Lobola’s impact on women, children’s rights

Here lobola discussions centre not on its effects during the subsistence of a marriage but after death and its impact on child rights. While love is presumed to be the mother of marriage, lobola is the backbone of acceptable marriages in Africa.

 

It has a huge impact on how children access birth certificates, parental death certificates and inheritance to some extent.

Families quarrel over lobola and these quarrels lead to hatred and lack of co-operation towards death registration and birth registration of children who would have been not registered at the time of death of the mother. The mother is so critical in the birth registration of a child, when she is not there or when she is not represented the child cannot be registered. So when the child has no access to his/her parental death certificate it means she may not benefit from programmes meant for orphans like the Basic Education Assistance Module (Beam), the child may struggle to get a birth certificate and inheritance shares.

Also when the child cannot get a birth certificate it means she will struggle to access or may not even access other rights like education, health, justice, participation in sporting activities, work, and identity and travel documents. Also it will be very difficult for the child to have a legally appointed guardian. The results are that children are likely to drop out of school and resort to transactional sex in order to survive increasing their risk of contracting HIV and Aids.

All this because of lobola.

Surely where elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers and likewise when in-laws fight it is children who suffer.

On the part of the surviving spouse, lobola is one of the critical building blocks on which one will be accepted and recognised as a son-in-law or daughter-in-law. If a son-in-law did not pay lobola, he, in some cases, is asked to do so when his “wife” dies and before she is buried. As if that is not enough her relatives will go on to grab all her assets including the kitchen utensils and the bed she slept on despite the fact that she has left behind children.

All this they do because they did not “know” the son-in-law. The word “know” here is used to mean performance of cultural obligations as far as the marriage is concerned. Some of them don’t even care what will happen to the children. The recognition or lack of it determines whether the surviving spouse will smoothly get the death certificate of the deceased, claim his/her estate and terminal work benefits.

As such lobola is used as a foundation for property grabbing and abuse whose consequences are disastrous for innocent children and defenceless widows; this all but increases the vulnerability of these groups to HIV infection.

There are four types of marital unions that can be identified in Zimbabwe: unregistered customary marriage, registered customary marriage, civil marriage and cohabitation. From an African perspective all recognised marriages have their foundations on the unregistered customary marriage and are dependent on the payment of lobola by the bridegroom’s family to the bride’s family.

Lobola is a custom in which the husband (or his family on his behalf) delivers or promises to deliver to the father (or guardian) of the wife, stock or other property, in consideration of which the legal custody of the children born of the marriage is vested in their father (or his family) to the exclusion of any member of the mother’s family. It is negotiated by the heads of the two families or their representatives.

In a discussion I held with some community leaders I realised that the people who negotiate lobola are not the direct parents of the people who are getting married; this role is assigned to some relatives. Unfortunately these relatives can be jealous and choose to make outrageous demands that will haunt the girl later in life. Their objective would be to foil the marriage of this girl. The essence of having a committee of negotiators is to remove the emotional attachment and preserve the respect of the real parents in-law. It is also because as Africans we believe in common action and solidarity, and we are guided by the ubuntu spirit that says I am because we are. The committee is usually decided not on who is closer to the real parents but on who is a relative, hence some choose to take that opportunity to settle matters that have nothing to do with those getting married.

Usually during lobola negotiations the real parents do not talk. Also when the married dies, it is not the real parents who do the talking, it is relatives who have absolutely nothing to lose and who will not, going into the future have anything to do with the orphans left behind. They will be just watching from the sidelines while the real in-laws are struggling to register birth of their orphans, and these relatives will probably be laughing their lungs out.

In Zimbabwe, lobola is no longer a legal requirement of customary marriage, although the Customary Marriages Act assumes that in most cases lobola will be paid while couples over 18 can choose to marry without lobola, though this is rare. When I say it is no longer a legal requirement I must emphasise that I am referring to general law.

In terms of our own African legal systems with particular reference to the Ndebele and Shona traditions lobola is not an option. A man cannot just walk into another man’s homestead or household and ask to marry his daughter without paying something towards kangaziwe and lobola. Even women regardless of how much modernisation they have undergone still expect lobola to be paid for them.

We have seen people refusing to bury their daughters unless the son-in-law pays lobola. This shows how important and strategic lobola is in today’s marriages. To elders, a marriage is not a marriage until lobola has been paid, whether it is registered or not. Some women even think that lobola gives them status and the amount of it demonstrates how important and valuable they are, maybe that is why Nandi, Tshaka’s mother demanded 55 cattle as her lobola. Women are arguing that less lobola to an extent contributes to their emotional and verbal abuse in marriages because they won’t be considered valuable.

A study conducted by Excellent Chireshe at Great Zimbabwe University revealed that abuse of lobola is also perpetrated by fathers who now see their daughters as money-spinning projects. Such fathers tend to overcharge lobola. Overcharging lobola can, in turn lead to abuse of women by both their husbands and their in-laws. Lobola often gives the husband or his family members the feeling that they have rights over the wife and even own her. One respondent in a certain study succinctly put: “Lobola should be abolished because at times when the in-laws charge exorbitant amounts of money women tend to be seen as property or objects.”

In a similar vein another respondent in the same study echoed:

“The practice is now abused by men to get rich through their daughters whom they watch with a greedy eye from birth.”

In this context daughters have become a high priced commodity in Zimbabwe, where lobola has become a means of escaping poverty in a poor economy.

The church is also caught in the lobola web. Some Christians argue that nowhere in the Bible, and in particular the first five books, do we ever find mention of the Israelites being commanded by God to pay a bride price. There are only two instances in Scripture and they occur before the Law was given, and even within these instances they are never specifically stated to be a customary bride price. In Genesis 24 a nose ring and bracelets of gold and silver were given to Rebekah by Abraham’s servant so that Rebekah could become Isaac’s wife. Contextually, the giving of these gold and silver ornaments for Isaac’s wife was more along the lines of a diplomatic gift, rather than a bride price.

In Genesis 29, Jacob had to work for Laban, the father of Rachel for 14 years before he could marry her. These payments from Jacob at best were to impress or appease man. In contrast, in Genesis 2, the first wife that man ever received was from God when the Lord formed Eve for Adam and brought her to him. The Lord did not demand payment for Eve but gave her to Adam freely.

Because of this some Christians believe that it not necessary to pay lobola. Then one wonders whether the church can preside over a marriage when the father of the woman has refused to hand her over to be the wife of the man she intends to marry. If the father says “no” because lobola has not been paid but the girl says yes because she needs to start her own family, would the pastor proceed with the officiating. In such circumstances one wonders if the father is the real marriage officer and the pastor a mere ceremonial figure who affirms only what the father has confirmed.

One question begging an answer is what the pastor would do if the woman walks in alone unaccompanied by a male relative or father. All these questions need answers because they affect child and women’s rights directly or indirectly. I have heard of interesting stories where “white” weddings are delayed because the son-in-law has not paid up lobola.

I have also often heard some parents saying they will not allow their son-in-law to wed their daughter as long he has not paid lobola. But if we do a thorough analysis we will discover that currently it is women who benefit more in registered marriages. This is so because most assets including those referred to as matrimonial are registered in the name of men, meaning they are legally owned by men, the woman only lays claim on them because of the marriage certificate.

I have often asked many married women as to who the house they stay in belongs to, many have gladly declared that it belongs to them with their husbands despite them (houses) being registered in the name of the men only. This is wrong. Many women discover that they did not own those houses when the man dies.

Women are also main beneficiaries of a marriage because when the man dies the woman will use their marriage certificate to register his death and then proceed to claim inheritance shares and other work-related benefits. So if parents refuse their daughters to wed because of inadequate lobola they should know that they are preparing a very, very fertile ground for their daughter to suffer and be abused when her unwedded husband dies as she will need the relatives of her husband to register his death, deceased estate and in claiming terminal benefits. By refusing to allow her to wed they are making her a serious candidate for property grabbing unless they would be property grabbers at the funeral of their daughter when she pre-deceases her husband.

• The writer is the programmes manager at Trinity Project Trust and can be contacted via Email: [email protected], cellphone: 0773195 055 or landline 09-883102.