Ascent of Women (17 page)

During the 2009 election in Israel, the majority of the political parties moved to the right. The left-leaning parties as good as collapsed. The support for the peace plan that the women had worked on since 1988 went from 70 percent in favour to 70 percent claiming that a two-state solution would never happen.

Then tensions flared among the commissioners over whether Israel should be held accountable for the damage done by their treatment of the Palestinians over the decades. The Palestinian women said they wouldn’t continue without accountability on the part of the Israelis. The Israeli women said it was too soon to accommodate that issue. They couldn’t come to an agreement. Tempers flared. The women at the table committed the sins of the fathers: “my way or the highway.” The negotiations collapsed not just because the two sides could not agree but also because the arguments became so heated that the space for compromise evaporated. Finally, in May 2011, the IWC members decided to formally disband. The great sadness of this failed commission was that everyone at the table—Israelis, Palestinians and international members—knew that the women on both sides could carry the negotiations to a peaceful conclusion, and yet here they were, walking away from the table, as others had done before them. The commission members had no sooner decided to begin disbanding than the women were in touch one with the other in cyberspace, hoping a new committee would rise from the ashes of
the old one and find a way to restart the conversation. Most people agree that Palestinians and Israelis are very much alike as people, and somewhere in that similarity, surely they could find common ground. Nurit Elhanan had explained that to me: “We have the same deep values, such as the way we treat our children, how we receive people in our houses. We feel good with each other. But the education system here in Israel promotes how much Jews are hated elsewhere, how fearful they need to be.” And the system on the other side promotes the same distrust and fear of Israelis.

In the meantime, every Friday, the Women in Black still hold their weekly vigil at Paris Square in West Jerusalem. The women drift into the square from the five avenues that converge there. They pick up their placards and take up positions facing the traffic on three sides of the square.

But it’s the men across from them on the fourth side of the square, waving Israeli flags, who now get the lion’s share of the honking and cheering. Gilda Svirsky tells me that she’s disappointed that the number of women who stand with her has decreased, but she still feels a political solution is out there. Ultimately, she believes, the point of view the women have promoted since 1988 will win the day.

~

Swaziland

If ever there was a country that needed a game-changer, it’s Swaziland. For all its trouble—the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate in the world; the most deaths per capita from HIV/AIDS; and a life expectancy of thirty-three years—the women of Swaziland
are coming to the rescue of the country. They’re being led by a dynamo called Siphiwe Hlophe. She is heralded as the woman who is turning the pandemic around in sub-Saharan Africa. One of the aces she holds is the powerful support of Stephen Lewis, the co-director of AIDS-Free World. When Lewis was the UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2001 to 2006, he soon identified Hlophe as a beacon of light in the darkness of the pandemic.

When I caught up with her in the summer of 2012, she said, “It’s the women who bear the brunt of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Swaziland: 31 percent are positive, compared with 20 percent of the men. There are 130,000 children orphaned by the pandemic, and here in Swaziland, 70 percent live in abject poverty.” Grim statistics.

The country she lives in with the quaint name—the Kingdom of Swaziland—is a tiny landlocked territory of a million souls, home to Africa’s only absolute monarch, King Mswati III, forty-four. He keeps a harem of thirteen wives (although three have recently left, claiming abuse and causing a monumental scandal in the royal household) and spends a king’s ransom on cars, palaces and parties. Crime, especially in Manzini, the business centre, is bold and rampant. A thief will steal your cellphone while you’re making a call, or snatch your purse from a restaurant table while you’re sipping lemonade.

During the apartheid era, Swaziland was a haven for mixed-race couples from South Africa, which borders it on three sides (Mozambique is to the west). It was a British protectorate until 1968. It was selected as the site of one of the first United World Colleges, Waterford Kamhlaba. Nelson Mandela’s children attended this school. So did Bishop Tutu’s.

Unlike other African countries, there’s just one tribe, Swazis, subdivided into dozens of different clans, living in fifty-five constituencies under half a dozen hereditary chiefs and one elected
ingula
(head man) per region. The king is the leader of them all.

The power of superstition is strong in Swaziland. Most people seek medical help from witch doctors, who provide concoctions for every conceivable illness. They have even been enlisted by the ministry of health to cure people with HIV/AIDS, which has led to a shocking rate of death as well as a disturbing rise in ritualistic killings. Body parts, preferably cut from a living person, are said to lend potency to the witch doctors’ treatments. More than half a dozen mutilated bodies, mostly children or elderly people, are found every year, flesh from armpits and bits of internal organs removed, the gory details splashed in the newspapers.

Twins are seen as bad luck. It used to be acceptable that one newborn twin would be killed so the other would be a whole person. Even well-educated Swazis speak in whispers when asked about these practices. Women cover their heads and avoid standing in the same queue (for food, services, banking) as the men, fearing the consequences of a dozen different curses.

But for all Swaziland’s black magic, the biggest wrong that needs to be righted, according to Siphiwe Hlophe, is the situation of the country’s women. They are considered minors with no legal status. The combination of tribal law and government law works against women’s interests in cases of domestic violence, forced marriage and sexual demands.

Hlophe, fifty-two, is the executive director of Swaziland for Positive Living (SWAPOL). She started the program in 2001, when she discovered she was HIV positive and felt that if someone didn’t do something to stop the spread of AIDS in her country,
they’d all soon be dead. And so she created a network of women whose challenge was no less than to take on the myths, superstitions and ancient male-dominated laws of the entire country—and even the king.

Swazi women have no rights when it comes to sex; polygamy, a practice that denigrates women and spreads the HIV/AIDS virus, is the norm. A woman can’t say no. She can’t demand that a man wear a condom. She can’t make decisions on her own, cannot practice safe sex. She can’t even go to the hospital without her husband’s permission.

The constitution says that women and men have equal rights, but Doo Aphne, a women’s rights lawyer, says, “Nobody observes that—not even the royal family, where women have privileges but not equality with men.” She says all the rules are stacked against women. “When I started talking about women’s rights, I was treated like someone who should be put in detention without bail.”

But then Aphne took the attorney general to court to prove that women had “immoveable property, bonds, and other real rights” registered in their own names. On February 10, 2010, she made history for women in Swaziland when a judgment was handed down by Justice Qinisile Mabuza that effectively redressed forty-two years of injustice and subordination of “women married in community of property.” The ruling also set the stage for examining all laws that still treat women as minors.

Although Aphne had been to court to fight for change before, this particular case came about when she and her husband tried to buy land and register it in both their names. They were told that having a woman’s name on the registry contravened the Deeds Registry Act and were refused. Like the girls in Kenya
who are suing their government for failing to protect them from being raped, Aphne relied on constitutional arguments to make her case. Swaziland’s constitution (like those of Kenya, Canada and even Afghanistan) claims to secure equality rights for all citizens. But Aphne’s was the first case to test the effectiveness of that claim.

I met Aphne and Siphiwe Hlophe for the first time when I went to Swaziland to cover an HIV/AIDS rally on World AIDS Day in December 2007. Hlophe is one of those women who command a lot of attention simply by entering a room. Ask for her at the airport, and the customs officers will tell you how to find her—they’ll even telephone her for you. In fact, ask anyone anywhere in the kingdom and they all know the former trade union leader who declared war on oppression, a battle that puts her in direct confrontation with the powerful king.

I found her that December in the overcrowded SWAPOL office in Manzini. Boxes and plastic garbage bags stuffed with materials to be delivered to the rally she was holding the next day took up every inch of space. Staff and volunteers stepped over them to negotiate a path to her desk, bringing her papers to sign, waiting for her okay on a course of action. She handled it all while taking two phone calls at once—one on her mobile, the other on a land line. Her trademark is hearty laughter—as the rolling belly laugh fills the room, her head falls back and a grin wreathes her face.

She told me that when she was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, she knew the infection had come from her husband, but she felt the sting of blame that women in Swaziland live with. “The culture here is that men don’t bring sickness to the house. Sickness is caused by women. And if a woman is sick it’s because
she’s been sleeping around. It’s never, ever presumed that she might have got it from her husband.”

The government even supports that sort of thinking. On that trip I heard a radio ad that featured a woman on the telephone asking a man, “Can you come and see me?” The man replies, “I’m sick of you women bringing disease.” Hlope explained that the campaign had been run by the National Emergency Response Committee on HIV and AIDS (NERCHA). “That ad hurled the fault for the pandemic at women. We had to stop the campaign,” she said. “It was promoting the stigma and discrimination against women. The very organization that should eradicate such thinking was promoting it.”

Popular radio programs were contributing to the colossal misinformation campaign. I heard one commentator scoff, “Condoms have worms. Fill one with water and you can see them moving around.” He went on to say, “The drugs [antiretrovirals] are being brought in to kill us.” The myth of the virgin cure was widely held, as it is in many sub-Saharan countries. Not surprisingly, it had contributed to a startling increase in the rape of girls.

Since the men in Swaziland see polygamy as their right, wives have no say in whom their husbands have sex with. “If he’s cross with one wife, he can go to another. If she talks too much, he goes to the third,” said Hlope. The country has signed CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, but the principles are simply not observed. “We want to empower women on issues of rights such as no condom, no sex,” Siphiwe said. “To do that, we need to join hands and change a lot. The government is denying the statistics, promoting our culture, but every day people are dying left and right.”

If a girl suffers an assault and goes to the police, she told me,
“They’ll demand to know where she was, what she was wearing, how she was behaving. You go in there in hysterics, and they humiliate you and make you feel responsible.” And although the parliament had a bill before it to stop forced marriage, it didn’t pass, and the practice still goes on all over the country.

When I was there in 2007, before Doo Aphane’s day in court, a married woman needed permission from her husband for every significant act. She couldn’t apply for a passport or own land. Customary patterns of inheritance dictated that land ownership was through a male relative, even in cases such as Aphane’s, who bought the land herself. A widow was expected—in fact, forced—to marry her husband’s brother. There were no shelters for abused women, and women thought they didn’t have the right to go to court. They’d been taught to take their complaints to the district chief, who invariably threw them out and told the woman to go home and listen to her husband.

SWAPOL’s project coordinator, Cebile Dlamini, twenty-six, told me, “When I get married, if my husband wants more wives, there’s nothing I can do. If he doesn’t want to use a condom or get tested for HIV/AIDS, he doesn’t have to. If I refuse sex with him, he will send me back home and say, ‘I’ll take another wife who will respect me and do as I say.’ ”

She and the other Swazi women I met were working to change those presumptions; they wanted an end to polygamy. But they believed that level of change would have to start with the king. Although grassroots change has been proven to be more effective in most parts of the world, in Swaziland, the king and his family have an almost mystical hold on the people. Reformers agree that if he stopped having multiple wives, the district chiefs would think it was the right thing to do.

In fact, many of Swaziland’s woes can be laid at the doorstep of King Mswati, who was educated in England and is seen as the country’s father figure despite behaviour that has attracted international condemnation. As Stephen Lewis wrote in his book
Race Against Time
, “His subjects are dying in numbers that would have made Malthus weep. And all of us are quiet; nary an audible peep from the UN family.”

Unabashed by the criticism levelled at him, Mswati still owns a fleet of expensive cars (in 2012, ten BMW SUVs and a German luxury car called a Maybach 62 that sells for US$500,000). He spends his time in a string of luxurious palaces and bought a personal jet for about US$90 million. Lewis called it, “Monumental extravagance in the face of pernicious illness and misery.”

Finding a member of the royal family to defend him is nearly impossible. You are told that the prince, or whoever is representing the royal household, is away today and coming home tomorrow or tired from yesterday’s journey and available tomorrow. The day I called, the king was in seclusion, preparing for
Incwala
, which is the Thanksgiving holiday (although very few Swazis had much to give thanks for that harvest season). During
Incwala
, old men and young boys do traditional Swazi dances in the presence of the king, and pubescent girls perform the reed dance, bare-breasted in grass skirts, as part of a ceremony called
Umhlanga
, acting the part of young virgins who weed the king’s fields. The ceremony is rather less benign, since the king often chooses a new wife from these girls. Hlophe’s youngest daughter, Lxolile (pronounced Holilay), sixteen, danced for the king in 2004; her friend wanted to go and persuaded Lxolile to come with her, convincing the teenager that it would be an interesting experience. When I asked her how it was, she said flatly, “I hated it.” When I
asked if she would like to be married to the king, she replied emphatically, “No. He’s too old and he’s got too many wives. When I get married there will be no other wives. If the man took another wife, I’d break up with him.”