Losing a husband can mean ‘losing everything’

HARARE, ZIMBABWE • For many Zimbabwean women, the death of a husband means much more than losing a spouse.

What usually follows is a rush by in- laws to seize property, stripping the widow and her children bare, a phenomenon described by Human Rights Watch in a report launched Tuesday as “profound injustice.”

Zimbabwe’s inheritance laws stipulate that a surviving spouse and children should be t he principal beneficiaries of an estate.

In reality, widows are forced to scrounge for survival, in many instances left without a roof over their heads because in- laws grab anything from houses to agricultural plots, livestock and even food stocks, said Bethany Brown, a researcher at Human Rights Watch specializing in the rights of older people. “It means, for some, losing everything,” she said.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 59 widows for the report, whose findings and recommendations were accepted by the government, according to Ivan Dumba, the principal director in the ministry of women’s affairs, gender and community development.

More than 580,000 of this southern African country’s 13 million people are widows, with most of them over 60 years old, according to statistics agency Zimstat.

Zimbabwe is still pretty much a man’s world in terms of property ownership and earning power.

Traditionally, males own the family property. The courts handle a steady stream of cases where widows battle to recover property from in-laws.

“The majority of widows have no resources to justice because they cannot even afford the bus fare to the nearest court, never mind the other costs associated with seeking the case through. They suffer in silence,” said Lucia Masuka-Zanhi of Legal Resources Foundation, an NGO that has set up in some rural areas to help widows.