BOCHRA BELHAJ
HAMIDA
LAWYER AND
PARLIAMENTARIAN,
TUNISIA
We women
activists
feared
that the
revolution
would take
women
backward,
but the
exact
opposite
happened.
It is “naive,” she says, for international groups “to come into Africa and
hope that they can solve our problems. What they find is that they can be
here for 20 years, and they go back” having achieved little because “some
of the issues they come to tackle are so entrenched in tradition that they
can’t break through.” It’s more effective to change a culture from within,
she says, by enlisting influential power brokers, such as chiefs. And when
those chiefs are women, the impact can be huge.
Some women have ascended to power through inheritance or legacy: In
Chief Kachindamoto’s case, she followed in the footsteps of her late father.
Kachindamoto’s jurisdiction extends across 551 villages and 1.1 mil-
lion people. She lists her first duty as “a custodian of culture,” yet since
becoming chief in 2003, she has worked to change some of her tribe’s
cultural practices, including the initiation that had girls at puberty lose
their virginity to strangers.
She has faced resistance, even death threats, from the subchiefs and
village heads under her and from other chiefs equal to her in seniority. Her
family cautions her, fearing for her safety. Other senior male chiefs, she
says, told her that “this culture was left to us to continue to do this; who
are you to change it?” As she puts it, “I said, ‘If you don’t want to do this
in your area, it’s up to you, but in my area I don’t want this to continue,
whether you like it or not.’ ”
Her father, when he was chief, tried and failed to ban the initiation
practice, but fear of HIV/AIDS in a country where one in 11 adults ages 15
to 49 is infected has now helped her efforts.
Kachindamoto also banned child marriage, sending the girls back to
school, well before Malawi enacted a law in 2015 that raised the legal mar-
rying age from 15 to 18. An amendment in 2017 brought the constitution
in line with the new law. At first, Kachindamoto says, people didn’t want
to hear her, so she formed a touring musical band to get people to gather
and then ambushed them with her message against child marriage and
initiation rituals. She has since created bylaws against the practices in
her jurisdiction and publicly fired male chiefs who continued the rituals,
making examples of them in the community. At the same time, she has
appointed some 200 women to positions of authority. When she became
chief, she says, “there were no [village] head women, only headmen, so I
changed the culture.”
Early marriage is linked to poverty, and Kachindamoto is trying
to combat both. She says tuition fees are a big obstacle to keeping girls
in school in her agriculture-based region. “I talked to the headmasters
[and told them that] if these girls don’t pay anything, don’t sack them
away, because if you do that, their parents will take them straight to hus-
bands,” she says.
Her voice is not the only one changing Malawi’s cultural landscape.
Throughout the Mwanza Traditional Authority in Salima district, Cha-
lendo McDonald, 67, better known as Chief Mwanza, also has banned
sexual initiation rituals and child marriage. Chief Mwanza presides over
780 villages and about 900,000 people of the Chewa ethnic group. She
too has made it her mission to transform Malawi, bringing the total to
320 women appointed to chief positions in her district, because, she says,
“women chiefs advocate women’s issues.”
In the 15 years since she became chief, she has annulled 2,060 child
marriages, but she says that despite the laws of the state and her own peo-
ple’s bylaws prohibiting the practice, it continues. “Yesterday,” she says,
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