HUMAN Rights Commissioner Pregs Govender this week sounded a warning to Parliament against enacting the Traditional Courts Bill, which she said would further prejudice rural women.

Speaking at the launch of Human Rights Week at Rhodes University in Grahamstown on Monday, Govender said “traditionalist, conservative restraints imposed on women by man-dominated structures” was more prevalent now than ever before.

Critics believe the Bill, which is currently before Parliament, will give traditional leaders sweeping powers over millions of rural South Africans, particularly in provinces such as the Eastern Cape.

According to civil society activists the Bill entrenches the geographical jurisdiction of traditional courts, often according to the boundaries drawn by the apartheid authorities.

Govender said Parliament had failed to heed rural woman when they had argued against the Communal Land Rights Bill, which they had said would rob them of their rights.

“Those with power did not listen and the Bill was enacted. Will those with power listen this time?”

She said President Jacob Zuma had recently argued that traditional leaders could play an important role in service delivery and rural development.

But she said that former ANC leader Oliver Tambo had correctly warned in the 1980s that the ANC needed to “stop hiding behind custom and tradition to justify patriarchal practice and to realise that custom must and can be compatible with the freedom and rights of women and men”.

She said black women and girls in the former homelands and in the informal settlements of South Africa were “economically, politically and socially the most powerless”, due largely to the social engineering of apartheid.

“This damage continues long after apartheid’s official dismantling.”

In 2010 women continued to experience high levels of poverty, violence and HIV/Aids because of gender inequality. She said woman were killed, raped and assaulted for being lesbian and not conforming to “culture”. In the name of culture, virginity testing was promoted as the way to curb HIV and girls as young as 10 were subjected to what was described as a “cultural practice of ukuthwala”, where they were effectively sold in marriage to men “old enough to be their grandfathers”. Many of them contracted HIV.

“The statutory rape, teenage pregnancy and HIV of the sugar daddy has melded with tradition in ways that spell death for young girls.” - By ADRIENNE CARLISLE