No holidays for Zimbabwean women

The Oxford Dictionary defines a holiday as:

1. an extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or travelling. 

2. A day of festivity or recreation when no work is done:

With this in mind, spare a thought for most married Zimbabwean women, for they know not the real meaning of this word. The Easter holidays have just ended, and many of these women are still nursing sore muscles after slaving away at their parents-in-laws houses. Real holidays are for rich, white tourists as far as most Zimbabwean men are concerned. Any public holiday is an excuse for them to show their parents that they got them a real beast of burden disguised as a wife. While holidays are a time to let your hair down and put your feet up, for a Zimbabwean daughter-in-law it's a time to tie your hair in your doek, place your feet firmly on the ground and work like a flogged horse. 

A survey I carried out with a number of married women indicated that beneath the submission and still waters, there's boiling rage and bitterness out there. Zimbabwean womenfolk feel short-changed by their husbands as they feel that their holidays are stolen from them. Many are lucky to ever spend a few hours of any holiday with their own parents.

I simply asked these women in my circle if they enjoyed their public holidays and Oh my! Did I open a can of big fat worms! From gangsta husbands who ban their wives families from visiting to sadistic ones that imprison their wives in their parents' houses behind invisible bars with invisible guns pointed at the woman's head, wives that come dressed as sheep but are actually wolves. In-laws who act like outlaws, husbands that think their families should be the only ones that should should get groceries and financial assistance. Because of the overwhelming response, I will have to write a follow-up article.
The worst affected seem to be the ones in the diaspora who only get to visit their families once a year, or even once in two years. 

According to Fatima: 

"Visiting in-laws is not fun at all because when the African daughter-in-law is there, the whole burden of household chores falls on her. I don't get enough time to relax. If I want a good holiday I just avoid visiting my husband's family. I enjoy going to my family for holidays because I get lots of help in whatever I need to do. I am more relaxed. I wake up late and eat what I want when I want. The other tactic is to have your own home in Zim especially closer to wherever they stay so that you can always relax there. African women have not holidays."

Tendai said:

 "Truly speaking, each time we visit Zim, I always feel short-changed because most time is dedicated to the husband's family.Fine, at times he leaves me at my father's house, which l strongly feel would just be some gimmick, because while at our home l get calls  from him any time to be told we have to visit this , that or the other person, all from his side.I basically have no time of my own. I'm not happy at all, and worse still when we go to his parents' house coming from South Africa, yooooh I will be so tired of travelling, and being a daughter-in-law, they expect you to cook for them from day one."

Because the issue of visiting families back home is such a thorny one, with many couples failing to strike a compromise, a lot of people have just decided not to visit their motherland during public holidays, and if they do, they minimise their stay there to minimise the squabbles. All the happy faces people see seem to be just a front. There is a lot of pressure behind the scenes. My former schoolmate, Ashley, had a lot to say with regards to home visits: 

"To manage all this craziness, we start planning for the journeys months before they come.  Budgeting every cent that it takes care of both families during the visit. We also set the number of days we spend with families which are not more than a week, that way it reduces pressure. Basically visiting family during holidays has become the biggest challenge we have had to encounter, it's not a joyous thing anymore because with each and every visit we plan, we have also to keep in mind the pressures we will encounter. We play the roles that need to be played and make sure we are out of there before we end up fighting ourselves because the pressure, when it's turned on from all corners, we ourselves end up fighting. 

To remove this pressure associated with visiting families in Zimbabwe, some couples part ways on arrival on the home soil. Georgina said she and her husband always part ways with her going to her mother's house while he goes to his own family. That way everyone is happy. It's a strategy that many couples have employed. Husband and wives then take time to visit each other' families, but will keep their bases at their families' homes. This seemed to be a popular choice for a lot of women I spoke to. Some open minded men, like Sam, did not find a problem with this.

"Normally we save for and make a single 'Home trip' each year where we include both families, days at mine and some at my wife's. If there is need or time is limited then we split, she goes to her family and I go to mine. We obviously not happy with the status quo but we have to do what we can, considering the expense and the work pressures this side." 

Austin confessed to spending more time with his family than his wife's.

"The reason is simply they stay in the rural areas and I am not comfortable staying in the rural areas as a typical town boy!Moreover I hate having to humble myself around the place, that's not my style!Definitely my wife is not happy about that because she wants more time checking out my in-laws. So what we do these days is shorten our stay in Zim to about a week!"

Lucky fish, isn't he just! It really is a man's world. A woman wouldn't have the audacity to say I can't visit my husband's family in the rural areas because I'm a typical town girl.

Of course, you can count on it that there will always be the hard nuts, which are the dominant group in the male species, like Ryan, who thinks that since he paid lobola for his wife, she's now like part of his furniture and can't just go to her family any more. Ryan said it's the wife that joins a man's family when they get married, she even assumes his surname, and that means she doesn't belong to her family anymore.

It seems the line between marriage and slavery is notoriously thin, in most cases. And here I was, thinking marriage was the merging of families, not the woman being forcibly yanked from her family. Talk about taking the wedding vow "To have and to hold (to ransom)" to another level! I also thought that if a woman got married, her parents would have gained a son not completely lost their daughter, condemned to never see her again. With this very bleak outlook of marriage, a nunnery begins to look like a very attractive option. Marriage shouldn't be for the benefit of one person, ensuring happiness for the other person should be reciprocal in that union.

People spend years on end away from their families, some only travel every second year to see their families in Zimbabwe. Both husband and wife miss their parents and relatives. They get home after so long and the husband says, "my parents'  home is now your home. You can't go to your family. I paid lobola for you. You even use my surname. Blah blah blah!" The woman misses her family while in the UK or wherever, comes to Zimbabwe and is forced to stay with people that her husband misses, is only permitted to see her family for a few hours and has to quickly take lots of pictures of them to see while she's imprisoned at the husband's family home, and before long is back in the diaspora, still missing her family. If this isn't sadistic, I don't know what is.  

"My husband has become self involved and there was a time when he didn't like my family to visit or us visiting them so it was a challenge. We have now always tried to balance the visits by alternating each year. Its not easy though as the hubby's family believe all holiday visits belong to them!", said Charity. "I sometimes catch myself asking me this question, is this all there is to life? To love? To marriage?" she added.

It appears, apart from women just missing being with their families, they are concerned about the high expectations that come from their husbands' families. "Most times you would rather spend more time with your family because your husband's family always has high expectations of you whether materialistic or physical, like cooking all the time," said Patricia. "Its never easy because nobody except your own family can really accept you. Its always easier with your own people. There is always that feeling that you are not welcome, even if its just imagination," she added. 

For some women, though, life is a breeze. One woman, Selinah, said, "Fortunately for me all my in-laws are deceased so I get to visit my family the most". Another, Elizabeth, said she was OK with her husband's family. "Maybe its easier because both my in-laws are late so I don't have to perform all the chores expected of a daughter-in-law."

I must say Selinah and Elizabeth's responses were jaw-dropping for me.They stopped me dead in my tracks. I had never thought someone's death could be viewed as fortunate. And it is disturbing that life turns out to be easy for some people only after others are dead! When will this war, this animosity between in-laws end? Can't we just get along when we are all alive? Does one have to die for the others to be happy?

There are a few drops in the ocean that actually get along with their living mothers-in-laws, like Anna:

"My husband's family is extremely big. When I go there I know I go to work , but my mother-in-law never sits down. We work together. She's a wonderful person and even shouts at her daughters when they don't help me with the chores . My husband and I agree on the duration of our stays with our respective families. My hubby is so free at my parents' house that he can sleep over even when I'm not with him. My sisters-in-law used to be a problem but my husband told them where to get off. My father-in-law is also a great man.

Anna's scenario is what a lot of women can only dream about.  

One interviewee gave me a very rare scenario where her father would pick her from the airport on her arrival from the UK and drop her off at her in-laws, saying she didn't belong to her biological family anymore.  

"Now my siblings are married I'm not forced to go to in-laws I just go to my siblings' houses and stay as much as I want," said Debrah.  

And that ladies and gentlemen, is the life of most Zimbabwean women with regards to public holidays. From these few interviews, there are evidently very few happy bunnies. In my follow-up blog, I will throw another pity party as we look at more of these very sad women's sob stories.

*Names of interviewees have been changed to ensure the women's families aren't slaughtered altogether so they are never seen again, not even on Facebook!