Senator for Mashonaland West Honourable Violet Moeketsi, says gender-based violence is a reality, adding that she grew up in a family where there was abuse.
The Senator, while making contributions to the debate on Domestic Violence in the Senate said, at one time she had to beat up her violent late father in a bid to rescue her mother who was being choked.
Below is what she said:
I would like to talk about violence against women. Allow me Mr President, to say that violence against women in communities that we live in is a very painful situation. I would like to mention where I grew up. We were a family of five girls and five boys. My father was not gifted in farming like other men and my mother was the head of the homestead. I want to explain that way back, as I speak I lived in such a homestead. My father was a drunkard and would walk on foot despite the distance in search of beer. I am not speaking evil about my father because he is now late but during that period when he was alive, people thought that an aggressive husband was good for a strong homestead.
Whenever he returned from the beer binges, he would hold one of his daughter’s hands and press aggressively on her finger and in the process ask – what did you eat in my absence? He wanted to establish what meals we ate during his absence, so we grew up in such a scenario. As children, we knew that whenever we went looking for mice, we would prepare the mice and leave some for our father. Sometimes chickens would disappear after being snatched by eagles from the homestead. Initially, we were not aware of the fact that our father would count all the chickens in the homestead before travelling and we would explain to him that the chickens had been snatched by eagles. He did not take that lightly and our mother would be beaten up for eating chicken during his absence.
Mr President, what I am saying is still happening in some homesteads and some communities. Women are still being abused in these communities. In some instances, other women do not report and end up giving other reasons different from what would have actually transpired – they hide such information. At times when they go to their parents to report, the parents turn back their daughters to their homesteads saying that they should return to their husbands since the parents received lobola for their daughters.
Another time Hon. President, my mother sent my sister to buy some provisions and the women whom she went with delayed coming back. That very day and because of the darkness, my sister could not return home but our father returned on the very day. He was in the habit of calling out all the girls names one by one to establish whether we were all there. This was how he established that my sister was not there but upon my mother mentioning that she was not there, my father just kept quiet. Our mother knew that because when he is quiet, things were not all right and since we were still young we did not know that our mother was being abused.
My sister came back the next day and my mother told her that trouble was brewing, she was going to be beaten up by father. My mother planned together with my sister that the moment she opens the door, my sister would immediately run away. However, my father tried chasing her and failed because he was drunk but instead he caught my mother and glued his hands on her throat.
I had grown up a bit and saw that my mother was dying and had to intervene. I am telling the House what I did myself; it was not done from next door. I hit my father with a big pounding stick so that he would let my mother go because he had his hands glued her throat.
In an effort to catch me, he ran after me, unfortunately there was a trench in the field and he fell inside the trench and I was able to jump over it. My mother managed to gain strength and again took the pounding stick and hit my father. So that was the very last day that we witnessed my father’s violent actions against my mother.
My father was well known for his violent behavior even where he went to drink opaque beer. Many people in the community were so scared of him; they would gather money whenever they saw him in sight so that they could buy him beer and avoid his violent actions.
My mother would only have peace when my father had gone out a distance away from the homestead to drink bear. However, we still have such people in this country abusing women to this extent.
It is my plea hon. President to say we still have a lot of work – women are threatened in their homesteads. Others cannot listen to any good news because of the people they live with. People cannot report such issues even to the police for help.
We kindly ask Mr. President that we still have a lot of work in this country on the ground. I know this campaign against gender based violence is being flighted everywhere, even on the radios but how many people have radios and how many are listening to these debates in this august House? If it is a man who understood that it is referring to him and reprimanding him, they would rather ask you to switch it off. So we still have a lot of work.
Long ago women were forced to go to the fields and were given the most difficult task in ploughing with cattle, a task known to be very dangerous that one can actually die when using cattle for farming for the first time (kupingudza mombe). A chief’s or president’s homestead without a wife is not a homestead – so women are very important and should not be abused.
The term prostitute is the most degrading or heavy word used against women, yet a woman cannot do prostitution without a man. We cannot continue to have the term being used to say women are prostitutes. Mr. President, we still have a lot of work to do for women to be respected in this country.
Thank you, Mr President, for saying that traditional leaders are in support of this action, it is very true. We have graves of women who committed suicide because of being abused. With these few words, I thank you.
