The Sunday News
Obey Sibanda, Features Reporter
DRIVING along Gwanda-Beitbridge Road between Colleen Bawn and West Nicholson, Matabeleland South Province, one cannot miss the sight of amiable makeshift stalls and hordes of women clad in dirty clothes drawn from all provinces who have descended on the area to harvest mopane worms.
From dusk until dawn, they move from one tree to another while others pick them from the tarmac until their buckets are full.
Braving the blazing sun and dripping with sweat, a village woman Mrs Chenesai Chiundura, with a baby strapped on her back balanced a bucket on her head as she and her daughter strode to the makeshift stall by the road side to sell their day’s work.
Mrs Chiundura (42), of Zimuto in Masvingo is a mother of four children, three of which are school going. She is married to Batsirai Chiundura, a teacher who she claims is a gambling addict.
“It’s only a mother who understands the cry of a hungry child. Your brother (pointing at her husband) squanders most of his salary on gambling and feeds us with crumbs. Therefore I work hard to fend for my children and provide for my upkeep. Gone are the days where women relied on men for providence,” she says while wiping her face with her wet and slippery hand from worms excretes.
Like many couples with a female breadwinner, Chenesai and her husband have had to re-evaluate their deepest feelings and expectations about their relationship as both adjust to their change of roles.
“If I measure myself against my late father’s values, which held that a man should be the main breadwinner and provide security for his family, then I’m failing miserably,” admits Mr Chiundura.
There is a reversal of traditional roles taking place in family set-ups. The majority of women today are financially responsible for generating their own and their families’ income. In climbing out of the poverty category, many women have overcome traditional notions of gender by becoming breadwinners in their homes and providing primary financial support for their families.
Presently, so many families have broken out of the traditional shell with women becoming more and more primary wage earners. In many cases male unemployment and deepening economic stress have placed greater responsibilities on women to seek paid work.
A woman was the centre of family life, a housewife and mother. Her role was to bring up children at home while their husbands worked, but with increased economic hardships and rising male unemployment, women are working outside the home in larger numbers than ever to supplement household budgets.
Women are over-represented in the informal sector in Zimbabwe. The informal sector is the primary source of employment for salaried women, in the form of self-employment, contract labour, casual labour or contributing family members. In urban areas the most prevalent forms of work are as street vendors, cross border trading or home-based producers.
In rural areas increasing numbers of women are taking part in Government supported initiatives, which has boosted their incomes as well as their workloads. Women are also engaged in self-employment activities like mining, crop production, cattle rearing and poultry.
Women are finding that their increased earnings help to increase their decision making authority in the household, but the extent of changes reported vary widely across communities. Their children know that sometimes things have to get bumped.
“When a child understand that their mother is working in part to contribute financially to the household in which they live, they come to appreciate where the money comes from, which in turn becomes teachable moments about budgeting and savings,” said Chenesai’s daughter Ratidzo.
According to Women’s Forum chief executive officer Ms Anania Mutingwende since independence there has been a rapid increase in the number of universities and colleges in Zimbabwe.
“The number of female students has risen almost seven-fold and women could soon outnumber their male counterparts in the country’s universities and it is inevitable that very soon they will be dominating the job market,” said Mutingwende.
Male unemployment has reduced most of them to beggars to the extent that they now approach the courts seeking maintenance money from their wives.
Recently the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) Company board chairperson, Ms Ruth Ncube, has been taken to court by her husband Mr Wilson Sezi (53) who is demanding $3 800 monthly spousal maintenance. In papers before the court, the money that Mr Sezi wants is for groceries, transport, clothes, medication, rent, water and electricity. He stated in court papers that he is not employed and wants Ms Ncube to take sole responsibility for his upkeep.
Mr Sezi’s case is not an isolated one but a graphic indication of how men are now depending on their spouses for upkeep.
Notwithstanding positive changes contributed by working mothers Ms Mutingwende said men express humiliation and anger over being unable to maintain their role as the household’s sole breadwinners.
“When a woman is the sole breadwinner, the man’s role can be revoked at any time. That means that men have to find some way to reinforce their gender role in response to anything that might be seen to threaten it. Loss of income relative to a spouse seems like an especially potent threat to masculinity,”
Principal director for Youth in Mind and Women Empowerment organisation Mr Christopher Zuze, however, lamented that despite women’s involvement in providing for their families, women have not moved out of the kitchen into the workforce entirely. As a whole, they are still responsible for the majority of chores in their households.
“In fact, breadwinner women still take on a disproportionate share of the housework as compared to their partners, thus bringing home the bacon and cooking it too,” he elaborated.
A survey conducted by the Working Mother Research Institute suggest that 79 percent of working mothers today say they are responsible for doing the laundry, and mums are twice as likely as dads to handle the cooking.
Working dads do tend to pick up the outdoor chores and mums and dads share bill paying responsibilities, but working mothers handle most of the child care.
Mai Munamati, a foreign currency dealer plying her trade opposite Chicken Inn along Leopold Takawira, Bulawayo said even if women and men might appear to share household chores, the woman was the manager of the home.
“As a woman I’m the one who thinks about what we will eat for dinner, whether we need toilet paper, or if the baby needs new clothes,” said Mai Munamati.
Another study by Marie Hartwell-Walker suggests that redistributing roles and responsibilities in a family is not as simple as saying, “you take out the garbage, and I’ll sweep the floor.”
“It often gets down to people’s core beliefs about who they are and what they need to be doing to be a real grown-up man or woman. The reactions people have to such things are often distressingly irrational, even to themselves,” the study says.
