GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

Sir,

Trying to determine how to protect women in the country while preserving Swazi traditions is the reason why we have failed to save the lives of many women who have died in the hands of their loved ones.

The mentality that I find even more disturbing is the idea that cultural traditions that oppress women are somehow worth preserving. One such custom is that of lobola.

The tradition itself is beautiful, but its implications are oppressive. The idea that after a man marries a woman, he now owns her - her body, her thoughts, her religion, her health - is one, among many, that has destroyed women in the country.

I am not referring to the obvious and physical battering, slaughtering and strangling of women by men, nor am I referring to the string of rape and assault incidents we read about everyday. I am referring to the cases we never get to read about, the unwritten rules of marriage that a man decides a woman’s every move, even if that move is practicing her health rights.

Deliberate

As much as stigma from strangers should not be tolerated, but deliberate murder from someone who married you because he claimed to love you is the one thing I can never understand.
Some say one of the reasons why men won’t let their women go to hospital is that the man just can’t stand the thought of nurses fiddling with intimate body parts of his wife.

The thought of his woman laying on the bed with her legs open while nurses and doctors perform a pap-smear is just too much for him to bear. One man actually had to go to the hospital himself to threaten the nurses and warned them away from his wife.

His wife died a few months later. The less said about pastors who tell these women to stop going to hospital because they’ll ‘pray for them’, the better.

I could not believe some of these stories when I heard them. I had been too focused on the obvious gender-based abuse and killing of women.

I hadn’t thought that murder could come in so many different forms, and from the people who are supposed to protect these women. It is true that the only people who can hurt us are the ones we love.

Nomsa

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