Chris McGreal in Lubumbashi
ONE group of women knows exactly what it expects from Laurent Kabila’s rebel troops, should they ultimately be victorious in Zaire – the abolition of Mobutu’s Family Code which legalised polygamy, relieved husbands of responsibility for the maintenance of wives and children, and lowered the sexual age of consent to 13.
President Mobutu Sese Seko imposed the revised law 10 years ago. Some women describe it as the greatest blow to their status in modern times, adding to the already considerable insecurities of life in Zaire.
Mafiki Yav Marie, a member of a Lubumbashi women’s association, was one whose life was almost wrecked by the code.
“We lost our dignity. We lost our status in society. The code says we have no rights as women or wives and our husbands could do anything with us, even take our property, or just abandon us and take up with other wives. We’d like our dignity back,” she said.
Mafiki was married with 10 children when her husband took advantage of the code to take a second wife. That was bad enough. After a while he stopped supporting Mafiki and their children. Then he wanted all her property, including the house she had bought after he abandoned her.
The law was on his side. The 1987 code gave a husband the right to claim all of his wife’s property even if they were not living together.
“I went to court. It took years and years because he tried to say I didn’t have any right to live in the house I had bought or any right to the things I owned when I got married. Under the Family Code even his children from his other wife can come and claim my property when my husband dies. I won the case because I had money to fight it and he gave up but I think I could have been made homeless,” she said.
While husbands who take more than one wife don’t necessarily abandon their first spouse, they are often less able to provide for more than one family. And in the end, Mafiki says, it is wives and children who suffer.
But for many women the most shocking aspect of the Family Code was the lowering of the age of sexual consent. It outraged many groups including Lubumbashi’s Association of Christian Women. Bulakali Marie Immacule is a member.
“In Europe you talk of paedophiles but here paedophilia is legal. What else can you call it when men can take 13-year-old girls?” she asked.
The collapse of Zaire’s economy has forced more children on to the streets, to live or beg for food. Girls are the most vulnerable.
“Some will do whatever is necessary to survive,” Bulakali said. “There are rich men in town who offer them money and somewhere to sleep. Some believe that if they take a virgin then they inherit her youth. Everyone knows who these men are but there’s nothing we can do. If you go to the prosecutors and tell them they point to the law and say there’s nothing illegal.”
On top of the insecurity created by the Family Code, the collapse of Zaire’s economy has added to the burdens of providing for families – especially by women on their own.
Bulakali – who works for a railway company which has not paid her in four months – says her Christian group has asked some members to leave because of what they have resorted to in order to survive.
“Some are obliged to leave the association because they became prostitutes. We cannot condone it but they ask: `How else can we survive? How else can we look after our children?'” she said.