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Putting them in their place: “respectable” and “unrespectable” women in Zimbabwean gender struggles
Chipo Hungwe
Introduction
In this article, I consider how women in the former colony of Southern Rhodesia and contemporary Zimbabwe were and still are defined as “respectable” or “unrespectable”. These terms carry different meanings, but for purposes of this discussion, a “respectable” woman in Zimbabwean society is one who is treated with deferential esteem, and who is perceived as an honourable and dignified member of her community or society. An “unrespectable” woman, however, is seen as dishonourable and lacking in dignity; she will attract social opprobrium and her behaviour may not be emulated.
I go on to draw out the implications of such definitions of respectability for gender struggles in Zimbabwe. Occasional parallels are drawn with other post-colonial African states. This discussion encompasses three phases of Zimbabwean history: the colonial era (from about 1890 to the early 1960s); the liberation struggle period (late 1960s to independence in 1980); and the postcolonial and contemporary situation (1980 to the present). The role of women in the public and private spheres during these three phases is considered in order to show how definitions of respectability have shifted over time, with certain women gaining or losing respectability.
I focus on the term “prostitute” and the ways in which it is used not only to describe sex workers, but as a marker to denote any supposedly “unrespectable” woman, particularly those who move into space that is considered to be male territory (Gaidzanwa, 1995). This “branding” is carried out by both men and women.
Colonial notions of “respectability” and “unrespectability”
In this section, I discuss the status of women in rural areas in Southern Rhodesia, and how notions of respectability were created for them to inhabit. Women could garner respect through marriage, bearing children within wedlock and earning money for the patriarchal family unit. Generally, respectable women (of all races) were expected to be virgins before marriage and chaste within marriage. This reflects the anxieties about patrilineage found in most patriarchal societies; women who did not fit this mould separated sex from procreation for the lineage (White, 1990: 120). Unmarried women who had children (especially if they did so after visiting or moving to the towns) earned the wrath of their elders in rural areas, and were branded as prostitutes.
The early colonial era, roughly up to the 1920s, was characterised by the same notions of respectability that had existed during pre-colonial times. At that time, respectable women were those who were fertile, who rejected any methods of controlling their fertility (through abortion, for instance), and who participated in laborious agricultural activities and other duties for their natal and matrimonial families. Women in polygamous marriages were respected, as were those wives who stayed in rural areas and remained chaste when their men migrated to towns. However, wives who followed their husbands were not deemed respectable, largely because they were effectively abandoning duties, such as farming, which were important for rural patriarchal familial structures. However, with the influence of missionaries and the development of the capitalist colonial economy, more and more women flocked to towns during the later period of colonial domination, and definitions of respectability shifted to incorporate these changes.
African women in towns
Many Zimbabwean women saw towns as places of freedom from restrictive parents or in-laws, husbands who were often violent, and the drudgery of agricultural work. They therefore migrated to towns, becoming receptionists, secretaries, telephone operators, housemaids, nannies, vegetable vendors, sex workers, dressmakers and “shebeen queens” (brewers of home-made beer). A few, however, who lived with their husbands, assumed the role of the stay-at-home housewife, and were respected as such. Most became “mapoto women”, meaning that they lived with men for whom they performed domestic and conjugal duties, sometimes bearing them children, without any bridewealth having being paid for them by these men. The presence of women in towns is thus as old as Southern African colonialism itself (Barnes and Win, 1992).
This situation is comparable to that of Uganda in the early 1940s, where Obbo notes that women migrated to towns to “increase their options and opportunities for self improvement, even though the unskilled and unschooled had no illusions about their chances of obtaining wage employment in the urban areas…. It was not so much the money they made but the fact that they controlled the fruits of their labour which counted” (1986: 122). However, this female migration was strongly resisted by both colonial officials and rural elders.
The increase in the female population in colonial towns such as Salisbury [renamed Harare after independence] and Bulawayo meant a shift in gender relations coupled with an increase in branding women as prostitutes. Married women who had moved to towns to live with their husbands wished to create a new kind of respectability by differentiating themselves from “unrespectable” women – “the prostitutes”. This term rapidly came to encompass both women who were unmarried and earned independent incomes, and those engaged in mapoto arrangements. Women in the latter positions were often more independent or less encumbered than married women, and thus attracted envy.
The fear that their husbands might be “snatched away” by single women or “prostitutes” also made married women eager to become increasingly domesticated as a means of fighting off possible competition from more independent women. This led to Western-style ritualising of marital and domestic arrangements, as married women sought to consolidate and reify their domestic position as wives and mothers. They did so by turning to “European” weddings, along with the accompanying church ceremonies, Western wedding garments, bridal attendants and so on, insisting on marriage certificates, and on being called by their married titles and names – Mrs [husband’s name].
They also honed their domestic and social skills through membership of women’s clubs and church meetings, where feminine domesticity was reinforced. One example was the Sakubva Homecraft Club in Salisbury, which taught women, among other things, how to bake scones. A list of official women’s clubs that existed in Salisbury by 1958 included the Runyararo Club (40 members), the Helping Hand Club (125 members), the Salisbury and District Club (56 members), the Radio Homecraft Club (58 members) and the Women’s Institute (24 members) (Barnes and Win, 1992: 152). Married women would attend these clubs in order to learn or re-learn domestic skills such as knitting and cooking. Such clubs “facilitated displays of middle-class domestic splendour” (Barnes, 1999: 152).
By grouping together into clubs, and insisting on formal and public tokens of marriage, such as the payment of lobola and marriage certificates, married women were able to segregate themselves from those who were unmarried. These women viewed their unmarried peers with scorn, and occasionally meted out communal punishments to those caught “prostituting”. Among the unmarried women targeted for punishment were those who lived in female hostels such as Carter House in Salisbury. These women were usually divorced, widowed or unmarried, and engaged in various trades, including childminding, teaching, hospital and factory work, religious activities and domestic work. They were financially independent enough to be able to afford to rent rooms in women’s hostels. So the increasingly segregated definitions of respectability at this time saw urban black women pitted against each other – the married versus the unmarried.
The married women who lived with their husbands in towns also had to maintain a delicately balanced social network by visiting the rural areas every rainy season to work in the fields, thus shuttling between the urban and rural areas. This acted as an important signifier that they had not yet been “corrupted” by the city, as well as an indication that they remained loyal to their husbands and their husbands’ families through their willingness to engage in “hard labour” for the patrilineage.
Female migration to urban centres was opposed by colonial authorities largely through urban policies that governed migration in general. Barnes and Win point out that until the 1940s, cities such as Salisbury were officially designated for white residents and black migrant workers (1992: 25). Urban and government policy allowed black workers, male and female, into the major towns only for as long as the white residents, manufacturers and industrialists needed their services. This was typical of colonial urban planning of the time. In his study of the Copperbelt in Zambia, Mitchell noted that towns were viewed as areas “in which Europeans lived by right and followed their way of life… in which Africans were by definition temporary sojourners in the same way that Africans in the tribal area lived their own lives and white men in those areas were but temporary visitors. This thinking was incorporated into the legal administrative structure from the earliest days of settlement” (cited in Obbo, 1986: 148).
The presence of rural women posed a problem for white colonial administration in towns. This was because black male workers in urban areas were generally provided with bachelor accommodation only, which cut the cost of providing housing for African employees. The presence of wives and children was seen as distracting. Moreover, it was considered more profitable for women to remain in the rural areas, as their husbands could then be paid “bachelor’s wages” rather than salaries that could support their families. The presence of African women therefore had unsettling economic implications for colonial employers. A vivid example of this was the 1948 general strike by the Bulawayo African Workers Union and the Bulawayo Municipal Workers Union, which demanded higher wages for married men, more “married accommodation” and the provision of food rations for wives (Barnes, 1999: 109). This, of course, was not new; apartheid legislation in neighbouring South Africa followed the same gendering principles (Slater, 2000: 39). The policy of influx control sanctioned the presence of limited numbers of African male labourers in urban areas, but not their wives or families.
On Southern Rhodesian mines, meanwhile, management hostility towards the presence of African women was expressed through the infamous bheura practice. This gave doctors (invariably white and male) the legal right to forcibly inspect all women in mine compounds (such as Shurugwi and Zvishavane) for sexually transmitted diseases. Ostensibly begun as an anti-venereal disease campaign, it had the effect of degrading and humiliating not only the women singled out for inspection, but their peers as well. Men were not subject to similar treatment, based on the assumption that “unclean” diseases originated and resided in the bodies of “unrespectable” women.
Women in urban areas presented colonial administrators with another headache: many of them brewed “illegal” beer, often as a means of financial survival. Their sales of beer, however, competed with the colonial beer halls, thus posing a threat to state revenue. It is therefore hardly surprising that women who brewed beer in the towns were rapidly identified as “unrespectable” and branded as “prostitutes” by the colonial administration. The argument was that illicit beer sales not only diverted a source of income that would otherwise have been sent to rural patriarchs in the form of bride-wealth (lobola); such sales also deprived the state of clients who no longer visited the state-sponsored beer halls, preferring to purchase home-brewed beer sold by “shebeen queens”. The state criminalised home-brewing by means of the Kaffir Beer Ordinance, and consequently branded the women who brewed beer as deviant. In addition, the state gained an extra source of revenue through the subsequent extraction of fines and bribes (Lovett, 1994).
It is clear that when it came to controlling women, the various patriarchies (colonial, rural, missionary and indigenous) often collaborated across racial lines. Examples from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya suggest that African male elders were prepared to collaborate with white colonial officers in order to control the mobility of “unrespectable” women.
In the rural areas, patriarchal elders profited from maintaining control over young women and their movements. Younger men gained some degree of economic independence from their elders as they migrated to the urban areas to take up waged work. If the elders wanted to retain economic control over these young men, they needed to control those young women whom they could offer as wives to the young African labouring classes. This ensured that they would continue to be paid lobola by young men working in the towns, retain control over young husbands’ remittances, and entrench the role they played in brokering and managing marriage negotiations. It therefore served the interests of both the rural male gerontocracy and the white colonial administrators to exercise control over black women. This was managed in part by categorising them as either “respectable” or “unrespectable”. “Respectable” women were those who remained in the rural areas and submitted to the guidance and control of the elders, or who returned intermittently to the rural areas; “unrespectable” women were those who “ran away” to the relative freedom of urban areas. Methods of mobility were also subject to patriarchal scrutiny; Barnes and Win note that even women who rode bicycles were at risk of being labelled as “prostitutes” (1992: 119).
A similar example can be drawn from Kenya’s colonial history. During the 1930s, sex workers among the Kikuyu in rural Dangaroni did not court social disapproval; no blame was attached to this practice, which was seen as a legitimate means by which women could earn money for their families (White, 1990: 120). This was as long as they replenished family livestock herds that had been depleted through drought. However, women who prostituted themselves in order to earn an independent income, rather than for the good of the patriarchal family, incurred disapproval. Those who established themselves as household heads, rejected family ties and created new lineages were invariably branded as “unrespectable”.
Although colonial administrators and rural patriarchs were both invested in controlling women’s movements, their earning ability and sexuality, it would be naïve to assume that total agreement existed between these two patriarchies. Colonial patriarchs also feared the prospect of erotic contact between black male colonial subjects and “their” white women. It was therefore in their interests to tolerate the presence of a few black female workers in towns, even if this disturbed rural elders. Moreover, while the latter called for young black women to return to rural villages and lands, the colonial administration needed some black women to work as domestic workers in towns in order to replace their male counterparts. This was also partly driven by the colonial anxiety about the possibility of sexual liaisons between black domestic servants (such as gardeners and “houseboys”) and their white “madams”. According to Samasuwo, this was “a result of simple fantasy on the part of the white settler community [which] became an ideological tool consciously and unconsciously used to build white supremacy” (1994: 03).
“Respectability” and race in colonial towns
Colonial notions of sexual morality and feminine respectability were also informed by racial boundaries. For white women, being respectable meant strictly avoiding any possibility of “contaminating” contact with black “houseboys” and “garden-boys” and sometimes teaching black women hygiene and other forms of domesticity associated with Western cultural habits. Those few white sex workers, such as Maude Cotte and Ann Guiney, who worked in Salisbury and included black men among their clients were said to “be guilty of unmentionable practices” and there were calls to drive them out of the colony. White women who had sexual liaisons with black men were considered “unrespectable”, and those who invited such sexual contacts were punished. White women whose relationships with black men were discovered were sometimes obliged to claim rape in order to salvage their respectability.
The categorising of women as either “respectable” or “unrespectable” also hardened and legitimised racial discrimination against women. In South Africa, many white officials regarded African women as morally corrupted by their contact with the industrial conurbation of Johannesburg and therefore in need of restraint (Gaitskell, 1979: 45). Thus the shepherding of young girls into mission schools was not only a means of trying to preserve purity, but also an effort to resubordinate young African women into new forms of domesticity and femininity that marked them as racially inferior. Missionaries taught home economics skills, such as flower-arranging and sewing, as well as Western patriarchal notions of what it meant to be good wives – “angels of the house” providing a safe haven for men and children.
Notions of “respectability” and “unrespectability” during the liberation struggle
Zimbabwe’s liberation war, which began in the early 1960s and ended in 1979/80, presented women with opportunities to blur the boundaries between “respectable” and “unrespectable” femininity. However, this was not easily achieved; even during the war, a distinction was made between activities that were considered respectable for women and those that were not.
The war was characterised by guerrilla warfare tactics, in which insurgents had to enlist the support of the black population both for recruitment purposes, and to ensure adequate food supplies and efficient communication systems for gathering information. This new context opened up fresh opportunities for women who wished to participate in the struggle. This entailed performing “male roles”, and many female soldiers hoped to earn respect this way.
However, women’s involvement in the guerrilla war did not fundamentally change gender inequalities in society after liberation, nor did it transform definitions of “respectable” and “unrespectable” women (Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 2000). Nhongo-Simbanegavi notes that the wartime slogan for women was “Forward with the cooking stick!” and points to other sayings that continued to enshrine the nurturing or maternal roles of women even during the liberation war (2000: 19).
However, Gaidzanwa points out that there was a functional redefinition of socially acceptable behaviours during the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe; mobile women were no longer referred to as “prostitutes”, but were now encouraged to leave their families to join the liberation forces and to move around within and outside the rural areas (1995). This female mobility was essential to guerrillas, who used these “travelling” women to obtain and pass on information. Young girls either joined the army (as porters, nurses and political commissars in liberated and semi-liberated zones) or became female civilian aides. Their roles, especially those of the latter, remained highly feminised. Women were encouraged to provide cooked food, warm water for washing, and laundry services to guerrillas.
Such activities highlighted the split, even during the war, between “respectable” and “unrespectable” women. Women who performed domestic chores and provided support for male guerrillas were considered “respectable”, while those women fighters who had children by their male counterparts were viewed as “unrespectable”. Sexual activity was generally discouraged by elders and spiritual advisors who had given their stamp of approval to the guerrilla movement. However, young fighters of both sexes challenged the traditional authority of elders by cohabiting without parental approval, especially while in hiding in the “bush”. Women who “transgressed” this way (but not their male partners) were often insulted and declared to be prostitutes by their male leaders. One male member of the ZANU-PF high command allegedly said to some of his female cohorts: “You are not real ZANU members. You are public prostitutes and I am going to take pictures of you to send them to the masses of Zimbabwe to see” (Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 2000: 51). However, many women who had performed “respectable” tasks during the war (cooking, laundry, carrying information, and similar tasks) did not escape the social stigma of “unrespectable” femininity. They were abandoned after the war by their soldier husbands, who divorced them in favour of educated and commercially employed women. Their husbands argued that “women from the bush are a problem” (Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 2000: 146).
A similar situation arose in Kenya during the Mau Mau revolt. During this period, sex workers were accorded a dubious legitimacy by male leaders for reasons of political expediency. Some of these women were enlisted to “lay tender traps” for those African policemen (askaris) who defended colonial interests. Female sex workers thus sometimes played a role in the abduction and even murder of such men, suffocating them in order to steal their guns (White, 1990: 205). Women were therefore allowed some specious freedoms during the revolt without risking social ostracism, as long as their transgressive behaviour remained under patriarchal control or furthered male interests. However, in the postcolonial state, such definitions shifted once again, and sex work by women was once more relegated to “disgraceful” status.
Notions of “respectability” and “unrespectability” after independence
After the war of liberation, definitions of female respectability changed once more, as the citizens of the new Zimbabwean state concentrated on building the economy through education and industry. Women who had been mobile or active as fighters during the war were now expected to return home and take up traditional domestic chores such as childcare and housework. If they wished to work outside the home, they were expected to take low-income jobs that were demarcated as “respectable” – in secretarial, teaching and nursing fields, for example. Those who defied these boundaries of mobility, particularly through cross-border trading, were targeted as “unrespectable”. The Shona word pfambi, which literally means “one who walks”, was used in the precolonial and early colonial periods to describe female prostitutes. It is still used as a derogatory term for female cross-border traders (it is not used to describe men, even those who travel or wander freely). So while male mobility was normalised, women’s mobility was once again branded as “unrespectable”.
One reason for this branding is the fear that mobile women might marry foreigners, who would threaten the status of local men. Another reason is that cross-border female traders redefine the role and functions of international mobility laid down by men, as well as supplying market niches that male-dominated state policies have tried to eliminate (Cheater and Gaidzanwa, 1996: 199). These mobile women continue to be seen as rebellious and promiscuous, because they are perceived as undermining Zimbabwean ideological constructions of womanhood, premised on female dependency upon males.
As mentioned earlier, in contemporary Zimbabwe, the term “prostitute” does not only refer to women who sell sexual services, but is used broadly to insult and censure any woman who is physically located beyond male control or who is behaving in ways that men disapprove of (Gaidzanwa, 1995). Mapoto women (those who live with male partners without payment of bride-wealth) continue to be seen as “prostitutes” because men have relatively little control over them. The “ideal” Zimbabwean (Shona or Ndebele) woman, however, is seen to be self-effacing, restrained in her public behaviour, family-oriented and caring towards her male partner and relatives. At work, she is not expected to aspire to the same professional status as men. If she does, she is immediately branded as “unrespectable”.
This categorisation of women into “respectable” and “unrespectable” put many at risk of gender-based violence. Stigmatisation, marginalisation of and violence against women are condoned and normalised through categorising them as “prostitutes”. Public education pamphlets on HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe sometimes give the impression that the deadly virus resides in female prostitutes only, while male prostitutes, who are equally visible at tourist centres, are not similarly targeted. This has led to the victimisation and harassment of women by the state; for instance, in the form of “clean-up” campaigns in which unaccompanied and “under-dressed” women are rounded up and arrested for “prostitution”.
In political crises such as those that exist in contemporary Zimbabwe, women find themselves targeted as scapegoats for wider frustrations and tragedies. What is alarming is that such scapegoating and violence is all too often determined and driven by the binary poles of respectability and unrespectability. This has been seen elsewhere; as in present-day Zimbabwe, Nigerian wives who did not spend “enough time at home” because of their activities in the labour market as petty traders, were targeted by the military for supposedly hoarding essential goods. Single women were accused of “tempting” men, with some of them forced to marry as a result (Halvorsen, 1991: 13). Full participation in the Zimbabwe economy thus becomes a difficult task for women in a polity where female wage-earners run the risk of being described as “lazy, gossipy, incompetent and morally depraved workers who have failed to maintain the good quiet life of rural areas” (Fatton, 1994: 60). Such accusations are appealing to males in poor and subordinate classes and thus in competition for scarce resources; they also maintain a male hegemony that thrives on such stereotypes. The discourse on “respectability” and “unrespectability” thus performs the function of legitimising state and male violence against women.
Zimbabwean women in postcolonial politics
If we define democratisation as a process where people struggle individually or in groups in order to secure and effect inclusion and participation in the governance and management of their societies and communities (Parpart, 1986), then the discrimination against Zimbabwean women through stigmatisation and violence prevents them from fully participating in this process. Such efforts at participation are undermined by a discourse of “unrespectability” that is sufficiently far-reaching to include even female politicians, and delineate them as “prostitutes”. Women may therefore be reluctant to engage in politics; or, when they do, they serve conservative and patriarchal agendas. Obbo notes that at a 1972 conference of the All Africa Women’s Organisation in Dar es Salaam, 200 women leaders from 41 countries spent much valuable time discussing the foreign “menace of miniskirts and hot pants” instead of addressing political issues that affected their female constituencies. This she attributes to women’s fear of not “playing the right game in a man’s world” (1986: 158).
It is commonly held that politics in Zimbabwe is a “dirty game”, but especially so for women. The following remark, cited by Obbo, succinctly summarises how female participation in either university or national politics is regarded: “A progressive and intelligent woman who participates in politics is regarded as a hooligan. She is said to have every possible fault, bad behaviour and so on. She isn’t worth anything; she is finished” (1986: 159).
Gaidzanwa (1995) shows how the term “prostitute” in Zimbabwe is mobilised against women in the political arena in order to delegitimise women’s initiatives to democratise private and public life. For example, women such as Shuvai Mahofa and Margaret Dongo have been branded as prostitutes. However, Zimbabwean feminists such as Win (2004) and Kwinje (2004) offer a counter-narrative, viewing these women as respectable precisely because they pursue democratisation. These feminists vehemently opposed the election of Joyce Mujuru (in November 2004) into Zimbabwe’s presidium because she represented patriarchal interests. Win further notes that feminists in Zimbabwe have no common interests with “women who trade on their biology [and who] … at every other time in their lives forget they are one of us, only to remember their [femininity] when it suits them” (2004: 2). Win’s censure is hardly surprising, given that Joyce Mujuru stated in 1998 that “there is nothing like equality [between men and women]. Those who call for equality are failures in life” (Win, 2004: 1). Mujuru is thus viewed as a politician eager to create a “femocracy” in Zimbabwe without questioning underlying unequal gender relations in society. It is claimed that she is content to mobilise women simply as another support base for a ruling regime that is sexist and seeks its own consolidation and legitimation (Kwinje, 2004).
“Respectable” and “unrespectable” women in academia
Generally, universities are viewed as institutions that support diversity, where all members of the community are accepted or at least tolerated in the name of academic freedom or freedom of expression. However, such freedom of expression has not yet been extended to female university students in Zimbabwe. The female student is still trapped in the traditional discourses of respectability, in which students strive to earn such approbation (for example, by shunning courses on gender studies, performing domestic chores for their boyfriends, and agreeing to having unprotected sex with their partners). “Unrespectable” translates as “unmarriageable”, and those who fly in the face of tacit campus standards of appropriate feminine conduct are seen as inviting problems such as sexual harassment, rape and ostracism (Gaidzanwa, 2001).
However, such an understanding not only makes it difficult to study gender and feminism, it also hampers gender mainstreaming within university curricula. Women researchers tend to shun “controversial areas of research”, concentrating instead on topics likely to get sponsorship or funding, and are more “respectable” (Mama, 1996: 85). Women who engage in politically or socially radical research projects are branded as stubborn and “unrespectable”.
Concluding thoughts
In this article, I have argued that the distinction made between “respectability” and “unrespectability” serves a patriarchal agenda. This distinction muffles and legitimates the social and political inequality between men and women that persists in the Zimbabwean polity. As long as women occupy space allocated to them, they remain “respectable”, but once they start redefining public and private terrain, they run the risk of being judged as depraved and “unrespectable” in the eyes of society.
What is more, it can be argued that some women actively participate in this form of policing. As is usually the case in patriarchal social structures, women who oppress, demonise and marginalise other women usually have some small amount of power or authority bestowed upon them by patriarchal structures; or they benefit from certain patriarchal practices, as in the case of those older women throughout Africa who earn an income by performing female genital cutting or mutilation. In contemporary Zimbabwe, it is usually married women who actively define mapoto women or unmarried women as prostitutes. During the colonial era, it was hostel matrons who used their positions of authority and respectability to help perpetuate the belief that female hostel residents were prostitutes; for example, by locking out residents who came home after a 9pm curfew (Barnes, 1999).
Whether consciously or unconsciously, there is no doubt that some women participate in defining and bestowing respectability. One of the ways in which patriarchy has been entrenched in Zimbabwean society is by dividing women, offering them limited power and social approval in exchange for behaviour strictly policed along binary lines. Women who are thus divided, and who label and insult each other continue to service patriarchal structures. Using Lasswell’s definition of politics as the determination of who gets what when and how (1953), it is clear that women with genuinely democratic and transformative agendas are blocked from access to political power and resources. However, women who sing the patriarchal tune are presented as champions of women’s causes, at the same time that they serve their masters’ cause. These are the “respectable” women, the ones who know their “rightful position”. Thus the distinction between “respectable” and “unrespectable” women in terms of age, class, race, and marital status has the lasting effect of ensuring that women “carry their burdens with strength” and do not present a united front as women in Zimbabwean gender struggles.
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Chipo Hungwe is a lecturer in the Human Resource Management Department at the Midlands State University in Gweru, Zimbabwe.