The Sunday Mail
The woman should do what she likes and financial power is the gateway to that world of limitless possibilities.
What do the following names have in common: Tendai Kurehwatira, Pardon Pamire and Jolly Tumuhiire?
Most people will likely not be able to place the first two Zimbabweans characters. But the whole world is still gasping for breath after watching a video in which Jolly Tumuhiire is caught working like one possessed on a toddler in Uganda.
Media reports estimate that over 12 million people have now watched the chilling video in which Tumuhiire is caught slapping the child repeatedly, thrusting her to the floor and hitting her with a torch before kicking the child on the head and stomping its back.
It has not been established what motivated the savage attack on such a small baby. Medical specialists have since established that the babysitter is of sound mind, prompting the police to alter the charge sheet from one of assault to attempted murder.
It is probably just one hell of many such monster attacks which go unreported in many parts of the world. It cannot, however, be classified as a typical example of gender-based violence.
Then there are the two Zimbabwean characters.
In Zimbabwe the tendency is to define gender in a lineal biological manner. So in much of the articles in our newspapers, gender-based violence refers to men inflicting violence on hapless women. Gender mainstreaming means getting women directly involved in main economic issues and decision-making.
In this context, gender is not placed in its social context defining how men and women relate to each other. This classification allows people to make simplistic explanations of gender-based violence which should leave them confounded by the Ugandan case.
Enter Zimbabwe, giving us typical gender-based violence but in unfamiliar territory. The first tells us: A Zvishavane woman died a painful death after her husband doused her with five litres of battery acid for going through his WhatsApp messages.
The deceased, Tendai Kurehwatira, allegedly went through her husband’s trousers and took out his cellphone and began reading through his WhatsApp messages while he was taking a bath.
The second is equally graphic: A former Shabani Mine footballer was bashed with a log on the head by his wife after she caught him perusing her WhatsApp messages with her secret lover.
Pardon Marime is lucky to be alive after the savage attack from his wife. Marime’s wife Tsitsi appeared before a Zvishavane magistrate facing assault charges.
The familiar stories in Zimbabwe involve couples fighting or one being killed because of suspected or being actually caught engaged in illicit sexual affairs. Yet none of the cases cited above fits the almost stereotypical explanations for gender-based violence one gets from listening to radio programmes or in articles in the print media.
Zimbabwe is currently observing a global annual ritual called 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence. During this period women go into a frenzy of male condemnation. It’s all the men’s fault, it’s to do with culture and the way boys and girls are socialised.
The usual, simplistic line is to reduce everything to lobola, patriarchy, and man’s supposed abuse of his economic power in the family setting. The prescription is therefore that instead of men and women fighting in the same corner for indigenisation and black economic empowerment, woman think their war is against their fellow oppressed male counterparts, hence the proliferation of numerous pseudo feminist movements fighting for equality with men.
The result is an attack on the marriage institution. Not that marriage necessarily oppresses women but that a woman who is economically empowered should have no business negotiating relations in a marriage.
The moment you feel you are not happy you must be free to leave your marriage and claim maintenance instead. The marriage is placed in the same freedom of choice as the miniskirt.
The woman should do what she likes and financial power is the gateway to that world of limitless possibilities.
Read this way, one would think there was no gender-based violence in supposedly civilized Europe and the United States. But the reality is that outside of wars or race relations, gender-based violence tends to be a crime of passion more than it is a reflection of the economic status of women, hence its prevalence across different cultural settings.
If anything, in our backward societies it is often the woman of means who tends to abuse and mistreat her improvident husband than the other way round. We are more used to men marrying beneath them and leading prosperous lives and a very happy marriage because each partner knows his or her place and there is mutual respect.
Yet our libertarian sisters want to give the impression that our mothers who never went to school suffered the worst forms of gender-based violence. While society was tolerant of male violence and the Bible urges women to submit to their husbands, there was in fact greater mutual respect between couples then, than there is now.
There was greater sincerity in a love relationship than there is now. If a man wanted to marry a second wife, he begged his wife to do so.
He might force this if it came to the extreme, but eventually the second, third or 13th wife Gumbura-style was brought in and accepted in the family with the first wife enjoying the honour of queen.
The man did not use money to keep his women under thrall.
Today that 13th wife is part of the rich husband’s secret harem while the liberated woman also has her own long span of undeclared husbands and boyfriends. Financial independence by our liberated woman is turning a blessing into a cause for sin.
Whereas orthodoxy claims that a woman engages in prostitution to earn a living, we now have well-to-do women who engage in multiple liaisons to assert their financial liberty because they cannot find satisfaction in the restrictive set up of marriage.
Compromising in a marital dispute is seen as a weakness. The marriage institution has been the biggest casualty in this war of financial muscle.
With all due respect to the ladies, don’t tell me, whether in war or peace, that women are raped or that men rape women purely to inflict pain on them as punishment for their inferior economic status!
It is thus completely misguided to think that abolishing lobola or imposing prison sentences of 100 years on rapists will end gender-based violence. A wrong diagnoses of the causes gender-based violence can never yield the correct cure.
In life, the only unfailing cement for any enduring relationship between any group of people is a healthy balance of respect and fear. That cement works between couples, a parent and a child, an employer and employee, friends, the soldier and his commander, a teacher and his pupils and society and its constituent members.
It is utterly naive to think that all crimes between the sexes reflect economic relations or that all such crimes are contemplated before hand and can therefore be cured by imposing lengthy prison terms.
If such were the case there would be no murder in countries which have the death penalty.
