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The crooked curfew
Mandisadzwa Kwangwari
October 05, 2005

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fSetId=515&fSectionId=285&fArticleId=2904252

In Zimbabwe, women are doomed to life indoors after 9pm, writes Mandisadzwa Kwangwari Imagine this: it's 9.30pm and you are walking back to your flat in the city centre after watching a movie with your partner. Suddenly a police van comes to a halt in front of you.

Two policemen armed with batons jump out and tell you that you are under arrest. This was the predicament my husband and I and his brother and the brother's wife, found ourselves in on a recent Sunday evening.

After a stunned moment, we naively produce our identity cards and explain that we are walking home, which is just a block away, after watching a movie.

We use my seven-month "bulge" to emphasise that we are married.

"You are wasting our time. We deal with you prostitutes all the time. You will explain when we get to the charge office. You're being charged with loitering," one policeman says.

We can tell that they are losing patience with our insistent explanations.My first concern, naturally, is my unborn baby, so we listen to them. Bewildered, my sister-in-law and I climb into the police van. I did so, of course, with great difficulty.

The police tell our husbands that if they are "genuine", they will follow us to the charge office and produce
evidence of our relationships.

We are driven around town in the open truck, filled with other women, as the hunt for "loiterers" continues. After I settle down in the best way possible, I begin to observe my fellow "inmates".

There is a variety. A clique of heavily made-up, scantily dressed night-time sisters (sex workers) laughing and taunting the police; a few quiet, confused women who have no idea what they have done wrong, wondering what is so unacceptable about being out at 9.30pm on a Sunday; and, lastly, a hysterical woman who is kicking, screaming and hurling insults.

A few blocks away we pick up two elderly women vending outside a nightclub. They are heaped on top of us together with their improvised cardboard table, boiled eggs, sweets, cigarettes and condoms.

Across the road a girl with a West African accent is picked up. She tries in vain to explain her position as a foreign student on her way back to university with her boyfriend. She is lifted into the truck, kicking and screaming, causing her visibly shaken boyfriend to jump into the truck. But he is pushed out and told to follow.

In the end, nearly 15 women, packed like sardines in the back of the truck on a cold night, are charged for loitering and driven to the charge office.

Luckily for us "our men" arrive just as we were being ushered into the office, bearing marriage certificates and identification cards to prove that they are brothers.

The charge for loitering is Z$25 000 (about R7), and then one still has go through great pains to explain why you, as a woman, were on the street at that hour.

Women who have no money with them, because they were in the company of someone else, or simply were taking a stroll, are kept at the remand prison until morning when they can call a relative or friend to bail them out.

Those who pay the bail and are released have to walk back into the city centre, a journey undertaken with the risk of attack by genuine "loiterers" and thugs.

So the question is: does loitering only refer to women? According to Zimbabwe's law on loitering under the Miscellaneous Offences Act in Section 4 (1), any person found loitering in a public place for the purposes of prostitution or solicitation shall be guilty of an offence.

However, the definition of a "public place" is very broad and includes any building or part of a building to which the public has access.

The major concern for the police has been that they have a right to clear the streets of loiterers, especially sex workers. However, what is not taken into consideration is the demand from men for these services.

If in Zimbabwe it is assumed that every woman who walks in the streets at night, accompanied or unaccompanied, is a sex worker, then the same should go for men. Also, by the blanket attitude adopted by the law enforcers, surely male loiterers should be considered even more dangerous as they may intend to rape, mug or break into property.

The biased attitude towards women is evident everywhere, even in the media. On August 11, Bulawayo woke up to The Chronicle's headline: "Prostitute dies in love nest."

The story described the death by electrocution of a sex worker who had been providing a service to a male client at an electrical substation. It was reported that the man had missed death by a whisker.

Now here is the issue: the initial story did not include any information about any action being taken against the man (had it not been for him, the woman would have not died in the first place).

As readers, we would have liked to have known whether he was charged (which he should have been) for being in a situation that led to the death of his "friend". Sadly, the double standards of society make themselves visible, yet again. By virtue of our womanhood, Zimbabwean women, it seems, are doomed to life indoors after 9pm.

*Mandisadzwa Kwangwari is a Zimbabwean journalist. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service

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