Ascent of Women (18 page)

King Mswati made international headlines in 2002 when he sent minions to pluck eighteen-year-old Zena Mahlangu off the street to make her the tenth wife in his harem, after he’d seen her in the reed dance. He hadn’t counted on the reaction of Zena’s mother, Lindiwe, who filed a lawsuit that accused the king of kidnapping. Lindiwe Mahlangu was manager of postal and telecommunications in the ministry of communications in Swaziland, and said her daughter had been invited to the reed dance by a friend who was Miss Swaziland at the time. A few days later, Zena left for school as usual and vanished. Her mother found out that she’d been taken to a royal guesthouse and was being prepared for marriage to the king.

If the king chooses a new wife from among the girls at the reed dance (or later while he examines videotape of the dance), he is bound to ask the girl’s father or grandfather for her hand. In this case, he hadn’t asked, so Lindiwe pressed ahead with her suit, even though a letter from the palace instructed the three judges to throw the case out or face dismissal.

A widow who has known her share of trouble (her youngest son was killed in a car crash in 2006), Lindiwe eventually came to an agreement with the royal family before her daughter married the king. She told me, “My daughter is married now and has a son. I am a grandmother. I went to court before she was married. So I don’t talk about that anymore.” When I asked her if she was happy with the result, she picked her words carefully. “Happiness is an event. Something happens to make you happy. You can’t
characterize your life around happiness. I have joy—from God—which is permanent. That’s what helps me to carry on.”

~

I drove with Doo Aphne from Manzini to the rally that Hlophe had planned in the far-flung district of Mahlangtja on a hot mid-December day that revealed the stunning extremes of the Swaziland terrain. The valleys that rolled out of granite-topped mountains in a kaleidoscope of muted colours made the countryside look as if it had been art directed. Puffs of mist appeared and disappeared as if by magic, revealing and concealing forests of zebras, rivers of hippos, cheeky vervet monkeys, blue-headed iguanas and geckos. Guinea fowl pecked at grain in the morning dew and hid their chicks from the crowned eagles soaring overhead. Hibiscus in flower and the massive albizzia shade trees were stunning; the non-indigenous gum and jacaranda trees also looked wonderful but suck up sixty gallons of water a day apiece in this water-challenged country. Near the capital city of Mbabane is Sibebe Rock the second biggest free-standing rock in the world (after Ayers Rock in Australia). There’s much that is remarkable about the Kingdom of Swaziland, the smallest country in Africa with the biggest problems.

Gossip about the king, although regarded as treasonous, was rife at the Mahlangtja rally to mark World AIDS Day. There were rumours that he was having sex with women other than his own wives and his wives were having sex with their bodyguards. His first wife, Inkosikaz Lambikita, said polygamy, which the king sees as a royal birthright, should end because of HIV/AIDS. But the spotlight at the rally was on Hlophe, who could gather people
in their thousands, attract the media, get the attention of the government and press her demands for change. While her mantra was women’s rights, SWAPOL’s program was about income generation (sewing, gardening, crop production) and drug treatment for HIV/AIDS. At the time, her organization was supporting fifteen child-headed households and paying the school fees of 500 orphans (by 2012, the numbers had increased to thirty-five households and 577 orphans). She received funding from several sources, but the largest portion came from the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which was providing US$100,000 annually.

Amid music, song and conga lines, the irrepressible Hlophe negotiated the jagged line of dignitaries and politicians with her belly laughter and her wide-open embracing arms. Watching her in action as she moved on into the crowd—all HIV positive and wearing white T-shirts with “Stop AIDS—Keep the Promise” written on the back—it was easy to see how her enthusiasm caught the imagination of everyone there.

As she delivered her speech about the importance of making change on that hot windy afternoon, the crowd fell silent when she described a better tomorrow. Hlophe was treading a fine line—the minister of public service, S’gayoya Magongo, was actually in the audience—when she told them, “Even the minister agrees with me—it’s in the constitution—women should have the right to choose.” The minister had no choice but to nod, knowing Hlophe had co-opted him for her battle. She ended her oration by reminding the HIV/AIDS victims in the audience of the responsibility born by the members of government, who were all sitting behind her. A courageous woman.

One of the ministers at the rally referred to the national pride they should all have in the decline of the HIV/AIDS rate of
infection from 42.6 percent of the population to 39.2 percent. “It’s nothing to be proud of,” Hlophe told me later. An administrator from Manzini, Catbird Khumalo, put it more bluntly, “We will all die if we continue to adhere to the culture of polygamy and continue to sleep with our relatives’ wives under the custom of
Kungena
[the right of the dead man’s brothers to have sex with his widow].”

Evening began to fall. The puffs of mist that had seemed so magical early in the day were rolling together into thunderclouds. The tourists in the safari camps an hour’s drive away were likely sipping their gin and tonic, watching wildlife drink at the river’s edge. At Mahlangtja, the rally was over and a thousand disposable plates littered the field. The members of the crowd, grateful for the meal they’d been served, were drifting back to their mud huts in villages that were as far away as a two-hour walk. Hlophe declared the day a success. “We raised $5000,” she said, while helping to clean up the field. “Tomorrow we’ll start again.”

If she had to do it one rally at a time, she was determined to alter the status of women in Swaziland.

~

Afghanistan

In early December 2011, just before the critical meeting in Bonn, Germany, that brought all the players on the Afghanistan file together to decide what the next best steps would be, President Hamid Karzai dropped another gender bomb onto the international scene. He announced that he was pardoning a woman who was in jail—who had, in fact, been in jail for two years—for the crime of being raped. The outrage about a woman actually
serving jail time for being raped spread around the world. Initially news media reported that he’d given a pardon to the woman because she’d agreed she would marry the man who had raped her and who was the father of the child she had delivered while in prison. The woman’s lawyer insisted that this was not the case, that there were no conditions to the pardon. Most of the world felt that if any conditions needed to be placed, it was on Karzai and all his male cronies in government. That a woman who was raped should have to be pardoned? That she should be in jail in the first place? That the rapist had gone free? That being raped was her fault, so she must be punished? These are the cockeyed notions that women and girls in many places live with until other women speak up, challenge seemingly intractable attitudes and traditions and turn the tide on inequality.

The thing about making change is that you have to do the research, prepare the data, present the facts and take them back to the power brokers again and again and again. As Marilou McPhedran says, when it comes to seeking change, “The single best tool to use is the law and the words in the law that say there are promises of equality and justice.”

That’s what convinced Afghanistan’s Hangama Anwari and her colleagues to form the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation. Anwari was a commissioner with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission when she realized that Afghan women didn’t even know what was written in the existing law or that their newly adopted constitution guaranteed equal rights for women. Worse, most politicians didn’t know what was legal and what wasn’t. Anwari and her associates decided to try to make the justice system work for women and girls. “Women who have access to information have a stronger voice in the family,”
she says. “They can have an opinion about a daughter’s marriage, for example. The goal is to improve the situation of women and children in Afghanistan by providing the knowledge the women need in dealing with laws that affect them.”

Afghanistan relies on a patchwork of criminal and civil law, as well as sharia (Islamic religious law). Add to this picture the large sections of the country that still operate under tribal law, and it’s little wonder that people don’t know what their rights are.

The foundation started with examining practices that harmed women and children. For example, the tribal law I mentioned earlier, called
Bad
: the exchange of little girls between feuding families to settle disputes. “When a girl is given by the perpetrator’s family to the victim’s family, both sides think the problem will be solved by creating a relationship between the two families,” says Anwari. “But it rarely happens. The families continue to fight with each other, and the girl child pays the awful price of being owned by people who see her as the enemy.”

Another harmful practice is child marriage. “Most of the girls are underage—seven, eight years old, even three years old,” says Anwari. If a girl who has been married off to a man (often old enough to be her grandfather) runs away and is caught and goes to the village jirga, or council, to plead her case to the elders, those elders may order her to be stoned to death or executed by another form of honour killing, even though it is illegal under the government’s laws. “I realized we didn’t have study cases or proper documentation to show that these actions are illegal. There was no local organization to do this work, so we started the research foundation.”

They began with a survey that asked five thousand Afghans how they felt about the religiously sanctified practice of polygamy.
They asked those with more than one wife why they had chosen that path. The results showed that a stunning 86.5 percent of Afghans were against it. But the Quran allows polygamy under four particular circumstances: if a woman cannot bear children; if she is sick; if he wants more wives and can provide for them; or if the first wife is in agreement with taking a second wife. Since Afghanistan is an Islamic state, criticizing anything in the Quran is considered blasphemous. And blasphemy is punishable by death. These change-makers needed to proceed with great caution.

“We started with what verses in the Quran said about polygamy. The four conditions allowed in the Quran were the basis of our research. But our research showed there are twelve reasons given for polygamous marriages in Afghanistan. Since only four of them are legal according to the Quran, by way of elimination, we began to whittle away the numbers. We concluded that Islam is against the way polygamy is practised in Afghanistan.”

She said it felt like a major achievement when the results of the study were presented to the government as well as the public. But she admitted, “Changing behaviour and attitudes is a sensitive and time-consuming task. We need to use different strategies. Advocacy at the national level is not enough. So we decided to take our research findings to the village.” In the course of talking about their findings with the villagers, they empowered the people to make changes such as building schools for girls, hiring teachers and buying materials such as books and science kits. Like so many game-changers, they saw the opportunity to talk about polygamy as an opening to discuss the value of girls’ education and the dangers involved in child marriage.

The foundation began in 2003. The last time I caught up with Anwari, in the spring of 2011, she had an impressive list of
research papers that had been prepared on topics such as the situation of the girl child in Afghan families, violence against women, women’s access to justice and equal access of women to marriage rights. With the data her team collected, they examined a woman’s marriage rights, using passages from the Quran to prove that the Prophet said there must be mutual consent between the man and the woman before marriage. Then they tied those verses to the articles of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The goal was to make the facts available not just to women but to governments, judiciaries, elders and villagers. Without that, said Anwari, “You cannot make change in a society.”

One of the aims of their work is to decrease the horrifying rate of self-immolation among Afghan daughters and wives. In 2011, there were twenty-two thousand known cases of attempted self-burning; two thousand cases required hospitalization and 234 women died. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission released a report called “Reasons of Women’s Suicide in South-Western Afghanistan” that year. It states that “most of the respondents have mentioned the issue of forced marriage as one of the important factors for self-immolation. Twenty-two percent of the victims interviewed said they had been married without their consent and because of force. Others talked about marriage in exchange for money or
Badal
[another tribal law that exchanges daughters for marriage].” Accurate statistics on self-immolation are not available, but the report concluded that stopping forced marriages was one of the solutions for decreasing the incidence of women’s self-immolation.

A measure of the foundation’s growing success is the welcome the villagers extend to the women who run the workshops that
teach about access to justice in the villages. Anwari explained: “We teach people what the law says, to help them to understand their own rights. Showing them how to make changes takes a lot of time, so I decided that conducting workshops was the best way forward.” She and her colleagues have noticed increased optimism among the women they work with. What’s more, local elders who have enormous social influence are increasingly onside. The workshops are the topic of conversation all over the village, and attendance has steadily increased.

When Anwari began, the government thought that tribal law had a legitimate role to play. Her organization proved that it does not. Most people thought polygamy was not only religiously sanctified but also culturally blessed even by women. Immense problems remain. Forced marriages and child marriages still take place, and violence against women is still very much a part of many Afghan marriages. But now there’s a sense at least that change is possible. As in other countries where women have been oppressed, the women of Afghanistan are now in a dialogue with their mullahs and with their village elders, but most importantly with each other. It’s a discussion that they have never had before.