guest column:Miriam Tose Majome ARE Zimbabwean men falling into legal obscurity or perhaps they already have? There was a time when men were indispensible in the legal lives of women, but many things have changed and continue to. This is confusing to a lot of men who feel and complain that women are becoming too powerful and eating into ‘their’ space. They complain that their rights as men are being taken away unfairly because women are getting too many legal concessions and rights — far more than they should, it is believed. These gripes are the expressed grief and powerlessness of losing grip on long held cultural and social privileges which have traditionally given men power over women. It must be stated that giving rights to women so that they have power to decide and chart their own lives is not the same thing as taking men’s rights away. Taking privileges away or indeed according the same privileges to women is not the same thing as taking men’s rights away. The conversation obviously goes deeper than Zimbabwe’s own legal development. It began with the women’s suffrage movement in the Victorian era when women began fighting for political rights and for equal access or even just some access to things they were deprived of like employment, remuneration, birth control and rights to determine choices for themselves and their own bodies. So much has been fought for in Zimbabwe over the years culminating in Sections 17, 56 and 80 of the 2013 Constitution which buttress and cement the equal status of women in all spheres of life. All forms of discrimination against women are now illegal and criminal offences under Zimbabwe law. It is the law that at least half of all public sector posts have to be occupied by women. Only that the political will is lacking, so there is still more fighting ahead to achieve this objective. When this parity is finally achieved, men will feel aggrieved yet all that will have happened is that women will have taken up their rightful share formerly occupied by men. It is very easy to forget and take basic women’ rights for granted yet there was a time women did not have them. The rights women enjoy now were not given on a silver platter, but thanks to the many forgotten pioneer and present Zimbabwean women’s rights activists ordinary women now enjoy them to the point of taking them for granted. The civil rights movement in America in the 60’s to a smaller extent, and to a greater extent the Pan African nationalist movements on the continent greatly influenced the status and future of black Zimbabweans, the women not excluded. Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and black majority rule were preceded by a protracted guerrilla war in which black women had fought and struggled alongside men in the same if not worse horrendous conditions in the trenches of Mozambique and Tanzania and the rough backwoods of Zimbabwe. At independence, it was ridiculous and just not feasible to return women to the pre-independence past where they were regarded as children and relegated to domesticity and supportive menia