Rural Women as Property in Zambia: The AIDS Exit

The inheritance of women, children, land and property in Southern Africa has been a 
common traditional approach to managing the welfare of these, upon the death of the 
male head of household. However with the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, the male 
relatives of the deceased are much less willing to inherit wives and children, due to the 
prospect that these individuals may have AIDS themselves, and the stigma associated 
with the disease. The male relatives do however continue to inherit the property--land, 
livestock, farming implements etc; leaving the wives and children homeless and destitute. 
The partial collapse of this institution of inheritance--refusing to inherit the people but 
continuing to inherit the property--is known as 'property grabbing' and generates very 
large numbers of destitute widows and orphans. However in Zambia, AIDS widows have 
used the current scenario to their advantage--to both escape being inherited, and to retain 
their land and property to become female headed households able to adequately care for 
themselves and their children. This chapter examines this 'escape' from female 
inheritance and the land rights repercussions to this escape.