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Gender dimensions and equality among the BaTonga

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CULTURE plays an important role in many aspects such as the way employees work.
It impacts on productivity of an organisation as well as the relationship among workers.
Therefore, it is important to understand cultural dimensions among individuals to predict the behaviour that will lead to organisational success.
Gender and ethnicity has always influenced people’s cultural dimensions.
The cultural dimensions among several Zimbabwean communities has always been debatable.
Women are deeply respected in the African culture. The protection of women and children formed the basis of Africanness while wars have been fought in defence of women and children.
Even during our days of herding cattle, fights often broke out whenever one insulted another’s mother.
Traditional challenges like zamu ramai vako (mother’s breast) where two mounds of soil were moulded to represent a mother’s breasts were the cause of many nasty fist fights. All this was made in defence of our women.
Today, because of Western values that have been adopted in most African societies, there is an assumption that our women and children are being segregated.
The so-called segregation came about as a result of the adoption of ‘equal rights’, intermarriages especially between blacks and whites, the adoption of Western cultures, the rise of feminism where most young women opted to be single and a higher educational base among young women who saw themselves as ‘equal’ to their male counterparts.
Another factor that has caused a rift between males and females are some gender-based NGOs that advocate divisions between African males and females as well as other vulnerable groups and tribes. These NGOs have not supported polygamy, and have forced our women to have less children.
The result has often been a woman who is ‘independent’, ‘headstrong’, who can choose to marry a partner or partners of her own choice, hence the violent clashes between women and their male counterparts.
Most women have abandoned African values, and this has resulted in gender-based violence as men are pushed into a corner.
However, to analyse the causes of gender inequality, we need to know what we mean by ‘gender inequality’. 
How can we conceive of and talk about gender inequality in ways that are general enough to apply across the range of relevant phenomena, consistent enough to minimise conceptual ambiguities and precise enough to be analytically effective?
Gender inequality has been extraordinarily diverse and wide-spread. 
Women and men are unequal in every conceivable way, in endless circumstances, both immediate and enduring, by both objective criteria and subjective experience. So, what counts as gender inequality?
In the highly matriarchal society like the BaTonga, gender inequality has never been an issue as women remain highly subservient to their spouses or husbands although they are regarded as community and family leaders under the matriarch system.
Unlike in other communities, the women are accorded full control of affairs. Leaders are selected by a caucus of women (matriarchs) before the appointments are subject to popular review.
Their traditional ‘Government’ is composed of an equal number of men and women.
The men are chiefs and the women clan-mothers.
As leaders, the women closely monitor the actions of the men and retain the right to veto any law they deem inappropriate.
The women not only hold the reins of leadership and economic power, they also have the right to determine all issues involving the trying of community offenders.
Matriarchy is a social system in which females hold primary power, predominate in roles of leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property at the specific exclusion of men, at least to a large degree.
Most scholars hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal, but some authors believe exceptions may exist or may have existed.
A few people consider any non-patriarchal system to be matriarchal, thus including generally equalitarian systems, but most academics exclude them from matriarchies strictly defined.
In 19th Century Western scholarship, the hypothesis of matriarchy representing an early, mainly pre-historic stage of human development gained popularity.
Possibilities of so-called primitive societies were cited and the hypothesis survived into the 20th Century, including in the context of second wave feminism.
This hypothesis was criticised by some authors and remains as a largely unsolved question to this day.
Matriarchy among the BaTonga is also a form of social organisation in which the mother or oldest female is the head of the family, while descent and relationships are reckoned through the female line; Government or rule by a woman or women.
The BaTonga ‘matriarchy’ are a non-alienated society in which women who produce the next generation define motherhood, determine the conditions of motherhood, and determine the environment in which the next generation is reared.
Matriarchy can be thought of as a shorthand description for any society in which women’s power is equal or superior to men’s and in which the culture centres around values and life events described as ‘feminine’.
To complicate matters, arguments proclaiming superior attributes of women among the BaTonga exist alongside the arguments proclaiming women inferior. 
Moreover, while for some, gender inequality always means a difference based on biology or genetics, for others it includes cultural differences that are embodied in women and men.
Today, because of the NGO crusade, some BaTonga women are being influenced to reject polygamous marriages, forced to take family planning pills and are forced in so-called gender empowerment programmes where they are taught about their ‘rights’ as women and mothers.

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