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BIOGRAPHY – The Extended Version cont.
AIDS and Custom Leave African Families Nothing
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
Published: February 18, 2005
BLANTYRE,
Malawi - There are two reasons why 11-year-old Chikumbutso Zuze never sees
his three sisters, why he seldom has a full belly, why he sleeps packed sardinelike
with six cousins on the dirt floor of his aunt's thatched mud hut.
One is AIDS, which claimed his father in 2000 and his mother in 2001.
The other is his father's nephew, a tall, light-complexioned man whom
Chikumbutso knows only as Mr. Sululu.
It was Mr. Sululu who came to his village five years ago, after his
father died, and commandeered all of the family's belongings - mattresses,
chairs and, most important, the family's green Toyota pickup, an almost
unimaginable luxury in this, one of the poorest nations on earth. And
it was Mr. Sululu who rejected the pleas of the boy's mother, herself
dying of AIDS, to leave the truck so that her children would have an
inheritance to sustain them after her death.
Instead, Chikumbutso said, he left behind a battery-powered transistor
radio.
"I feel very bitter about it," he said, plopped on a wooden
bench in 12-by-12-foot hut rented by his maternal aunt and uncle on
the outskirts of this town in the lush hills of southern Malawi. "We
don't really know why they did all this. We couldn't understand."
Actually, the answer is simple: custom. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa
the death of a father automatically entitles his side of the family
to claim most, if not all, of the property he leaves behind, even if
it leaves his survivors destitute.
In an era when AIDS is claiming about 2.3 million lives a year in
sub-Saharan Africa - roughly 80,000 people last year in Malawi alone
- disease and stubborn tradition have combined in a terrible synergy,
robbing countless mothers and children not only of their loved ones
but of everything they own.
"It is the saddest, saddest story," said Seodi White, who heads
the Malawi chapter of Women and Law in Southern Africa, a nonprofit research
organization. "People are cashing in on AIDS. Women are left with nothing
but the disease. Every time you hear it you get shocked, but in fact it is
normal. That's the horror of it."
The tradition is rooted in the notion that men are the breadwinners
and the property of a married couple represents the fruits of the man's
labor. Women may tend the goats and plant the corn, but throughout the
region's rural communities they are still regarded as one step up from
minors, unable to make an economic contribution to the household.
When the husband dies the widow is left essentially to start over,
much like a young girl, presumably to search for another husband. Since
the children typically remain with the mother, her losses are also theirs.
"Women are traditionally behind, so they are vulnerable to this kind of
exploitation," Phil Ya Nangoloh, executive director of the National Society
for Human Rights in Namibia, said in a recent interview. "It is bad because
it makes a weak person even weaker and more vulnerable."
The degree to which men control household property varies from country
to country and tribe to tribe.
In matrilineal tribes, children are considered descendants of the
mother, and the family typically lives in the mother's village. Should
the husband die, the widow typically keeps the house and land, plus
items judged to be women's essentials like pots, pans, kitchen utensils
and buckets, according to studies by Women and Law in Southern Africa.
Her in-laws collect the more valuable belongings, like bicycles, sewing
machines, vehicles and furniture.
Most tribes are patrilineal, meaning that children are considered
the father's descendants and men are viewed as the owners of all of
the property. Here, a new widow's situation is truly precarious. Her
in-laws may allow her continued access to her home as long as she does
not remarry. But if she wants to move away, she leaves bereft of all
property.
Alternatively she may be forced to marry one of her husband's relatives
to keep her property. Or she may simply be driven out altogether. Increasingly,
AIDS is an excuse for eviction. "Families have even more of an
out now," said Birte Scholz, who wrote a report on inheritance
practices in sub-Saharan Africa for the Geneva-based Center on Housing
Rights and Evictions. "They simply say: 'You have AIDS. You must
get out.' "
In a culture where women are prized for their docility and obedience,
few widows protest. Consider, for example, the fate of Ellen Wyson,
who lived with her husband and two children in Chiwaya, a southern Malawi
village, until her husband died two years ago, apparently of AIDS.
The family income from farming and selling fish had enabled the couple
not only to build a six-room house and till an adjoining plot of land,
but to give a stipend to her husband's struggling younger brother.
Still, Mrs. Wyson said, her brother-in-law was jealous. When her
husband died, she said, he saw a chance to get even. As in nine out
of 10 cases here, Mrs. Wyson's husband left no will to protect her and
their children.
"Two weeks after the funeral my husband's younger brother and his wife
arrived and took the iron roofing, doors, bicycles, even the produce from the
garden," she said in an interview. "He became very forceful. He
told me: 'You are supposed to go back to your home, because your husband is
dead. And you are not taking anything.'
"They chased me away. There was nothing I could do. I just gave up."
Ms. Wyson, 38, sought refuge in an unfurnished abandoned hut in the
nearby village of Ndanga, where she now lives off relatives' handouts.
In the advanced stages of AIDS herself, she has sent her son and daughter,
13 and 15, to live with her parents while she tries antiretroviral therapy
at a clinic four hours away by foot.
Under Malawi law Mrs. Wyson was entitled to half or two-fifths of
what her husband left behind. Her in-laws might even have been convicted
of property grabbing under a 1998 amendment to the inheritance law that
provides for a fine of up to $200 or five years in prison.
But Mrs. Wyson says she has no money or energy to pursue such remedies
when her life is at stake. "I don't want to reopen old wounds," she
said, staring down at her dirty blue dress.
Legal centers and human rights advocates say such cases are ubiquitous
in sub-Saharan Africa. In one 2001 study in Uganda financed by the United
States Agency for International Development, 29 percent of widows said
they had been victims of property grabbing. One in five teenage orphans
said outsiders had seized their belonging after their parents had died.
Laws to protect the inheritance rights of widows and children are
not enforced or are simply no match for the power of tradition, legal
advocates say. Few widows know their rights, and fewer still are able
to seek legal help, especially in countries like Malawi, where about
500 lawyers serve a population of 11 million.
When one woman in Zambia refused to be inherited by her brother-in-law
or to move out of her home, her in-laws turned her homestead into a
cemetery, Ms. Scholz said in a telephone interview from Geneva. Sixteen
graves now lace her property. A local judge recently ruled that the
court had no jurisdiction to settle the dispute.
Still, more and more widows are putting up a fight. In Zambia, the
police say they investigated 458 cases of property grabbing in 2003.
In Malawi, the nonprofit Center for Advice, Education and Research counseled
some 120 people on issues of inheritance, death benefits or property
grabbing from last July to September, a 60 percent increase from the
preceding three months.
By the time his father, Jonas, died, Chikumbutso Zuze recalled, his
mother was to sick even to cook for him and his three sisters in their
three-room house in the village of Bvumbwe in southern Malawi. Still,
he said, she tried in vain to defy her husband's nephew when, with Dickensian
callousness, he showed up after the funeral demanding the keys to the
family truck. He also demanded the beds and any other possessions they
had not already sold off to pay for medicine and food.
Chikumbutso now lives on the charity of his maternal aunt and uncle,
who say they struggle daily to feed their own six school-age children.
To raise money for food, the boy carries buckets of water, hauls sand
from the river and solicits other chores from the neighbor.
"I don't have a permanent place to stay," he wrote in a notebook
provided to him by Unicef, which endeavors to track and aid orphans like Chikumbutso. "I
am shifted from one place to another, sometimes on a weekly basis. Assistance
which I need: food, clothes, blankets, school uniform."
He is at least marginally better off than his 14-year-old sister,
Labbecca. A few weeks ago she turned up on the doorstep of his aunt,
Befiya Phaelemwe, begging to be taken in.
But the aunt said the pittance her husband earned patching clothes
was not enough to feed her own children and Chikumbutso. She gestured
toward a metal bucket half-filled with corn on the floor - the sum total,
she said, of the family's provisions.
"I told her the house was small and I could not take one more child," she
said. "She was full of sorrow."
In tears, Labbecca trudged off, saying maybe a boyfriend would provide
her with a place to sleep. Ms. Phaelemwe said she had not seen her since
and had no idea where she was.
Said Chikumbutso: "I am very worried."
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