Traditional practices of polygamy, virginity testing and kugara nhaka (wife inheritance) in Zimbabwe inhibit women’s control over their bodies and increase vulnerability to HIV infection, but activists are split on the best way to tackle the customs.
The Girl Child Network (GCN) believes in empowering girls to resist virginity testing. Other advocacy groups favour tighter legislation against high-risk behaviour performed “in the name of culture”. Still others believe in empowering women to make informed decisions within the context of traditional culture, given the hostility of many community leaders to attempts to tamper with custom.
“Where the cultural practice is not seen as a violation and is believed in, it’s difficult to police,” said Emedie Gunduza, advocacy officer of the Women and Aids Support Network (WASN). She said the more economically disadvantaged the woman, the more prone she is to wife inheritance.
GCN director Betty Makoni said virginity testing takes place not only at ceremonies sanctioned by rural chiefs, but also in churches and the home, where it is performed by “the girl’s mother, an aunt, a neighbour or even the prospective husband”.
Contrary to the cultural belief that testing reduces promiscuity and the rate of HIV infection, Makoni noted it can actually fuel rape, as girls become targets of HIV-infected men who believe sex with a virgin can cure them.
In some Pentecostal churches, once a girl’s virginity is confirmed, “a male member of the congregation might rape the girl, confess in front of the whole congregation, and then agree to marry her. The power to resist must therefore rest in the girl’s own hands,” Makoni said.
Some groups believe the practice will be much more acceptable if boys are tested too, but Makoni disagreed.
“We say the insertion of a finger or anything in a child’s vagina is sexual abuse. It violates the most critical part of a child’s body and girls must report it.”
The GCN has 156 girls’ clubs in 11 mostly rural areas, where girls are taught about their rights and given survival skills. Several chiefs now frown on the practice of virginity testing, but in areas where there is resistance, the GCN’s “underground work” has resulted in many girls refusing to attend ceremonies, Makoni said.
One such ceremony organised earlier this year in the Rusape area, close to the capital, Harare, reportedly collapsed through non-attendance by the girls.
“The greater the girls take up the challenge of refusing, the greater the chances of virginity testing being phased out,” Makoni said.
Bold interventions against nhaka and polygamy are more difficult, as the work of the Zimbabwe Open University’s (ZOU) committee on HIV and Aids has shown.
After an evaluation exercise with its students last year, the university reported that 73,7% rated nhaka as top of the list of practices fuelling HIV because of the possibility of infection if a widow is passed to her deceased husband’s brother.
But attempts to lobby traditional leaders have been unsuccessful, with the leaders rejecting notions that nhaka and polygamy necessarily fuel the pandemic.
“They said there was no proven research that women in these relationships had a problem,” said David Chakuchichi, chairman of the ZOU’s HIV and Aids committee. Traditional leaders demand the right to correct from within whatever is proved to be fuelling the pandemic, while leaving the practices intact, he said.
The WASN, however, said it has recorded success when it worked through traditional structures and targeted HIV/Aids issues in a more holistic way.
In a three-year evaluation exercise in Chikwakwa, 50km outside Harare, where infection was believed to be high and ignorance of the disease prevalent, it found that once women were equipped with information and negotiating skills, they were able to make informed decisions on matters concerning high-risk behaviour.
Consequently, sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies had dropped significantly and there was greater openness to discussing HIV issues.
For example, “the women indicated that the female condom put them in control and the men preferred it to the male condom”, said advocacy officer Gunduza.
She put that success down to an “enabling environment” created by health workers and community leaders, which might not have been possible had a more aggressive approach been taken. — Irin