Online Reporter
Alice Tagwira
Beyond Boundaries
There is a video I watched on Facebook. A woman, voice trembling, is cursing her husband and the internet at the same time. She is calling down “dangerous” prayers, warnings, and a few divine consequences should he continue with his alleged affair.
Half the comments are laughing emojis. The other half are “this is too much.” I am in the third group: the ones who watched and felt a deep sadness. Because what we are watching is not just drama. It is what happens when love, betrayal, and public life collide, and when a woman decides that if no one will listen in private, then everyone will hear in public.
Let us be honest with ourselves. Marriage in many African homes is still sold as both destination and identity. From Harare to Lagos to Nairobi, the script has not changed much. Meet, marry, build, endure. “For better or for worse” is said at the altar with flowers and photos. The “worse” part, however, is rarely discussed in the marriage classes.
And yet the “worse” keeps showing up. Infidelity. Betrayal. Secrets that eventually become status updates. The result is a generation of women who are tired of pretending that everything is fine while quietly bleeding. Sometimes that bleeding comes out as silence. Sometimes it comes out as WhatsApp voice notes. And sometimes, as in this case, it comes out as a public prayer that sounds a lot like a curse.
I am not here to diagnose anyone. I am not a psychologist, and Facebook is not a clinic. But I do know desperation when I see it. And I also know how context shapes behaviour. According to the 2019 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey, 1 in 3 women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence, and 1 in 4 have experienced sexual violence by a spouse. UN Women’s 2023 global report puts the figure for intimate partner violence at 35 percent of women worldwide, with sub-Saharan Africa carrying a disproportionate share. In South Africa, the Medical Research Council has reported that a woman is killed by an intimate partner roughly every three hours. Closer to home, the Musasa Project recorded over 14 000 cases of gender-based violence in Zimbabwe in 2023 alone.
Those are not just numbers. Those are kitchens, bedrooms, and church pews. Those are women who were promised partnership and got performance instead.
So when a wife goes online to speak in the language of curses and declarations, it may not be madness. It may be the only megaphone she thinks she has. It may be grief with data bundles. It may be a woman who has tried quiet conversations, family meetings, and tears, and has found that none of those moved the needle. The internet, however, moves things very fast.
There is also another angle worth considering with some grace. Many women, when marriage gets difficult, turn to faith leaders for guidance and prayer. That is a good and human thing to do. Faith carries people through seasons that logic cannot explain. But in that space, messages can sometimes get mixed. A woman in pain may be told to “declare,” to “stand,” to “prophesy.” The intention may be to give her hope and agency. The outcome, however, can sometimes be a public spectacle that helps no one, least of all the woman herself. Intention and impact are two different things, and in the age of screenshots, impact travels further.
This is not to blame pastors or churches. Most faith leaders I know in Zimbabwe are doing difficult work with limited resources, and many marriages have been saved in counseling rooms that will never make the news. But we would be lying if we pretended that bad advice does not exist, or that some counselling has not, over time, prioritised “keeping the home” over “healing the people in the home.” A home held together by fear and silence is not a home. It is a museum of what used to be.
The larger conversation we must have is about the gap between the promise of marriage and the practice of marriage. Women walk into marriage on the strength of a vow. Men do too. The vow is simple: fidelity, partnership, care. Yet we keep seeing very public failures of that vow, and then we keep seeing very public defences of those failures.
A few days ago, Nigeria was debating the tragic case of a young woman who alleged she was assaulted by a married man. He reportedly told his pregnant wife he was going to work, then met the young woman at a hotel. The online commentary that followed was, to put it mildly, unedifying. Some married men defended him. Some said they would have done the same. Some joked.
Married men. Husbands. Joking about betrayal and violence as if it were a sport.
That is the part we cannot afford to normalise. Because while we are busy analysing a woman’s Facebook post, we are missing the men whose behaviour created the post in the first place. It is a bit like arresting the smoke alarm and leaving the fire to burn.
Across Africa, we are living in a strange moment. Women are more educated, more economically active, and more vocal than any previous generation. Yet many are still being told that their primary job is to endure. Endure infidelity. Endure disrespect. Endure explanations that start with “men will be men” and end with “pray about it.”
That is not sustainable. And it is not fair.
Let me also address something that comes up often in these discussions: the relationship between faith and women’s autonomy. Can a woman be a person of deep faith and still ask hard questions? Of course she can. Millions do, every day, in Harare, Abuja, Accra, and Johannesburg.
The sacred texts of Christianity and Islam are just that — sacred. They are also old, and they were written into societies very different from ours. Thoughtful believers have always read them with interpretation, with context, with history in mind. That is not disrespect. That is wisdom. To read a 2000-year-old text as if it were a WhatsApp forward with no context is not faith. It is laziness.
The question is not whether women should be in church. Churches in Zimbabwe are full of women who are praying, serving, leading, and building communities. The question is whether the messages women hear in those spaces affirm their dignity, or whether they quietly teach them that dignity is something they must earn by suffering well. A faith that requires a woman to disappear in order to be holy is not faith. It is erasure.
And here is where a bit of wit is necessary, because if we do not laugh, we will cry. We have men who will attend a 6-hour service on Sunday, clap for a sermon on integrity, and on Monday explain infidelity as “a small mistake.”
We have aunties who will tell a young bride to “be patient” while the husband is being impatient everywhere else. We have families who will spend money on a big wedding, but will not spend money on marriage counseling. We are, as a continent, very good at ceremonies and very allergic to maintenance.
Zimbabwe is not exempt from this. We have the laws. The Constitution, Section 80, guarantees equality. The Domestic Violence Act recognises emotional and economic abuse, not just physical. We have brilliant women in law, in business, in media, in the pulpit. What we need now is for culture to catch up to the law, and for practice to catch up to the promise.
So what do we do with the woman in the video? We do not mock her. We do not turn her pain into content. We ask better questions. Who was she before this post? Who failed her? What systems told her that this was the only way to be heard? And what are we, as men, as women, as faith communities, as a society, going to do so that the next woman does not feel she has to choose between silence and a public outburst?
To the husbands reading this: fidelity is not a favor. It is the floor. It is the bare minimum of the vow. If you cannot keep it, do not make it. And if you break it, do not ask your wife to clap for you while you are picking up the pieces.
To the wives reading this: your voice matters, even when it shakes. But you also deserve peace more than you deserve a viral post. Seek help that heals, not just help that performs. There are counsellors, lawyers, faith leaders, and organisations in Zimbabwe who will walk with you without shaming you. Use them.
To the church and community leaders: we need more rooms for honest conversation and fewer stages for public warfare. Teach men responsibility with the same energy we teach women endurance. Teach boys what a vow means before we teach girls how to keep a man.
Africa deserves marriages that are partnerships, not prisons. Zimbabwean women deserve homes where they are not choosing between their sanity and their status. And all of us deserve a public conversation that is more honest than it is entertaining.
The woman in that video may have been driven to a breaking point. She may have been given bad counsel. She may have simply reached the end of what she could carry. Whatever the explanation, the image should haunt us a little. Because behind the camera is a person, and behind the person is a promise that someone broke.
We can do better. We must.
