South Africa returns to the 18th. century

An excellent opinion piece from the LA Times

"KWAMPUNGOSE, South Africa — As a child, Nike Dlamini grew up under a rule: If anything happened in the family or the village, you went straight to the head man. Quarrels, problems, births, deaths: All had to be reported. In some cases — a child born out of wedlock — there was a fine to be paid.

When Dlamini was 11, her older brother made sexual advances, forcing her to undress and stroking her. Dlamini and her sisters went to the head man, the village representative of the traditional king, or chief, for help.

He brushed it off as a family affair, she said. Male relatives took her brother's side, and Dlamini fled to avoid what she feared would inevitably be rape.

After two decades away, Dlamini, 32, came home last year to this village in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal. She approached the head man asking for land to build a house with her savings where she could raise her two children.

"He said he's not allowed to allocate land to a woman," she said. "It must be a male relative."

South Africa seems to be deliberately heading backwards rather than embracing the future

South Africa's system of traditional rulers and tribal courts endures, and the ruling African National Congress moved recently to widen the reach of that system. The Tribal Courts Bill would subject 20 million rural South Africans to courts ruled by traditional chiefs, in a move critics say creates one law for urban people and another for those in tribal areas.

The bill would deny South Africans in tribal areas their present right to opt out of traditional courts in favor of government courts. Although serious criminal offenses would still be heard in conventional courts, some assaults, including cases of domestic violence, could be heard in tribal courts.

This is a very bad move.

"The tribal courts remain patriarchal institutions. Women complain that when they try to bring their cases to councils comprised of men — and old men at that — they don't get a very sympathetic hearing, particularly when it comes to family matters," said Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, senior researcher at the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

The tribal traditions and institutions sit uneasily alongside a liberal constitution outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion or sexual preference.

Nursing grievances against arbitrary chiefs and traditional courts that treat them as second-class citizens, women have emerged with horror stories: chiefs who refuse grieving widows the right to appear in conventional courts when their land and houses are stolen; who collect arbitrary taxes or impose harsh fines; who punish them by refusing to let them bury their dead."

Why in the 21st. century would you want to revert to a system suited to the 18th. century

" Talking about her experiences 21 years later, Dlamini stood in the doorway of her unfinished house, which she hasn't the money to complete. Tears threatened, but she brushed them away, engulfed by memories.

Suddenly she crashed, face first, to the concrete floor of the round thatched hut in a faint. After a minute, she regained consciousness. She said she had been suppressing so much grief and anger that she feared she would explode.

Her older child returned from school, folded his uniform reverently and took a bowl of samp (coarse cornmeal) and beans from a pot on the stove. Dlamini has managed to put a roof over their heads, but she's afraid they'll be turned out one day, because the land isn't hers.

Although the South African Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, the head man forced her to put the land in her cousin's name, even though she paid the $190 fee to the chief for the land. But she frets that the cousin will change his mind, or that his family will take the land if he dies."

It would be interesting to know if she can go to a court to get her constitutional property rights enforced

"I'm very worried about it," she said. "I'm thinking about my children in particular, because they might come and grab the land and my children will be homeless."

When Dlamini returned to her village, unmarried but with two children, the head man also demanded a $50 fine to be paid to the chief for the children born out of wedlock.

"Where am I going to get this money when I don't even have money for food?" she said.

The head man sounds like a total prick.

" The fines for out-of-wedlock births are traditionally intended to "cleanse" the chiefs, but the men also often impose levies to pay for their sons' educations, a new car or other expenses, said activist Sizani Ngubane of the Rural Women's Movement. She said that with most rural people unemployed, families were sometimes forced to use welfare payments, the $31 monthly child support grant paid by the government, for the fines and levies, which are illegal.

Chiefs keep a register of the unpaid levies. Those who can't pay get punished, sooner or later. A chief can paralyze an unruly subject simply by denying the "proof of address" letter that rural villagers need to get an ID or passport, open a bank account, receive welfare payments and access government services. But retribution can be more sinister."

The world has changed and South Africa must change as well.  Gender apartheid is as immoral as racial apartheid.