By Cynthia Akanaga ’25
Staff Writer
Content warning: this article discusses sexual violence against minors and child death.
“What you see today, a young girl forced to marry, get pregnant and [die], is not an aberration. It is part of the same continuum. Female persons are not seen as fully human, with individual rights, choice, rights to control our own bodies,” Zimbabwean feminist activist and the international head of Action Aid International, Everjoice Win, declared on Twitter on Aug. 6 in response to the widespread practice of child marriages in Zimbabwe. She continued, “The age of the girl/woman is not the issue, nor concern for these folks in these matters. It is the potential children that come out of her uterus they care about. And these violations happen because we are female.”
One recent fatality linked to child marriages in Zimbabwe was the death of 14-year-old Anna Machaya, who died while giving birth in July at Johanne Marange Apostolic Church shrine, CNN reported. The case has garnered publicity and sparked an uproar from several women’s rights activists, including Win, condemning the policies in Zimbabwe that allowed for this situation to go unchecked. As reported by Reuters, “One in three girls in Zimbabwe was likely to be married before turning 18 years,” according to the UN.
Currently, Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution protects the marriage rights of those 18 and above and prohibits forcing a person into marriage. Zimbabwe has two marriage laws, the Marriage Act and the Customary Marriages Act, according to Reuters. “The constitution states that a person can marry at the age of 18. The Criminal Law Act states that, at 16 years, a person can consent to sex. The Marriage Act sets the marriage age at 16 years. So, when we have laws that are not in alignment with the constitution it creates a lot of problems,” Fadzai Ruzive, a legal practitioner with Women and Law in Southern Africa said, as reported in Al-Jazeera. There is currently no law that explicitly criminalizes child marriages in Zimbabwe.
The Apostolic church in which Machaya died is one of many that present the practice of child marriages as a way for young girls to gain “spiritual guidance” by marrying older men, according to Girls Not Brides. The public response to Machaya’s death pressured Zimbabwe to arrest Hatirarami Evans Momberume, Machaya’s 26-year-old husband, and Machaya’s parents, Edmore Machaya and Shy Mabika, Zimbabwe police spokesperson Paul Nyathi told CNN. Nyathi added, “Momberume is facing rape charges, while her parents have been charged with obstructing the course of justice for allegedly providing false identification documents to the police concealing her real age.” News outlets had initially identified the child as Memory Machaya, because Anna Machaya’s parents had falsified her documents with those of her cousin Memory Machaya, who is 22 years old. They are also accused of agreeing to provide Momberume with a nine-year-old child as a replacement after Machaya’s death, CNN reported.
The UN has been using public denunciation to pressure Zimbabwe to amend its laws, according to ZimEye. Anna Chait ’23, an international relations major, commented that while “condemning is another good step to help these girls get out of these terrible situations,” she thinks “it takes a lot more than just naming and shaming” to solve the issue. To combat the issue of child marriage, Chait suggested a movement towards “education and making [children] aware that this [isn’t] their only choice.”
Lily Smith ’25, a student enrolled in a World Politics class, added that “an increase in political activism for women’s rights” would help bring more light to the issue as “a large part of the problem lies in women being treated as objects or something that can be used for monetary gain.”
In addition to condemning the practice of child marriages in Zimbabwe, the UN aims to “fast-track the adoption of the Marriage Bill that recognizes child marriage as [a] crime,” Global Citizen reported.
Smith highlighted another underlying issue behind child marriages, saying, “resolving [the issue of child marriages] has to include passing bills on a certain age for marriage as well as helping the problem of poverty. I think that both have to happen for the problem to be resolved.”
Chait echoed Smith’s opinions, stating that “solving the issue of poverty would be a huge first step in cutting down on the number of children that are forced to marry for the sake of [their] family’s money.”