In theory, what happened to 14-year-old Sibongile in this hilly, crowded township outside Durban in November could not happen today - at least, not legally.
On a broiling Saturday morning, as more than a dozen women looked on, Sibongile joined 56 other Zulu girls outside a red-and-white striped tent. One by one, they lay on a straw mat beneath the tent; one by one, they received a cursory inspection of their genitals by a woman in a ceremonial beaded hat. As the inspector pronounced judgment on the state of their hymens - “virgin,” “nice,” “perfect” - each departed to the excited trilling of the women who were observers.
Until Sibongile lifted her red pleated skirt and submitted to her examination. Near silence followed her out of the tent.
“Only one of them cheered,” she said, looking stricken at the determination that she was not a virgin. “I feel very bad because I haven’t done anything.”
To many Zulus, such virginity tests are a revered custom, one that discourages early sex and, after falling into disuse, has been revived to fight the spread of HIV. But to many advocates of women’s and children’s rights, the practice is unscientific, discriminatory and - to girls who are publicly and perhaps falsely accused of losing their virginity - emotionally searing. This month, their arguments persuaded South Africa’s Parliament to ban some virginity testing, with violations punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The ban is an example of how sub-Saharan Africa is slowly, but inexorably, enshrining into law basic protections that have long been denied women. But it also hints at the frailty of the movement toward women’s rights in the region. Not only is the new law a watered-down version of what was proposed, but few here believe it will curb a tradition so deeply embedded in local culture.
“We will uphold our traditions and customs,” said Patekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders, a political party in South Africa. “There are laws that passed that do not necessarily have any impact on the lives of people. I imagine this will be one of those.”
The story is similar in much of this region: Measured by laws and political status, women are making solid, even extraordinary, gains toward equality. Women’s equity commissions are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 nations. Women are deputy heads of state in at least seven nations and a woman has been elected president of one, Liberia. They hold one in six parliamentary seats, matching the worldwide average.
Women’s rights legislation has also been enacted. Swaziland’s new constitution, adopted this year, makes women the legal equals of men, able to own property, sign contracts and obtain loans without the sponsorship of a man. Zimbabwe this year allowed women to inherit property from husbands and fathers. Liberia passed a stiff statute against rape, and president-elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman in modern Africa to be elected a head of state, has pledged to enforce it. Last month, a comprehensive protocol on women’s rights, ratified by 15 African nations, took effect as part of the African human rights charter.
Even so, African governments are typically much quicker to adopt international protocols than to pass domestic laws. And they are still quicker to pass domestic laws than to enforce them, or to tamper with the unwritten rules - the so-called living law of custom - that govern much of rural Africa.
In Guinea, for example, female genital mutilation has been a crime since 1965, punishable by life imprisonment or death. But in 40 years, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group in New York, no case has ever been brought to trial. The UN Children’s Fund says 99 percent of women in Guinea are mutilated, a rate unchanged for decades.
The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa delivered a downbeat assessment in February of the progress of African women, stating that gains in political mobilization, advocacy and government representation “are not yet reflected in substantial changes in the lives of ordinary women.”
In a part of the world where modern mores often collide with ancient traditions, women themselves are sometimes divided over what constitutes progress. Some advocates for women say their movement has come together over continentwide needs to promote peace and reduce violence against women. Beyond that, unity is often elusive.
South Africa’s virginity-testing debate was not unlike women’s rights battles elsewhere. The issue pitted officials from South Africa’s Commission on Gender Equality against Zulu leaders, male and female, who saw the legislation as an attack on ancient tribal culture and family values.
Joyce Piliso-Seroke, who heads the commission, urged Parliament to ban virginity testing outright. The public inspection of girls’ genitals, she argued, was humiliating, the conclusions about their virginity were slapdash and medically unreliable, the stigmatization of girls who failed the test was a lifelong blow, and the public identification of virgins an invitation to rapists because of a myth among African men that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS.
Not least, she said, she rejected the notion that it was acceptable to pass judgment on the virtue of girls while ignoring the morals of boys. Educating boys and girls, she argued, is a better weapon against AIDS.
Zulu leaders, however, called the tests a revered tradition ideally suited to address modern ills. King Goodwill Zwelithini called virginity tests an umbilical cord between modern Zulus and their ancestors.
After voting to ban virginity testing entirely, Parliament backtracked this month, restricting the tests to girls 16 and over who consent to them.
If the new law is enforced, there will be no examinations without gloves, no white dots on the foreheads of girls deemed virgins.
And there will be no 14-year-olds like Sibongile, who began the morning in a buoyant mood and ended it hiding in the rear of the tent, insisting tearfully that whatever her tester’s judgment, she remained a virgin.
Source: Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, Gavin du Venage contributed reporting for this article from George, South Africa