ACTIVIST, firebrand and feminist are just a few of the terms used to describe Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, a former opposition MP and cabinet minister in Zimbabwe. No one would call her a pushover. Yet despite her connections and some of the country’s finest lawyers arguing her case, after her husband’s death she was forced empty-handed out of her matrimonial home of 13 years.
Before Ms Misihairabwi-Mushonga was widowed she and her late husband owned three houses, including one in the leafy suburb of Mt Pleasant in the north of Harare. They shared bank accounts and owned several cars. Some of this was left to her in a will. Yet after her husband’s death Ms Misihairabwi-Mushonga lost almost everything, even her clothes, to her late husband’s brother, various other in-laws and his children from an earlier marriage. “I am a typical example of a person who had access to information, a minister, but yet I woke up with nothing,” she says.
Her destitution illustrates a wider problem. It is not only the government that grabs other people’s stuff in Zimbabwe. In-laws do it, too. Tens of thousands of widows are stripped of their...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2k7vNRC
EmoticonEmoticon