Infanticide: Zimbabwe Wonders Why

Farai Gatsi, 19 years old and deeply in trouble, pressed the worn toes of her black shoes together and tapped them nervously at her murder trial.

The law weighed heavily on her thin shoulders, hunched forward beneath a plain white cardigan, facing the red robes and white wigs of the high court of Zimbabwe.

Her crime was recounted:

Gatsi had given birth to a baby girl two years before and tied a nylon stocking around the newborn’s mouth, suffocating it. Then she placed the body in a watering can and hid it in the weeds behind her house.

Later that night, her 16-year-old boyfriend, the baby’s father, helped her dig a pit in the vegetable garden, and they buried the baby, covering the freshly turned soil with rubbish.

Gatsi was just one of three young mothers on trial here during one recent week. All faced charges of killing their newborn babies.

“Baby dumping,” as it is called here, has become an increasingly serious problem for Zimbabwe. More than 80 cases have come before the courts in the last three years, and one in five female inmates in this southern African country’s prisons is there for killing her infant.

Judges and lawyers have begun debating the proper punishment for the crime, and prison sentences that once ranged up to nine years, with hard labor, are coming down under pressure from citizens’ groups.

To combat baby dumping, social welfare agencies here are stepping up their birth-control information campaigns, and Zimbabwe’s first home for unwed mothers will soon open its doors.

Why Is It on the Rise?

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to figure out why infanticide has become so common in this nation of 9 million people, about the size of California in area, one of the most industrialized and affluent countries in black Africa.

Many blame rapid urbanization and its pressure on families, tribal prohibitions against adoption, legal bans against abortion and the lowly economic and social status of women--and unmarried mothers especially--in traditional African rural life.

Some African experts believe infanticide occurs throughout rural areas of this developing continent, although such cases rarely end up in courtrooms. Historians say it also has been a serious problem for Western societies at times of great social upheaval, such as the Industrial Revolution.

Farai Gatsi was 17 on the October morning in 1985 when she gave birth in her parents’ home in Chitungwiza, a heavily populated urban area where thousands of Harare’s workers live in squat, concrete-block homes amid a sea of children at play.

To friends and family, Gatsi had denied that she was pregnant; she knew that she would be expelled from school if her condition were discovered. Her father, supporting 12 children on his salary as a domestic cook, had sacrificed plenty to come up with the fees necessary to keep his favorite daughter in school.

Gatsi was afraid to tell him the truth. “I knew he would be so disappointed,” she said.

She made a few feeble attempts at abortion but otherwise regarded the unborn baby as “a growth, something she didn’t want, not a living human being,” according to Dr. Lynda Albertyn, a psychiatrist who examined her.

‘Child’s Thinking’

“She wanted it to go away in a magical way,” Albertyn said. “It was magical thinking, child’s thinking. When she thought of the baby, she felt helpless rather than callous.”

After the baby was born, Gatsi placed it on the floor of her bedroom and called the family’s housekeeper. Together they wrapped a stocking around the baby’s mouth--”I was afraid people might hear it crying,” Gatsi said later.

When her boyfriend came to visit that night, they all went into the garden to bury it. A suspicious neighbor told the police.

Gatsi went on trial a few weeks ago in Harare, the tidy capital of Zimbabwe.

Guilt was not an issue. Gatsi had admitted everything.

Her attorney, Michael Lofty, wanted to keep her from going to jail. She had been free on bond, and he now was asking for a suspended sentence.

Using the psychiatrist’s testimony as ammunition, Lofty argued that Gatsi was emotionally unbalanced at the time of the birth and did not have the intent to commit a crime, as the law requires.

“This is not ‘murder most foul,’ ” Lofty said. “It was an act taken during a period of emotional instability, fear, loneliness, in circumstances that we (as men) must find very difficult to understand.”

He noted that in many countries, infanticide carries small prison terms because of research indicating that some women experience severe depression or other psychological trauma following childbirth.

The prosecutor, Augustus Agyemang, countered that Gatsi, “in her selfish interest, lost sight of the fact that this little helpless child, whose life she sought to snuff out, was a human being.”

His lordship, Justice Wilson Sandura, expressed dismay over the growing numbers of infanticide cases and suggested he knew why it was happening.

‘More Promiscuous’

“Girls are getting more and more promiscuous and not using contraceptives,” he said. “Why don’t they go to the clinic and get the pill?”

The judge acknowledged that Gatsi felt alone when she gave birth and was “probably emotionally disturbed to some degree.” But, he added, she “killed a defenseless baby. The baby had not asked to come into this world, and it expected to be taken care of by its mother.”

Gatsi was sentenced to 18 months in prison, a relatively light sentence and identical to one handed down in a similar case the day before. Gatsi’s boyfriend received six months in jail for helping dispose of the body.

Gatsi’s attorney thought the punishment far outweighed the crime.

‘They Are Both Kids’

“They are both kids. They’re not criminals,” Lofty said later. “All right, I know a human life was taken. But there’s more to it.”

Women who kill or leave their babies to die here often believe they have no option, social workers say.

A young unwed mother may be rejected by her relatives because they can no longer claim the roora , or bride price. An older unwed mother may face expulsion from the community and separation from her other children.

The unwed mother’s economic situation usually appears dire as well. Although women do much of the farming in rural Zimbabwe while the men work as migrant laborers, they have no land rights.

“The great majority of baby dumpers are in a desperate situation economically, have no education or skills and see no way to support themselves without a husband,” said Elizabeth Rider of the Harare Women’s Action Group.

Adoption No Viable Option

Adoption is rarely an option. Most Zimbabweans, and most Africans, see children as an extension of their ancestors and consider it unthinkable to turn a child over to strangers. Children may be “adopted” by their relatives, such as when their parents have died, but that support system is not always available.

Although abortion is illegal here, gynecologists estimate that about 40,000 occur every year. One in five cases of miscarriage brought to Harare Central Hospital is the result of an attempted self-abortion, doctors say.

Unwed mothers-to-be in Zimbabwe are under enormous stress, but such pressures exist elsewhere in the world where infanticide is rare. Why so many women in Zimbabwe choose the most extreme response to an unwanted pregnancy still baffles social workers and psychiatrists.

Many believe the upheaval of the past decade may be an underlying cause. During that time, Zimbabwe has endured a swift population shift to urban areas, a civil war for independence and a transition to black majority rule.

Upheaval in Society

“Our society is in the process of very rapid changes, and women in Africa generally have a very hard time of it,” said Rhoda Immerman, a social worker and member of the Committee for the Unborn Child in Harare.

“But it’s very difficult to say this or that is the reason for baby dumping,” she added. “We are just guessing.”

Eriya Jokasi’s worry was that she would be expelled from her village and separated from her seven children. The 38-year-old widow was unemployed and dependent on the tribal chief for support when she became pregnant in 1984.

She gave birth in a maize field, wrapped her infant daughter in a fertilizer bag and rolled a 100-pound rock on top of the baby until it was dead.

She was sentenced to nine years in prison with labor. But, in a landmark appeal last year, Justice Nicholas McNally reduced Jokasi’s sentence to four years and urged judges to impose jail terms of no greater than six years in these cases.

‘A Terrible Threat’

For Jokasi, “an unemployed, unskilled, totally unsophisticated, unemancipated tribal woman to be threatened with expulsion and separation from her children is surely a terrible threat,” McNally said.

“In that society, a woman must live under the protection of a man,” he added. Without it, “starvation is a reality.”

Women’s groups and legal rights organizations in Zimbabwe continue to lobby for leniency in these cases, arguing that stiff sentences have no deterrent effect. A new law allows judges to issue suspended sentences in baby-dumping cases, which remain legally classified as murder.

Farai Gatsi’s case was apparently the first baby-dumping trial at which psychiatric testimony was presented, legal experts said. (It was paid for by the family that employs Gatsi’s father.)

Must Look for Causes

Judges “are beginning to recognize that these are not just plain, callous murders,” said Kathy O’Meara, a lawyer with the Legal Projects Center in Harare. “For a woman to kill her baby is an incredible thing, and we must look behind it for the causes.”

Family planning clinics have increased their information campaigns to combat Zimbabwe’s high population growth rate (nearly 4% per year) as well as the high incidence of baby dumping.

Help is also being arranged for pregnant women who have no relatives or friends for support. A Roman Catholic relief agency from West Germany and an anti-abortion group are opening a home for unwed mothers in Chitungwiza, Gatsi’s community.

The pilot program, with beds for eight residents, will provide housing and counseling for women from the seventh month of pregnancy until a month after the birth.

“We’re trying to provide some sort of help first and worry about research later,” said social worker Immerman. “All we want is to get involved before that young woman contemplates doing anything as drastic as killing her child.”