The University of Zimbabwe Elected Its First Female Student Leader

Since the University of Zimbabwe was founded in 1952, no woman had ever been elected to the position of student representative council president. The position is a serious one: Students elected to lead live under the watch of secret police and are sometimes kept from attending graduation for their safety. Some student leaders have been assaulted, and others were forced into exile in other countries. In a deeply patriarchal society like Zimbabwe, women have been dissuaded from running for election.

That changed in 2019, when 22-year-old Abiona Mataranyika was elected to the position. But despite the historic nature of her election, Mataranyika doesn’t want to be defined by her gender. “I’m not the female student representative council president. I’m the student representative council president,” she told the FBomb.

Yet Mataranyika is still interested in addressing the issues female students face at Zimbabwe’s biggest university, mainly “expensive and limited accommodation for female students,” she told the FBomb. Inadequate accommodations for female students in Zimbabwe is about far more than comfort, but can put them in dangerous situations, like moving in with male suitors “just to afford a room,” she said — a situation that can end in violence and abuse.

Mataranyika is also notably leading at a fractious time in Zimbabwe’s politics and economy in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. She organizes buses to ferry Zimbabwe’s students home, which the government cannot afford to do, and has confronted the hatred and prejudice that people with albinism in Zimbabwe face.

Mataranyika does not shy away from stating her belief that Zimbabwe’s government — which has bungled the economy so that inflation has reached over 1000%, according to the Cato Institute — needs to change. “I think it’s high time the hashtag that #ZimbabweGovernmentMustGO is taken to the streets of Zimbabwe not Twitter,” she states.

Mataranyika has a personal reason to be distrustful of the government, too, given their treatment of other female leaders. In May, three activists, including Zimbabwe’s youngest female MP, claimed they were abducted by the police, beaten, and sexually assaulted. They were later taken to a hospital after being found in a marketplace — only to be arrested in June for allegedly lying about this torture.

But fear won’t stop Mataranyika, who credits her culture for her strength. “In the tribe I hail from, women are allowed to govern alongside the king,” she told the FBomb. “We don’t fear question[ing] patriarchal decisions. We should fight the patriarchal system that says a woman’s place is in the kitchen.”