Joyce Banda: A poor girl's rise through GBV to presidency

The effervescent and incisive Joyce Hilda Banda, served as a Member of Parliament, Minister of Gender and Child Welfare, Foreign Minister and Vice-President. She was the first female President of Malawi, from 2012 to 2014. She's also an entrepreneur, an activist for women, youth and children, and a philanthropist through the Joyce Banda Foundation.

From Day One is a boundlessly insightful unmediated masterpiece, of factual research. It covers conscientious content of the oppressive realities about the rural Malawian pre-ten-year-old girl-child. It embellishes why supporting girls aged zero to ten years is monumental to reform Africa's impoverished trajectory. It also replenishes solutions to combat retrogressive customs. 

Joyce was raised in the matriarchal village of Malemia, in Malawi's Zomba district. Her best childhood friend Chrissie, an academically brilliant girl, never left Malemia. She was married off and had a child, while still a teenager.

"For a long time, her silent question cast a very dark shadow over our friendship," Joyce writes. “Why? Why you and not me?” This question led Joyce to her purpose as a consortium administrator, to assist women in acquisition of financial independence.

She elaborates that girls and women are Africa's most valuable assets. Yet numerous Chrissies, precocious village girls stocked with aptitude, exist. Eager to become transformative leaders that Africa desperately yearns, but doesn't scout for, because of a sexist redundant patriarchal society.

In 1995, Joyce was slated for surgery in Lilongwe. Her surgeon informed her that he would perform an epidural, which required injecting into the spinal cord, rather than general anaesthesia. After the surgery, the doctor informed her that he couldn't inject into the spinal cord. Her lower spine was bent. Ferrying heavy loads from the age of five, fomented to skeletomuscular injuries and agonising deformation of her spine.

Fetch firewood

She carried buckets of water, firewood and heavy baskets of maize meal on her head as a child. In Zomba, there was no water infrastructure in her parents’ home, and cooking required firewood. She awoke at three every morning for a frightful trek to Zomba Mountain, to fetch firewood.

"At age seven, I was already a little mother," she writes about attending to her siblings. "Carrying babies on my back and feeding them, while taking care of chores at home."

In rural Malawi, whenever there is not enough food, boys have first preference, and the girl-child eats leftovers and little food. Resulting to stunted growth and inadequate cerebral inception in girls. Pregnant mothers are also culturally prohibited from consuming eggs, an indispensable source of protein at an integral period.

Gender interventions in Malawi protecting rural girls below ten years old, don't exist. Interventions focus on women and pubescent girls, while programs targeting children are not gender specific. When most rural girls hit adolescence, its irreversible, to recuperate the damage that has propagated.

When Joyce separated from her viciously abusive husband, he ceaselessly harassed her. One night he stalked her to her house, while intoxicated, and banged on the door persistently. "I’m going to kill you, and I’m going to kill the children!" he kept screaming.

Vandalised house

She managed to wake her two children aged two and four, and pushed them through the back window, to hide at a neighbour’s house. He broke in and she ended up with a broken arm, fractured nose and a vandalised house, from the assault. She fled to the police station, but the policemen cohered and defended her husband.

Joyce's mother insisted she reconcile with him. Refusing to bear the shame of her daughter divorcing her husband, regardless of his demented brutality and despicable vulgarity. The next day, Joyce filed for a divorce.

While serving as Minister of Gender, Joyce championed for the accession and enactment of the Prevention of Domestic Violence Bill in 2006. It ministered the legal prerogative framework, to inaugurate the prevention and elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls.

In rural Malawi, there is a stipulated primitive draconian custom called, kushosa fumbi. Familymembers recruit a local paedophile known as hyena, to have sex with their girl at the cusp of puberty. Usually between 8 and 12 years old, in a disturbingly catastrophic atrocity, to cleanse her of misfortune and prevent infertility.

According to Action Aid and the U.S. Department of State. In parts of northern Malawi, girls as young as five, are coerced into sexual dissipation with older men, in exchange for a loan or livestock. The pimping transgression is known as kupimbira.

Apart from requisition to have sex with newly bereaved widows and women struggling to attain pregnancy, hyenas also defile underage girls. Infecting them with STIs and eternal mental wounds. In many African countries, the law rejects conceptualizing the criminality of paedophilia and marital rape. Due to the predominant conceit, that men are entitled to sex.

This is how infant girls are conditioned, and when they enter puberty and adulthood, they believe the stereotype. Joyce tabled decisive bills to assent the passage of a marital rape bill and child sex offences bill, but they were repudiated by a misogynist legislature.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother