Letting women down

The Rural Women's Movement says rural women are already getting a rough deal when it comes to justice " and the Traditional Courts Bill will make the situation worse.

The Rural Women's Movement says rural women are already getting a rough deal when it comes to justice " and the Traditional Courts Bill will make the situation worse.

Published May 23, 2012

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The Rural Women’s Movement, based in KwaZulu-Natal, has in the course of its work with more than 50 000 rural women extensively documented the harsh realities of rural lives under the unaccountable authority of traditional leaders and their institutions of power.

In a district that cannot be named for fear of reprisal, the traditional leader unilaterally controls community resources and access to land. In most instances, where there are projects that rural women have initiated without him, such as a sewing machines project, he tries to undermine the projects and threatens to remove the resources needed for the project (the sewing machines). His “justification”: he feels he has no control over the project and the money involved.

At amaHlubi, the Rural Women’s Movement is working with an elderly gogo who is a widow living alone. Her only source of income is her state social grant. She supplements the grant by growing food in her garden which cattle from neighbouring eMangweni kept destroying.

In trying to support her, we encouraged her to report the matter to the eMangweni traditional court. She approached the court, which is about 10km from her home, but was sent away because the court “does not speak to a woman”.

The court demanded that she be represented by a man. As she does not have a man in her home she cannot return to the court and has stopped growing food. The movement regards this as an example of the feminisation of poverty.

In Zululand, the Rural Women’s Movement is working with a young woman whose dead father could not be buried for three months because the senior traditional leader had deprived her and her family of the “right” of burial.

The chief claimed he had not paid his khandampondwe(male tax). In this community men are subjected to paying R20 a year as khandampondwe.

The family was only able to bury their father after borrowing money from a neighbour.

In the same community, a young woman has been deprived of her right to low-cost housing because she gave birth to a baby out of wedlock and the father of the baby did not “cleanse” the issue by paying an amount of R300.

Residing in rural areas is becoming more expensive compared to urban areas, where people are assured of taxation being limited to, most commonly, VAT, income tax and property rates.

Traditional leaders arbitrarily impose heavy levies on community households.

As an example, the levies in KwaDlamini, uKhahlamba municipality, are as follows: land allocation costs R500 plus a bottle of liquor, cold drinks and beers; pregnant young women’s parents have to pay R80 to the traditional leader; ihashi lenkosi(the chief’s vehicle) costs R100 a household; and the payment for hosting a party or a ritual during which one slaughters a cow is R50.

In Loskop, Mbabazane municipality, residents are forced to pay R25 for the education of the traditional leader’s son; and it has just been announced that members of the community are expected to pay R200 to access the government’s low-cost housing.

At eMakhuzeni in Sisonke-Ingwe, land allocation costs R150, cases of beers, cold drinks and meals; children born to single parents had to pay R200 to R250 a child, which has recently been raised to R1 000. There are also reports that traditional leaders “raid” households to check if couples living together are married. If they are not married, they have to pay R200.

While conducting a workshop in Ilembe on the Traditional Courts Bill, the movement tried to ascertain how much money the traditional leader there was getting for imposing levies for his isibaya(cattle kraal) to be repaired each year.

We learned that each household paid R10 in a community numbering about 60 000 households.

However, women of the community reported that they and their families collected the poles and fixed the chief’s isibaya. So what is this estimated R600 000 being used for?

Families that do not pay their levies or penalties get sidelined: they cannot have, for example, a wedding or a party in their own homes or a letter to confirm their residence when they want to open bank accounts. Members of the community are discouraged from helping families bury their loved ones as people are scared that they could be banished from the area.

The Rural Women’s Movement is deeply concerned about this imposition of levies, an abuse of power which the bill will not end.

Many women in the rural areas rely on customary dispute resolution processes and institutions as their primary means of access to justice – both because they value these systems and because in many instances other courts are inaccessible to them.

However, the Traditional Courts Bill does not guarantee women’s effective participation in traditional courts – neither as members of the body of people who make decisions in the courts, nor as litigants.

Rural women are most often excluded from traditional courts. They are commonly refused self-representation and attendance in these courts, paving the way for their further exploitation and economic vulnerability.

The Tradtional Courts Bill does not require that this customary law practice change; instead, it permits that women may continue being represented by husbands or neighbours “in accordance with customary law” which favours men.

The institutional arrangements contemplated in the bill have been shaped largely by a desire to protect the interests of traditional leaders – the only group known to have been consulted by the government in the drafting process.

Women, rural women in particular, were not consulted, even though they make up the highest proportion of people living in rural areas and are the ones who will be most affected by the bill.

The formalisation and recognition of traditional courts in the bill presents an ideal opportunity to take proactive and concrete steps to address these inequalities, which the administration of justice in the existing traditional courts has perpetuated.

The bill’s drafters have, however, failed to take the opportunity to ensure that traditional courts comply with the requirements of the constitution regarding women’s rights.

Rather than ensuring that women are no longer discriminated against in tribal court settings, the real impact of the bill will be to perpetuate the existing discriminatory patriarchal power relations with state-backed sanction.

The ones who will pay a price in this regard will primarily be the poorest and most vulnerable women in rural areas (single women, women without sons, women without land rights and/or widows) even though our constitution guarantees access to justice, non-discrimination and equality for all.

l Sizani Ngubane is the founder and leader of the Rural Women’s Movement.

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