Early this year I read from one of the newspapers that the Chief Justice, Maruping Dibotelo had said that eleven million Pula (P11m) of child maintenance money lay uncollected from the courts by the babies’ mothers. That’s about one and a half million US dollars (US $1.5 m). The money had been paid to the courts by the babies’ fathers. At around the same time it was reported that unwed fathers complain that their babies’ mothers deny them access to their own babies. Last week I read about a priest who allegedly battered his wife to death with a hammer, then surrendered himself to the Police. Yesterday I read Iqbal Erahim’s religious piece in the WeekendPost, complaining bitterly about divorces and the resultant social breakdown.
All these speak volumes about the breakdown of society in general. But let me try and open up my confused mind on some of these “problems”. The first question I ask myself is: Where do the courts keep the P11 million? If it is in banks, why can’t the unwed mothers collect the monies direct from the banks, rather than from the courts? This will in no way increase the administrative burden on the courts, because the fathers will deposit the monies into the mothers’ bank accounts, and then submit the evidence of such deposits to the courts for filling. The mothers will only interact with the courts if their accounts have not been credited for a specific month. It seems to me that this will actually lessen the administrative load on the courts.
Should unwed fathers be allowed access to their babies? Here we need to go back to the IKalanga basics. In Kalanga it is the exception, rather than the rule, that two young unwed people engage in sex. When it happens though, a child is usually born. This child, like all other children born in wedlock, is entitled to a home and a family. If its biological parents cannot, for whatever reason, marry each other, then the child will either belong to the mother’s family, or be “wed” by the father, and belong to the father’s family. Yes, in Kalanga tradition a child is wed by its father in exactly the same way that its mother would be, except that there is no sex between father and child. The mother’s family “gives the child away” to the father, and the father pays a dowry (malobolo). This does not imply barring the mother from further access to the child. It simply means that if the mother should get married to another man, “adoption” of the child by the other man will be proscribed. Indeed the biological father, to whom the child will have been “married”, will have the option to take his child to his family, on the child’s mother getting married to another man.
The baby’s mother’s family cannot refuse to “give a child away in marriage” to its biological father, if the father has paid “damages” for impregnating their daughter, and if the father is mentally stable and economically capable of rendering a good upbringing to his child. The issue of mothers “barring” fathers from access to their children therefore falls away as such fathers would simply take away their “wed” children to their own (fathers’) families. The right of a father to “marry” his child is not absolute, though. If society should determine that the child’s father does not want to marry the child’s mother for no other reason than that he has someone else in mind to marry, then society (the courts) can refuse to let the father “marry” his child.
In view of the above I do not believe that unwed fathers who have not “married” their children should have a right of access to their children, whether or not they pay child maintenance for such children.
What about “same-sex” marriages? For a start I DO believe that what goes on in anyone’s bedroom between two people is nobody else’s business but their own. Equally, I DO believe that those two people should NOT make their relationship my business, either by demanding that I declare them to be married or that I recognize them to be so married. I believe that where there is no possibility of a child being born, marriage makes no sense at all. Where there is a possibility, but fertility issues intervene, marriage can and should be conducted. Child adoption should then complete the process.
People who decide to live with sexual partners of the same sex as themselves should be eligible to individually “marry” children from the state, the same way that Kalanga fathers “marry” their own biological children from the would-be in-laws But since these would not be their own children, such people should be put under stricter scrutiny by the state or by whosoever gives them their child to adopt. The state should then proffer a tax rebate/exemption to such a parent on the basis of her/his having “married” a child, and not on the basis of her/his having “married” a same-sex partner.
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