“In Our Culture”—How Debates about Zimbabwe's Domestic Violence Law Became a “Culture Struggle”

Abstract

This article analyses a debate about the political definition of “culture” and “tradition” in Zimbabwe, sparked by the introduction of domestic violence legislation in 2006. The debate is analysed against the back-drop of the Zimbabwean government's nationalist identity politics, rhetorically dubbed the “Third Chimurenga”, in which insiders and outsiders of the nation are depicted via a cultural and historical discourse of indigenous authenticity. The relations of gender and power which are inherent to this political discourse are analysed as functioning through the formulation of discourses of marriage, Christianity, and “tradition”, which are the contested elements in the debates. The article concludes that the nationalist discourses of the government were maintained as the discursive framework within which the debates about the legislation could take place. And while those who opposed the law saw it as an attack on patriarchal powers, the law can from an analytical point of view also be seen to transfer patriarchal authority from the private sphere to the authorities. Furthermore, the debates over the definition of Zimbabwe's “culture” and “tradition” are seen as part of a contingent process of cultural and political change, which the Zimbabwean women's movement is engaged in.

Notes

¹ The legislation is referred to both as domestic violence bill and domestic violence law according to the context and time-frame of the particular reference.

² The Danish naturalization test was initially made public at the web site www.nyidanmark.dk (accessed 15 December 2008). After a tightening of the legislation around naturalization in 2009, the contents of the test were removed from the government web site.

³ The Southern African Development Community.

⁴ The Shona word Chimurenga means struggle and originally signified the resistance against early European settlement in the 1890s. It was later used as a rallying cry during the liberation struggle in the 1970s. With the entrance onto the political stage of the MDC party in 1999, and the government's defeat in the 2000 constitutional referendum, the government adopted a policy of official anti-colonialism dubbed the “Third Chimurenga”, to underline the take-over of white-owned farms and the violent clamp-down on political dissent in the rural areas.

⁵ The party congress of the ZANU PF in 1989 adopted resolutions to a government review of the Legal Age of Maturity Act, in order to raise the age of majority to 21. A number of similar resolutions were also passed at the congress (Ranchod-Nilsson 2006: 61).

⁶ The original proposal for the constitutional amendment was withdrawn after a wide-spread lobbying campaign by a number of women's rights and civil rights groups. A second draft of the amendment was passed, however, without the discrimination between men and women, but with a general withdrawal of the right to pass citizenship to a spouse, leaving the question up to the Chief Immigration Officer, and thus leaving possible discrimination up to administrative practice (Nkiwane 2000: 335–336).

⁷ An official transcript of the parliamentary debates has not been made public, wherefore we need to rely on an extract from the government newspaper The Herald's coverage of the reading. The reasoning behind using The Herald as opposed to other media more critical of the government is that this piece offers the most thorough account of Mr Mubawu's statements. Official transcripts from the second and third readings of the bill have been made available, wherefore it is conceivable that there is some reason why the transcript from the first reading has not. It is, however, difficult to speculate as to the reasoning behind this.

⁸ Opah Muchinguri interviewed by the author in Harare, 4 December 2006.

⁹ Interviews with a number of these NGOs on this issue during the period October to December 2006.

¹⁰ The author knows only of a single article which was written by an information officer at the NGO Southern Africa HIV/AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS), Fungai Machirori, and appeared in The Sunday Mail (26 November 2006), which quoted a ZANU PF MP who had opposed the bill. This was, however, a rare occasion.

¹¹ Timothy Mubawu was subjected to a disciplinary reprimand from the party leadership, and the immediate response from the party leadership indicated that Mubawu would be expelled from the party. However, this did not happen, and the details of the disciplinary case against Mubawu are not known to the author.

¹³ The Manica Post is the provincial newspaper for Manicaland in eastern Zimbabwe.

¹² Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation.

¹⁴ The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe (www.kubatana.net) is an umbrella organization of Zimbabwean NGOs, which aims at giving the Zimbabwean NGO community a centralized communication strategy and uses its web site for information dissemination purposes and for debate. The site's online debates are widely used by intellectuals and the NGO community. Especially during the debate about the domestic violence law, the site was widely used.