Marko Phiri of Kubatana draws the analogy between women being unable to exercise their democratic right to vote for their choice of candidate and that of the right of a woman not to be physically molested and to dress as she pleases.

I listened with disgust the other day to a woman and two men justifying why one of the men had fondled a woman’s breasts in public. The woman in question was a total stranger. While the young man claimed he was drunk when his hands strayed and groped a strange woman’s bosom - an offence that subsequently saw him do community service as his just desserts - the young scoundrel still insisted he believed what he had done was not wrong. His female interlocutor agreed.

I sat and listened silently and my mind went on overdrive as I made parallels with our present political circumstances where men, women and children have “invited” the wrath of Zanu PF militias by simply voting for a party of their choice. As the discourse on Zimbabwe’s post-2000 political narrative that has been defined by coercion rather than persuasion and has rendered all democratic precepts - fundamentally that of the ability to exercise one’s franchise without paying for it with brutal violence - the woman’s body as an object of men’s sexual pleasure presented for me a fascinating analogy.

Tags:
Zimbabwe
Sexual Harassment
Elections