|
|
Botswana: Emang Basadi to Challenge Kgosi Sebele's Judgment
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
15 July 2008
Posted to the web 15 July 2008
Bame Piet
Botswana's pre-eminent women's rights organisation, Emang Basadi, intends to challenge a decision by Bakwena Deputy Chief, Keineetse Sebele, recently in a case in which a Gantsi family was awarded property at the expense of a certain woman.
The women's movement says it will see that justice is done for Gadza Maike whom it believes has been victimised only because she is a woman.
According to the complainant, Maike (44), she started staying with her deceased boyfriend, a retired soldier (name withheld), in Kopong in 2005.
They met in Mogoditshane and relocated to Kopong where they rented a house. They decided to acquire a plot in the village and equally contributed to the construction of their five-roomed house, the purchasing of two vehicles, and the rearing of livestock.
Maike, who works for CA Sales in Gaborone, says her boyfriend introduced her to his family and she introduced him to hers in Masunga. The two families were known to each other for the whole time that the couple was staying together.
Maike says things turned nasty last year when the 48-year-old man's health deteriorated after flu attack. She says her boyfriend constantly fell ill and spent a lot of time in hospital and at home ministered to by her. "The disease affected him mentally and he started hallucinating and saying things that did not exist," she says.
Maike says there was a time when she called her boyfriend's parents to inform them about their ailing son, but nobody cared to visit them.
But there was a time when his mother came to check on him and she wanted to take him to Gantsi where she would give him nursing care, but the ailing man declined the offer, opting to stay behind with her, she adds.
Maike says late last year, her boyfriend fell ill again and she phoned the parents to inform them, but they did not come to see him, saying he had refused to go with the mother to Gantsi.
There was a surprise visit around October when the boyfriend's sister, mother and other relatives came to convene a meeting to inform her that they no longer wanted her in the house.
Maike says her boyfriend did not disclose the purpose of the meeting to her until a time when it finally took place. "He told me that he no longer wanted me in the house because he was ill and that our relationship was no longer valid," recalls Maike. "I did not object to the ending of our affair, but I requested that I should get a share of my contribution to what we had collected."
The meeting ended with no compromise since her boyfriend's relatives insisted that they did not know her. The boyfriend died in December, she says, and a conflict ensued between the two families.
"They even refused my financial contribution to the funeral, forcing me not to attend in fear for my life," she says.
The family showed up again in February this year and they demanded "the property of their son". The matter was finally settled at the Kopong Customary Court late last month, presided over by Kgosi Sebele.
Kgosi Sebele ordered her out of the house, awarded the two cars to Maike's boyfriend's family along with a significant number of the couple's livestock. "They kept on saying they were doing me a favour because they never asked for my hand in marriage and that I had no child with him," she says, tears rolling down her face.
"The chief ordered that I must vacate the house and give way to my boyfriend's mother.
They did not care where I was going to spend the night. They just threw my belongings out of the house. I am homeless as we speak, and the woman has taken everything. The man (deceased boyfriend) has wasted my time."
Idah Mokereitane of Emang Basadi says Kgosi Sebele's judgment is shocking because it was handed down without first hearing what the other party had to say. She argues that if the judgment was based on culture, Kgosi Sebele must understand that culture is not static.
Mokereitane says she wonders what happened to the Setswana way of caring and respecting others, (botho) and how the pillars of Vision '16 can be attained under such appalling circumstances.
But she concedes that it is difficult to deal with such matters because there is no legislation on co-habitation, yet more people are going into such relationships.
"There is a need for legislation on co-habitation because it works better for many people than marriage, Mokereitane says.
|
"Cohabitation is here with us and we need to legislate on it."
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
