other boys as well. And only this past Sunday did it occur to me that it was a rather unusual usage and connection to an event which is far from extraordinary.

So I Googled it and came up with a mountain of information, most surprising being that it is a South African thing. Yes, it started here, and comes from Zulu, umshado wezinkawa, literally translated as a wedding for monkeys.

In Afrikaans, the event is known as jakkalstrou, jackal’s wedding as in, jackals trou met wolf se vrou as dit reën en die son skyn flou, which means “jackal is marrying wolf’s wife when it rains and the sun shines faintly.”

My Concise Oxford dictionary carries no references to a monkey’s wedding, so clearly it is not an often used term for a combination of sun and rain.

But just about every group of people and language seems to have their own version, so clearly humankind finds the event something of an amusing aberration.

In English-speaking meteorological circles it is referred to as a sun shower (or sunshower) which I find particularly dull, but I suppose is accurate, and again the words aren’t in my dictionary.

A clue to why it is called what it is by different folk comes from Wikipedia, the internet dictionary, which says: “Additionally, the phenomenon has a wide range of sometimes remarkably similar folkloric names in cultures around the world. A common theme is that of trickster animals, or the devil, getting married, although many variations of parts of this theme exist.”

So we see the sly fox, wolf, tiger and in Africa the leopard and hyena all being involved in marital connections when rain coincides with sun.

In Haiti – now that’s a country whose people have weird, and certainly not wonderful, beliefs and where voodoo rules – they say that when it happens a zombie is beating his wife for salty food. See what I mean? Haiti is definitely not on my travel bucket list and I don’t suppose it’s on yours either.

Talking of monkeys, I see them everywhere and they’re breeding like flies... all those weddings, I suppose. Driving between East London and Kenton-on-Sea recently, hardly a kilometre passed, where bush grew next to the road, without seeing one or more of them scurrying across in front of us. And those were the ones crossing. There must have been hundreds more in the trees.

Chiel today is Robin Ross-Thompson; robinrosst@gmail.com