[BRC-NEWS] Zimbabwean Women Fight for Lost Rights Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit [NOTE: SEE ALSO article in this section: "Junior Males/GL Wkly" source - Marc Mealy BRC-NEWS http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/99jun1/10jun-zim_women.html Daily Mail & Guardian (South Africa) June 10, 1999 Zim women fight for lost rights Zimbabwean women continue to protest the Supreme Court's decision that women cannot be treated as adults according to African customary law. -------------------- SUSAN NJANJI reports -------------------- ZIMBABWEAN women have gone on the warpath to regain rights lost when the Supreme Court, citing local tradition, recently ruled that they should never be considered adults. The country's highest court of appeal, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that irrespective of the rights granted to women under a 1982 Legal Age of Majority Act (LAMA), "the nature of African society" dictated that they were not equal to men. The court said that according to African customs in Zimbabwe, women should never be considered adults within the family, but only as junior males, or teenagers. "Women's status is therefore basically the same as that of a junior male in the family," Justice Gibson Muchechetere said in his judgement which disinherited one Venia Magaya, 58, of her late father's estate. Magaya lost a house in Harare to her younger half brother on the grounds that she was female, since customary laws of succession preferred males to female heirs. The court said that customary law -- crafted in 1907, when white colonial settlers failed to interpret the indigenous people's traditional practices -- stated that only men could inherit and that all family members were subordinate to the patriarch or male head. In 1982, President Robert Mugabe's government became very popular with women after it passed the Legal Age of Majority Act, which accorded majority status to women at the age of 18 years. Previously, a woman could not even own a passport without the consent of her husband or father or any male relative. Although the legislation applied to both men and women, it greatly improved the rights of women by effectively raising their status from minors to adults, with capacity to enter into legal contracts without the consent of the parent or male adult relative. "Under customary law, women did not have the right to heirship and majority status would not give them that additional right," said a full bench of five Supreme Court judges. Justifying its ruling, delivered in March, the court said that the legal age of majority did not apply to customary law and that the country's constitution sanctioned discrimination against African women on family matters. "It must be recognised that customary law has long directed the way African people conducted their lives and the majority of Africans in Zimbabwe still live in rural areas and still conduct their lives in terms of customary law," Justice Muchechetere said. Women's rights activists are fuming at the 5-0 decision which has revoked their rights and wiped out 20 years of women's rights gained since the early 1980s. Last month, angry women took to the streets to protest the court decision and delivered a toughly-worded petition which suggested that those who appointed senior judges should take account not only of their legal skills but also their grasp of the needs of a modern society. In other forms of protests ranging from articles in newspapers and radio chat shows, women have lashed out at the all-male, middle-aged supreme bench. One sociologist Rudo Gaidzanwa said the gains of 20 years have been "overturned by a sleight of hand whereby provisions of gerontocratic rules in peasant societies (are being) hauled out of the archives selectively... to discipline those sections of the community that are a thorn in the flesh of older males in our society". The women, who have embarked on a fierce campaign against the decision, argue that even if the judges' interpretation of the laws were correct, culture was never static and there was never one culture in Zimbabwe. "What alarms us is that the Supreme Court reinstates the disadvantage and disabilities women suffered under customary law, which the legislature clearly intended to remove through the Legal Age of Majority Act," said a coalition of women's rights groups. The women questioned the reasoning of the country's most learned and respected lawmen and felt the judiciary was seeking to reverse the rights given to women under the majority act. "The implications are actually frightening -- where exactly does it end, does it erode our rights to vote?" said Rita Makarau, Magaya's defense counsel. Amy Tsanga, a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe said for the judges to uphold a lower court ruling that "a lady could not be appointed heir to her father's estate when there is a man", Zimbabwe had "chosen to regress into the dark ages". The women have decided to work on constitutional reforms to ensure there are no more loopholes allowing for any form of discrimination against women. One section of the current constitution prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, while another states that it is lawful to discriminate in areas of family law, customary law, inheritance divorce or marriage. AFP, June 10, 1999. (c) 1999 Daily Mail & Guardian [NOTE: SEE ALSO article in this section: "Junior Males/GL Wkly" -------------------------------------------------------------------------- BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News/Alerts/Announcements Subscribe: Email "subscribe brc-news" to ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytfem-06.14.99-21:24:05-23707