Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues recognition of all women, irrespective of their marital status, as individual taxpayers, was a major move towards gender equity in respect of women’s economic rights. Yet gender equality was not written into the Constitution of Zimbabwe until the end of 1996, and when it was so recognised, it was massively diluted by the retention of the much-hated ‘Section 23’. Section 23, sub-sections (3)(a) and (b) of the Constitution have since 1980 exempted all customary, family and personal law from Constitutional regulation. Thus our Constitution itself permits, even encourages, men to discriminate against women in innumerable ways, provided these are recognised ‘customs’, or fall within the ambit of family or personal law. What the governing party has given in statute, it has taken back in two ways: in the names of ‘culture’ and ‘customary law’. Both were created by State administrators and judicial officers during the colonial and post-colonial periods (Bourdillon 1975; Cheater 1986). They bear little, if any, relationship to pre-colonial practices. Moreover, section 111B of the Constitution of Zimbabwe also specifies that international agreements are not binding unless they have been incorporated into our law as acts passed by our Parliament. Our Parliament has not yet incorporated as domestic statutes any of the international treaties and conventions on women’s rights. In particular, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) cannot yet be used in Zimbabwean law, even though Zimbabwe signed it in 1991. Even after the 1996 landmark 14th Amendment to the Constitution, then, major problems still remain with gender equality in practice. As the editor of The Herald noted: ‘the new battle is to change attitudes of many men, to make them start thinking seriously about how their own behaviour denies half the human race its right to be treated as truly human … to find ways of restoring that spirit [of the past], rather than enforcing obsolete customs’.5 5 The Herald 9 March 1999. 6