Iuze Mukube
“Why is it that when a woman loses her spouse to death, she is often depicted as a witch and a gold digger, but the man is not? It’s very unfair,” Paulina Iilonga wept.
She was telling her audience about events that ensued after her husband’s death, during International Widows Day, this week.
The Kuhanga Widows Association hosted and commemorated this event for the first time in Namibia.
International Widows Day is a global awareness day that is commemorated annually on June 23. The day was launched by the United Nations in 2010 to raise awareness of the violations of human rights that widows endure in many countries following the deaths of their spouses.
On the day, Iilonga illustrated how her late husband’s family appeared loving and caring, only to become her worst nightmare following his demise.
“They took away everything – all the property and land that my late husband and I worked for. They took everything. They showed up in numbers to divide the property among themselves, leaving me with nothing; they literally treated me like an enemy,” she recalls.
Meanwhile, Collen Ndjai also related his heartache and grief over the actions of family members upon losing his parents.
“After my stepfather died, before his body was even in the mortuary, family members came and kicked my mother out of the house, stole, and sold everything,” Ndjai remembers.
He sought help from traditional authorities and constituency councillors, but to no avail.
Ndjai emphasised that while a man may own a house, it is the woman’s duty to ensure that it has a chair or bed. However, it is the woman who suffers the most, as they face being kicked out when their husband dies.
Bernadette Maria Jagger, the deputy Minister of Gender Equality, stated: “Under the theme of ‘Accelerating the Achievement of Gender Equality’, the emphasis is on strengthening the land and property rights of the widows, ensuring that they are economically righted in terms of inheritance from the death of their spouse.”