Johannesburg - The practice of ukuthwala needs to stop, a woman who was abducted, forced into marriage and raped, said in Johannesburg on Thursday.
“I'm here to say, put an end to it. Only bad things come from it,” said the woman, clad in orange and brown traditional Xhosa clothing.
She was speaking at a briefing by the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious, and Linguistic Communities on its latest report on ukuthwala.
The woman was responding to calls from commission head Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva that ukuthwala be promoted and protected.
The practice of “ukuthwala” was being abused by some men, the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities said on Thursday.
Commission head Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said ukuthwala was between two consenting adults who loved each other, wanted to be together, but were being hindered by issues such as collapsed lobola negotiations between their families.
The woman's family would then be alerted that she was at her lover's home willingly and call for the negotiations to continue.
But, Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said men were now abducting young girls and calling this ukuthwala.
She was speaking in Sandton where her organisation was briefing the media on their latest reports of ukuthwala.
“As long as we call it ukuthwala, it won't stop,” she said.
“It needs to be called jack-rolling and abduction... Name it correctly,” she said.
The woman, however, said she wanted the practice abolished. She was abducted when she was 14 by a 50-year-old man and repeatedly raped.
“I was in Standard two (Grade Four), I was uneducated and I had to bear him kids,” she told the conference.
Her first child was stillborn, probably because she had had the baby at a young age.
She cried as she spoke about how the man would leave her at home while he went to Johannesburg and possibly mingled with other women.
“I never loved him and he never loved me but I had to hold on,” she said in Xhosa.
She explained the vicious cycle of being taken as a young girl.
“My own children are now uneducated because I was uneducated,” she said, taking a sip of water.
“I say do away with this practice.”
Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said she sympathised with the woman, but it was wrong to call for the dissolution of cultural practices instead of fixing problems with them.
She said it seemed to be easy for people to call for abolishing cultural practices but the same was not being done for religious practices as these were considered sacred.
“Why are cultural practices not sacred?” she asked.
Delegates at the event included traditional leaders, legal officials, and children's rights activists.
Sapa