Colleagues at OSISA recently  shared this news with us:

Well done sisters in  Mozambique!!

Last week, the advert above (of a local milk stout beer) sparked a furor in Mozambique and managed to galvanize the women’s movement (across the spectrum), to rally together against it.

They claimed successfully that this advert was insulting, discriminatory, sexist and against women’s dignity.

After a press conference where a campaign against the brewer (Cervejas de Mocambique) was launched, the brewer bowed to the pressure and decided to unconditionally withdraw the advert.

Fórum Mulher (Women Forum) and the Mozambican Human Rights League led the protest.

Last week I was part of a very interesting discussion with a few Zimbabwean tertiary students, from universities all over the country, on the issue of sexual harassment in tertiary institutions. The group was a balanced mixture of male and female students, and they were all in agreement about the existence and prevalence of sexual harassment in their different institutions.

They spoke of the large number of students being forced into sexual relationships with authority figures, especially lecturers. These students are often threatened with failure of courses, despite the quality of their work, if these sexual demands are not met. When given a choice between failing a course, which in many cases they have struggled to raise the funds for, and having sex with a lecturer to guarantee that they can continue their studies successfully, many young women, (and indeed a growing number of male students too), end up giving in for the sake of their education. This is not to say that all sexual relationships between students and lecturers are all non-consensual. There are indeed some female students who actively pursue lecturers in order to have relationships with benefits (but this not what we are discussing today).

One of the students made a powerful and startling statement with regard to these ‘sexual exchanges’ between students and lecturers, and introduced me to the idea of negotiated rape.

“There are many rapists now who can give you room to negotiate with them, even to use condoms.”

Negotiating with a rapist? Pretty hard to imagine! I guess maybe because I have never thought of the issue of rape in that way before; never thought that there would even be room or time enough to negotiate for anything in the heat of the moment. To me, the word rape has always dredged up images of brutal beatings; ripping of clothing; use of weapons; women being dragged off into the bushes and left for dead, all by unidentifiable monsters, or of uncles or teachers etc,  taking advantage of young children in private and threatening them to keep it a secret. However, from the way she put her point across, I got the distinct impression that the encounters she was describing were quite “civilized”, a far cry from the way I have always imagined rape.  Both parties appear to get a chance to talk things over beforehand, and there also appears to be quite a bit of flexibility on the part of the ‘rapists’. It fells quite strange to be using the words rape and negotiate in the same phrase, but the more I think about it, the more sense it seems to make. I’m also not sure if other people, or relevant organizations are seeing things in the same way as this young lady, but I hope that they are paying attention and at the very least feel prompted to further investigate the matter. After all what is the real meaning of rape anyway?

Maybe we should begin by exploring the meaning of the word ‘rape’ and the issue of consent. According to Wikipedia rape can be defined as the act of having sexual intercourse with a person without their consent. It can be carried out with the threat or use of physical force, duress (coercion), abuse of authority (e.g. sexual harassment) or with a person that is incapable of giving valid consent (a minor).

So, given this definition of rape, can we say that these lecturers are rapists, or is this sexual harassment? The problems with concluding whether, the incidents in our nation’s universities can be classified as rape, or just sex, lie within the issues of consent and duress, and how the latter usually affects the former. I mean, how does one prove that they have or have not given their consent, in a situation where they have been given no other choice but to consent? It seems to me that the line between rape and sex within this context is becoming even more blurry. Even though the women I speak of are not treated brutally/monstrously as we most times imagine is the case when we think of how rape occurs, are they still not, in essence, being raped?

In some way, I feel that most of us, (male and female), have gotten into a comfort zone about how we now define rape. This has to change! We must update our thinking so that our ideas on how to solve these problems can continue to be current and relevant to the situation on the ground. I’m also not sure if other people, or relevant organizations agree with the concept of negotiated rape, but I hope that you are paying attention, and at the very least, feel prompted to further investigate the matter.

We held a discussion group this morning with a vibrant and energetic group of students from several tertiary institutions across the country including the University of Zimbabwe, Harare Polytechnic, Africa University and Harare Institute of Technology. In some respects things haven’t changed much since I was a student; they worry about the same things I did then. But while getting a degree and wondering if it will be good enough to guarantee a (high-paying) job is an obvious and universal concern, I think our tertiary institutions are letting their students down by not addressing the social issues that affect them.

Sexual harassment of women students by men in general seems to be one of the biggest problems. In the period when the UZs halls of residence were closed, numerous students had to find alternative accommodation close to the university. One student reported cases of women students staying with gardeners in Mount Pleasant. In addition to paying rent, the women students would also have to give them sexual favours.

Women students are also exploited by their lecturers, and what concerns me most is that the students themselves were unable to even imagine a possible solution for addressing this. The newer institutions like Africa University seem to have the correct structures in place for reporting and investigation, while the older ones like Harare Polytechnic and the University of Zimbabwe simply discourage it by not having or not informing students of the channels in place for bringing up this issue with administrative or faculty staff. Alarmingly, all our women participants reported a lack of faith in any attempt to seek redress by reporting to school authorities. In one story a student reported harassment to a departmental head, who was a woman, but nothing was done to help the distressed student or investigate her claims.

When asked to estimate how many women students got their degrees because they had sexual relationships with lecturers, the average was 80%. The general consensus was that while this relationship was not desired at all by the student, it was in the student’s best interests to endure and make the best of it. One woman student who attends the University of Zimbabwe said: ‘We know that as girls we just have to accept some of these things. If she reports him [for harassment] he will fail her and stop her from getting her degree by talking to all his friends in the faculty.’

Zimbabwe boasts thirty-one government funded universities and colleges whose purpose is to be bastions of knowledge and enlightenment. Instead they have become a playground for the sexual exploitation of women, where every man with so much as a modicum of power seeks to manipulate his way in to gaining sexual favours. Equally culpable are lecturers, department heads and faculty staff; men and women who are aware of this situation but for whatever reason choose to do nothing. It is not enough to protect your own daughter, every woman is someone’s daughter, and every woman has the right to gain an education without harassment. Shame on you!

Sisonke Msimang, is the Excutive Director of OSISA. Here she writes about the challenges of leading a large organisation.

True leadership has no gender

In 2008 I was appointed as the director of a fairly large funding and advocacy organisation. With a staff of 60 and a budget of about R180-million, I was more than a little intimidated. I was younger than my colleagues in senior management and had just had a baby. And, of course, I was a woman working in the notoriously male-dominated sector of human rights and governance.

I was a nervous wreck. How on Earth would I do this?

My instinct was to focus on what I was good at. I have been involved in work on gender and women’s rights since the beginning of my career. I thought I would make my mark by turning our workplace into a model for gender equity.

I imagined I could try out some ideas regarding flexitime and introduce more child-friendly policies. I had grand ideas about challenging people to appreciate that long hours in the office did not necessarily translate into higher productivity. And I wanted to ensure that female employees felt free from sexual harassment and that male employees understood the boundaries and were encouraged to contribute towards an organisation striving for gender equity.

I would make myself available to female staff members by listening to their problems and mentoring and coaching them through difficulties.

All this would be in addition to the daily work of driving strategic direction, keeping an eye on finances, managing a diverse and engaged board of trustees, monitoring the political temperature in our 10 countries of operation and responding to requests for analysis and information from colleagues in Budapest, London, Brussels and New York.

It became evident quite early on that (a) the gender utopia I thought I might achieve simply was not the most pressing organisational need of the moment; (b) given who I was (young, black, female) the pressure to be excellent was intense; and (c) once you are the boss, not many people are interested in sharing their problems. When they are, it’s usually with a view to wriggling out of some obligation. So I nixed the mentor idea.

I realised that if I focused all my time and energy on being a strong “woman” leader, I would not be making very strategic use of my time. I would also be sending a message that I was hired because I was a woman, not because I was a woman who could do the job.

So, much as I understood that relegating gender to the category of “soft” issues was problematic, there was no getting around the fact that others would read any preoccupation with gender as precisely that: an inability to deal with the core issues of the job.

The organisation did not need a gender warrior. It needed a higher degree of internal accountability. This required less of the kinder, gentler woman’s-touch approach and more of the hard-nosed tactics often associated with men. It required confronting people, paying close attention to detail on institutional policy, looking closely at the audit and it required me to say no – very often to men older and more educated than I am. It also demanded of me an ability to let people go if they were undermining the institution.

By the end of my first 18 months, I had had no cosy chats and certainly didn’t feel as though I was bringing any kind of feminine sensibility to the workplace. It was a tense time. I was not turning out to be the feminist leader I had hoped I would be.

Yet there were also clearly a number of ways in which I was acting out classic female leadership traits. I spent a lot of time in the office. The organisation needed a manager focused on in-house matters. In some ways I was playing into the classic gender binary: women spend time within the boundaries of the compound, as it were, whereas men go out there and conquer the world.

In time I learned to use every minute during regular working hours wisely. I cut lunches short, seldom lingered to chat in corridors and turned the BlackBerry on at about 8pm so that I could respond to my colleagues in New York, who began to send messages just as I was getting home at 5pm.

There is no question that a man in my position who had chosen to spend less time in the office might have been viewed as an underperformer. I was given more leeway and there was less pressure on me from my colleagues because they knew I had a small child. It is complicated to be a woman with children who chooses career and family. The costs of trying to juggle are high.

Today the institution I help to manage has grown. It has a staff of 87 and its budget is about R250-million. It operates on a range of human rights and governance issues, from monitoring the conduct of mining companies in poor communities and sensitive ecosystems to supporting litigation related to human rights abuses in countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland and Malawi.

The organisation is no longer tension-filled. I have become a more relaxed leader.

Those early hard-nosed decisions have paid off. People understand that accountability is key and so there is far more peer monitoring. People have largely bought into the broad vision we have of a region in which change starts with us.

I have two children now. I still have not had time to sit down and have any of those mentorship conversations I thought I would. But I feel younger colleagues, both men and women, have learned a few things from me by watching.

We have no more women in leadership positions today than we did when I started the job. But I am proud to say that we have incredibly progressive maternity and paternity leave policies.

Women who have given birth are entitled to six months paid leave and men whose primary partner has had a child are entitled to three months paid leave, taken within the first year of the child’s life. Staff members who choose to adopt are similarly entitled. We have also paid careful attention to creating an environment that is free of sexual harassment.

I have learned an incredible amount in the past three years. In spite of all my misgivings and concern about whether or not I would be respected simply because of my age and my gender, I have been provided with the type of support many managers can only dream of. It wasn’t automatic and it should not have been. But I felt that as I learned, I began to earn respect.

You do not become a leader by virtue of the position you occupy. Every day in my job, I am reminded that you become a leader because those you work with for a common cause give you permission to lead.

In an organisation that is brimming with talent and intellect, I have been provided with the permission to lead. I have been allowed to make mistakes and to pick myself up and try again.

My dreams of turning the organisation into a gender experiment have given way to a more realistic but no less lofty set of goals: to ensure that we build a Southern African institution in which the values of hard work, integrity and authenticity are embodied by a team of women and men committed to a more transparent and accountable region.

That a woman happens to lead the team is both essential and completely incidental. I have learned to live with the contradictions that come with the territory.

Sisonke Msimang is the executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. This is an edited version of her essay that appears in the Mail & Guardian’s Book of South African Women

WLSA has been in existence for the past 24 years. We have handled and continue handling many cases on inheritance. We have also noted an increase in inheritance disputes due to the increase in deaths brought about by HIV/Aids. The case below is one of the thousands of cases that we have dealt with. It illustrates the complexities in our lives especially in relation to marriages.

B (male) paid lobola for A in 1960 under an unregistered customary law union. The union was blessed with five children, three girls and two boys. B acquired a stand in the High density area of Glen View in Harare in 1981. A was a hard working woman and spent time in the rural areas, farming and selling the produce. She also went to neighbouring countries to purchase goods for re-sale. Most of the money generated by A was used to purchase building materials and develop the residential stand in Glen View until it became a complete nine roomed house. A’s desire was to wed in church with B but the latter adamantly refused. In 2001, B met a woman C and started an affair with her. In 2002 B paid lobola for C. She constantly nagged B for a wedding until B gave in. In the same year, B advised A that she should stay permanently in the rural home in Wedza. In 2003, B and C unknown to A “married” at the Magistrate Court in terms of Chapter 5:11 marriage. A only learnt with shock the existence of the marriage on the 1st of June 2007 when B passed away.

Legally, an unregistered customary law union or a registered customary law marriage cannot exist side by side with a monogamous Chapter 5:11 marriage. From research conducted by WLSA, the situation enunciated above is not uncommon. As a result of intense advocacy, the Administration of Estates Amendment Act that started operating on the 1st of November 1997 provides that if a man is married in a registered customary law marriage or an unregistered customary law union but goes on to marry another wife in a Chapter 5:11 without dissolving the marriage or union, both the Chapter 5:11 marriage and the customary marriage or unregistered customary law union will be recognised as and treated as customary law marriages for purposes of inheritance only. A will be considered as the first wife and C the second wife. A and C will be entitled to inherit the house that they each stayed in at the time of B’s death, the household goods and contents and for the remainder they share with the children. A as the senior wife will get more from this remainder.

While WLSA applauds this law, research and other evidence has revealed that women in the situation of A who may have contributed to the acquisition and building of the house will often lose out since wives in the situation of C above who may not have contributed anything will inherit the house by virtue of the fact that they were living in the urban home at the time of B’s death.

On the other hand, if A and B had a registered chapter 5:11 marriage that allows a man to have only one wife at any given time and B goes on to marry C in an unregistered customary law union or registered customary law marriage without dissolving his marriage with A, if B dies, C will not be entitled to inherit anything from B’s estate.

Find out more about this and share your views. Email WLSA on sly [at] wlsazim [dot] co [dot] zw, gettie [at] wlsazim [dot] co [dot] zw or dorcas [at] wlsazim [dot] co [dot] zw

You can also use Skype as follows: slyvia.chirawu, getrude.matsika and dorcas.makaza

You can visit our website on www.wlsazim.co.zw

Making The Law Work For Women, Challenging The Legal System To Work For Women

It is tempting to think of men as animals who cannot control their urges. This is what is implied when women are told that if they wear tight fitting clothes or miniskirts in public they put themselves in danger of being raped. It is affirmed by men themselves when they threaten those women with a public stripping and beating, or argue that the benefits of sex without a condom outweigh the risk of STIs and pregnancy.  But when men are angry that Matobo Senator Sithembile Mlotshwa from MDC-T has also affirmed this position I am surprised. It is one thing for men to control how women behave both in public and private, but it is quite another when women seek to do the same. Men themselves exploit the notion that they are unable to control their urge to procreate. Our society has made it acceptable for a man to have a wife, a small house and a girlfriend, without making that man accountable. And before anyone brings up polygamy, please understand that polygamy was practised within the framework of the family, not outside it.

I don’t agree with the senator’s sentiments. The premise upon which her argument is based, that men are exclusively to blame for the spread of HIV, is false. More than that, the idea of chemically castrating men in general is not only in-humane but also ridiculous. But in the face of countless testimonials by HIV-infected women whose single sexual partner is a philandering husband, I can understand her frustration.