Tendai Gambiza, a 33-year-old resident of the Zimbabwean city of Marondera, forced his way into the Supreme Court building where his ex-wife works and threatened to kill her with an ax Monday. Fortunately, police detained him before he could carry out his threat.
According to the outlet New Zimbabwe, Gambiza is fighting a “nasty custody battle” with his ex-wife, Felistas Bere. He became enraged and followed her to work on Monday after she refused to let him see their child.
Gambiza was charged with violating Zimbabwe’s Domestic Violence Act and attempting to “intimidate” Bere. Court papers noted that his demand to see his child on Monday was “contrary to the court order, which states that he has access to the child during weekends only.”
Gambiza has also been charged with pointing a toy gun at Bere during a separate incident. He is currently in custody awaiting a bail hearing.
Zimbabwe has a long-running problem with domestic violence. A 2015 government survey found that roughly one in three Zimbabwean women between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced sexual violence, a finding that spurred the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to declare a crisis and invest additional resources for reducing “gender-based violence.”
UNFPA said the domestic violence situation in Zimbabwe is exacerbated by “pre-existing, persistent, gender and social inequalities, as well as traditional harmful socio-cultural practices.” Among those practices are women resorting to “trading sex as a means of providing the most basic needs for their families.”
The U.N. also pointed to Zimbabwe’s tradition of lobola or “bride price,” essentially an elaborate series of dowry payments that make it profitable for families to marry their daughters off at young ages. Lobola was actually made mandatory under Zimbabwean law in 2022.
Zimbabwean women complain they are culturally conditioned to accept a certain degree of violence in their marriages or even regard it as a sign of their husband’s fierce affection and dedication. Many fear reporting domestic violence to the police because they believe such a complaint would immediately end their marriages. Women without husbands, in turn, worry they will be abused by the population at large in addition to having difficulty making ends meet.
“There are different beliefs such as ‘if he does not hit you, he does not love you enough,’ and ‘a woman should suffer in silence and pray about her pain,’” Christian Zimbizi of the international charity Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) told Reuters in June 2021.