Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues Chapter 4 Gender Discrimination Marriage and gender discrimination Gender discrimination affects how women participate in our economy. It starts with the assumption that girls will get married and their major work will be to produce children for their husbands’ families. Their obligation to bear children for their in-laws arises from the payment of bridewealth (roora, lobolo) by husbands to their wives’ fathers, brothers, or guardians. Bridewealth transfers rights in the children from the woman’s family to her husband’s lineage. It also compensates her own family for the loss of her labour. When bridewealth is paid, therefore, the bride must work and bear children for her husband and his family. Certain attitudes accompany the payment of bridewealth. Fathers of girl children may see their daughters’ education as not worth investing in, because the girls will marry out and their own investment will then benefit others. This attitude is unjustified. Firstly, many families are assisted financially by their welleducated, adult, married daughters more than by their sons. Secondly, fathers often charge exorbitant amounts of bridewealth for their well-educated daughters. Education, like chiefly status, commands a premium in the marriage market. So bridewealth alone is no reason for not educating girls; but it is often used as an excuse for not doing so. Of an estimated two million functional illiterates in Zimbabwe, threequarters are apparently women. 11 And our school enrolment figures show increasing drop-out rates of girls in the higher grades. Equal enrolment of boys and girls in Grade 1 becomes, by first-year university, two young men enrolled for every one young woman. Organisations such as the Adult Literacy Association of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe chapter of the Forum for African Women Educationalists are concerned with countering women’s low self-esteem and the negative attitudes towards educating girls, as well as imparting skills to and sponsoring school fees for females. Husbands may regard themselves as having ‘paid for’ their wives. 12 In the heat of domestic arguments, they often tell their wives that they must obey, and can be beaten, because they have been paid for. As the amounts paid in bridewealth have risen, this problem also appears to have worsened. Yet such power struggles in the home appear to be recent. The ideology of bridewealth says it is not an indemnity payment for a woman’s labour or fecundity, but rather expresses gratitude to her family for raising her properly, and binds the two families in an ongoing relationship. In reality bridewealth does all of these things, and can be used in different ways in marital disputes. But traditionally its payment did not give husbands the right to beat their wives, whose own families had the obligation as well as the right to protect their daughters against marital abuse. However, bridewealth was – and remains – part of our patriarchal society. It affects especially elites, who can afford to pay. Poor Zimbabweans cannot afford bridewealth or church weddings. They shack up together, sharing pots and beds in what we call mapoto relationships. These have not yet been recognised as common-law marriages by Zimbabwe’s Parliament or judiciary. While mapoto relationships lack legal recognition, they confer much greater freedom on the women involved than do formal marriages. Ironically, perhaps, the constraints of patriarchy affect the wealthy more than the poor. But the social classes are also affected differently by patriarchal power relations. In patriarchies, women are subordinated to men. Modernising patriarchies find many ways to continue subordinating women to men, even in new institutions. Christian churches preach the equality of all humans before God; but many still recruit their priests only from the male population and may regard female ordination as an affront to their God. Constitutions may guarantee gender equality, but few 11 Parliamentary Debates 27,36:3776. 12 In fact, some women contribute to their own bridewealth in order to marry men they love who may not be able to pay what their fathers demand. 13