Zimbabwe national chiefs council president Fortune Charumbira last week urged traditional leaders — natural custodians of cultural heritage and values — to play a leading role in educating their communities to desist from the forced and child marriages practice.
Viewpoint by Wisdom Mdzungairi
This came about following the release of a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) survey revealing that 31% of Zimbabwean girls under the age of 18 were in forced marriages with 15% of them getting married at the age of 15.
It is terrifying that the bulk of these children are married to some of our traditional leaders, whom Charumbira urged to desist from the practice presumably because traditional leaders are the custodians of our culture.
But, some of these so-called custodians of our cultural heritage have more than five wives. Zimbabwe allows men to marry as many wives as they can as long as they can look after their “widened” family.
I remember less than a decade ago, I paid homage to a paramount chief in Masvingo while in the area for business. When we exchanged pleasantries, he referred to his 16-year-old wife who was clutching a new-born baby, as his daughter (presumably because he could not see properly due to his advanced age), but when his eldest son who accompanied us to the home corrected him, he opened up telling us that he could no longer remember all his wives and children. As if that was not enough, five of the wives had children less than a year old. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It is not my intention to demean our well-respected traditional chiefs or culture.
But the chilling statistics about the abuse of the girl child indicate a lot of contradictions on the part of traditional leaders and their expectations. Surely what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Could it be that the majority of the girls were pushed into early or forced marriages by poverty, cultural norms and other social, economic and sprouting religious practices? No doubt the survey results were extensively deliberated on by the Women’s Affairs ministry, the chiefs’ council and Plan International ahead of International Women’s Day commemorations on Saturday.
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Part of the communiqué reads: “We note with concern that 31% (UNFPA, 2012 report) of girls are married before the age of 18 years in Zimbabwe and further note that in 2009, the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency recorded that 16,3% of the Zimbabwean population is married by the age of 15 years.” It is an undeniable fact that child marriages rob the victims of their basic rights like health, freedom of choice and education. For Zimbabwe to be among top abusers of women and girls is truly a sad development.
At least 14 million girls among them Zimbabweans under the age of 18 marry each year in the world. That’s around . . . 1 166 666 a month; 269 230 a week; 38 461 a day and 27 every minute and/or around one girl every two seconds. One in every five girls in the developing world including in our country is married by the age of 18. One in nine marries before they reach the age of 15. Child brides are particularly prevalent in South Asia (46%) and in sub-Saharan Africa (38%).
Zimbabwe is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) which among other things entails that women should not get into marriage unions before the age of 18.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that marriage should be “entered only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses”. This means that where one of the parties getting married is under 18, consent cannot always be assumed to be “free and full”.
According to our laws, any man who has sexual intercourse with any girl under the age of 16 has committed an offence and must be arrested and prosecuted for statutory rape.
We hope that traditional leaders as custodians of communities’ cultural heritage and values will play a leading role in educating their communities to desist from the practice.
It is important that Zimbabwe implements and enforces human rights instruments at its disposal such as Cedaw, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It is unfortunate that countries that are signatories to such conventions do not always ensure that commitments are implemented and enforced at national level leading to the unfortunate incidences of forced child marriages.
I cannot agree more with many who view domestic violence as an outrage and blind spot holding back women and girls. Because of that it can no longer be considered a private matter, but a public issue and a major challenge for all who strive for development.
If domestic violence continues to receive inadequate attention, it tells women they have less worth and less power than men. It undermines their ability to make choices and act on them independently, impacting not only them, but their families, communities, and economies.
Globally, the most common form of violence women suffer is at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, or partners.
It has also turned political in that conservative estimates of lost productivity resulting from domestic violence are roughly equal to what most governments spend on primary education, according to the World Bank.
Early and forced marriage contributes to driving girls into a cycle of poverty and powerlessness as they are likely to experience: illiteracy and lack of education. Girls tend to drop out of school shortly before or when they get married as there is a commonplace view that once a girl is married she has crossed the threshold into adulthood and no longer needs an education.
