Conjugality as Social Change: A Zimbabwean Case

Abstract

Understanding intrahousehold relations between spouses is central to understanding gendered wellbeing in developing countries, and therefore has engaged the attentions of economists, anthropologists, political theorists and interdisciplinary development studies. In all these fields contractualism in conceptualising conjugality and intrahousehold relations is ubiquitous, yet it implies an overly static and compelling structuralist logic, which this article questions. A better understanding of agency and change, in relation to marriage, matters for both the conceptualisation of intrahousehold relations, and for a range of policy initiatives, for example gender equity, or indeed HIV/AIDS, where the ability of women to instigate change in conjugality and sexual cultures is significant. This article makes no claim to represent contemporary Shona gender relations in Zimbabwe, but offers a temporal analysis of changing conjugality in south-central Zimbabwe from the colonial period into the late 1980s 1 to critique the theoretical stance of contractual approaches, through revealing the ways in which marriage has been reformulated through women's agency.

Notes

1. Fieldwork was conducted in two areas of Chivi Communal Area in southern Zimbabwe over 18 months in 1988 and 1989, and consisted of repeated interviews and observations with husbands and wives in 60 households in each site, group interviews and additional interviews with sex workers and many other informants. I am grateful to Ester Tagarira, Beauty Musavengana and Vhenekai Man'ozhe for their help.

2. No claims are made here to portray contemporary marriage in rural Zimbabwe, as the character of marriage in rural Zimbabwe since then has had little ethnographic attention.

3. Zimbabwe has three legal types of marriage; civil marriages which are governed by The Marriage Act, registered customary marriages, under the African Marriages Act, and unregistered customary unions. There are very few marriages other than this last type in Chivi; ‘customary law’ is applied in magistrates courts and is largely the creation of male elders and colonial officials who codified sets of norms which were actually were far from universal or uncontested (Bourdillon, 1975; Ranger, 1983).

4. This situation which was changed by the Legal Age of Majority Act of 1982, and then effectively repealed in 1999, when the Zimbabwe Supreme Court ruled that it does not provide for women to be treated as adults.

5. In the Copperbelt, Zambia, the response by women in urban and mining areas was to undertake informal marriages without any bridewealth, and in this they were encouraged by the mining companies (Lovett, 1989).

6. The two areas are both drought prone, relatively highly populated (40–50 per square km), with livelihoods based on subsistence maize and millet, cattle, small stock, and migrant remittances.

7. Weinrich was a nun, and her association with the church may have affected the willingness to admit to these two officially disapproved of forms of marriage.

8. Meekers (1993) uses categories which are not strictly comparable to mine; two forms of elopement, and marriages-in-progress, which are likely to be negotiated marriages. Thus I have clubbed together her two forms of elopement marriages, and the two forms of negotiated (roora) marriage. She also has no levirate, which is likely due to the nature of her sample (women at maternity clinics) who are younger than mine.

9. Also found in Masvingo town by Muzvidziwa (2001).

10. Called rutsambo in other areas.

11. Called roora in other places.

12. Domestic violence seems to have been recognised as justifying divorce only where it was excessive (May, 1983: 83). May (1983: 82) suggests that recently accepted divorce grounds are male sterility and impotence although Schmidt (1992: 96) reports women running away from marriages in the early decades of the century for reasons including male sterility.

13. There were cases of husbands and wives conniving to extract money from wealthy men in this way. The suggestion here is not that infidelity by women was of no concern but that male sexual jealousy was possibly less significant in divorce dialogues.

14. The road passing through the Madangombe area and the small truck stop offered a location for prostitutes to gather and work, unlike Gwendomba which was not on any transport routes.