This examination of changes in adolescent fertility emphasizes the changing social context within which adolescent childbearing takes place.

The tradition of Bride Price has been at the heart of marriage for many centuries in numerous cultures across the globe. The Dynamics of Bride Price presents new research data from Zimbabwe and the UK highlighting the transnational dimension of the practice, its diversity in different contexts and across generations, and its influence on the structure of gender relationships and inequalities. The transnational element of its investigation into the institution and traditions of African marriage sets this book apart from existing study and offers its readers a nuanced and complex understanding of the perceptions and experiences of Bride Price across diverse contexts. This original contribution will be of great interest to those studying and teaching courses on Gender and Development, as well as researchers and policymakers of cultural practices.

The authors focus on the timing of marriages of women in rural Zimbabwe. Zimbabwean marriages are associated with bride welath payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's family. Unmarried daughters could therefore be considered assets who, at time of need, can be cashed in. The authors investigate to what extent the timing of a marriage of a daughter is affected by the economic conditions of the household from which she originates. They distinguish household-specific wealth levels and two types of shocks--correlated (weather) shocks and idiosyncratic shocks. The authors estimate a duration model using a unique panel survey of Zimbabwean smallholder farmers. The estimation results support the hypothesis that the timing of marriage is affected by household characteristics. Girls from households that experiences a negative (idiosyncratic) shock in their assets are more likely to marry.

The position and treatment of women in every religion, culture, and society have been subjects of concern for a long time. In every society, women fight for their emancipation from exploitive and oppressive patriarchal structures. The most contentious issues include domestic violence, gender discrimination and inequality in the areas of employment, leadership, and marriage. Domestic violence tops the list and is the worst enemy of any progressive and democratic society. It dehumanizes, disfigures, and demeans its victims and survivors. Shona Women in Zimbabwe--a Purchased People explores the causes of domestic violence--the cultural practice of bridewealth, in particular--and assesses the extent to which it contributes to the proliferation of domestic violence among the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It then explores the Christian traditions, particularly, the Roman Catholic Church, in search of resources that can be used to emancipate Shona women from patriarchal subjugation. Finally, the book offers a pastoral response that is informed by the experiences of the Shona women, their cultural resources, and the Roman Catholic religious tradition.

This book examines the everyday lives of ordinary Zimbabweans in the context of national crises in post-2000 Zimbabwe. Throughout the literature of Zimbabwean studies, a consideration of everyday lives has been limited to informal trading and rarely applied as an analytical framework, despite the importance of understanding crisis-living with reference to the specific character of national crises across the African continent. This edited volume is one of the first in its field to theorise everyday Zimbabwean lives within the context of crisis, with three central themes addressed: urban and rural lives; men, women and HIV; and along and beyond the border. Chapters incorporate topics from child marriage and sexual practices, to climate change and social accountability, encompassing a shift in focus from macro-structures to how farm labourers, students, child-brides and other ordinary people negotiate gender, class and social dynamics within a dominant order. The introductory chapter offers an innovative analytical framing for the empirical chapters which follow, each providing micro-studies based on original qualitative fieldwork by early-career Zimbabwean scholars. Everyday Crisis-Living in Contemporary Zimbabwe will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, anthropology and African Studies more broadly.

The stories in Mukoma's Marriage and Other Stories capture the lives of Zimbabwean men and the women they marry, and the lives of women and the men they fall in love with, each revealing the complexities of cultural and gender expectations against the backdrop of a changing country (war in the 1970s, political uncertainty in the 1980s and economic structural adjustment in the 1990s). Fati sets out to tell Mukoma's story, but ends up also telling his wives' stories. By telling his brother's story, and that of his women, he ends up telling his own story. Fati is a new and interesting protagonist in Zimbabwean literature with a voice at times innocent, yet increasingly incisive, humorous and engaging. These stories are deeply personal yet universal in their treatment of human relationships, ambitions, and misplaced cultural and gender expectations. Whether he is telling the story of his brother's first marriage, or remembers his brother's fights at a Parents Day event at Mhototi School, whether he recalls the night Mukoma took him to see a new baby in the alleyways of Glen View, Fati renders these stories with a measured, composed voice which doesn`t fail to delight with its unusual humour.