Diaspora a death trap for cheating partners

As the British Home office plans to deport another plane-load to Zimbabwe again, it has become imperative to find out why many women and some men lost their lives to their spouses over the issue of infidelity.

At law, the killing of a wife by the husband is called Uxoricide (from Latin uxor meaning "wife" and -cide, from caedere meaning "to cut, to kill").

 It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own girlfriend. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. The killing of a husband is called mariticide. Mariticide (from Latin maritus "husband" + -cide, from caedere "to cut, to kill") literally means the killing of one's husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out.

In 2021 a British man set his family  on fire. He bundled his wife and his three children into a car and set them alight. The dead were reported to be Hannah Clarke and her three children, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey. Their lives were ended in a very painful and cruel way.

To make things worse they died at the hands of their father. A man who was supposed to protect them became their killer.

This was a shocking and horrifying act by a father and a husband.  While the country was baffled by such heartless murder many spouses are at each other's throat and a spouse is killed every week.

Sadly, our people from Zimbabwe do not tolerate competition or intimacy sharing. So many couples are murdered over infidelity.

There is another cruel killing of families which is called Familicides — family murders in which a perpetrator murders their partner and children this surprisingly is much rarer, in indigenous Europeans  but  very common with or  among Zimbabweans outside our mother land.

In this context, it is important familicide be understood as a form of gender-based violence, whether in the presence or absence of a history of physical violence.

Marriage has become a dangerous institution for most Zimbabweans here in the UK. Murder cases among couples are alarming because in the last six years in the UK alone, over 50 Zimbabwean women were allegedly ruthlessly murdered by their husbands or boyfriends.

About 40 percent of all female murder victims (and six percent of male murder victims) die at the hands of a former or present spouse or lover. This statistic has remained constant for the past eight years which is a very scaring situation. It is deeply depressing and flabbergasting.

The dialogue surrounding couples in which a homicide takes place often focuses on a history of domestic violence within the relationship, rather than the reasons the offender killed their partner. The importance of domestic violence notwithstanding, why do people sometimes kill the ones they love?

Taurai Mbano of Men Protect a charity organisation in the UK said: "To call an act of violence gender-based is not merely to suggest it is male violence against women, although it often is. It is violence that is driven in a central way by the social and structural dimensions of gender.

"This means gender plays an important role in who perpetrates the violence, who is targeted, how and why.

"In the case of familicides, research shows they are almost exclusively committed by men in heterosexual family relationships."

Northamptonshire Police reported that there is a surge in domestic violence among Zimbabweans in the UK. There are over hundred active cases ranging from common assault to murder perpetrated by family members or husbands.  

There is a new trend that even husbands can be victims as women have graduated from the satanic college.  Whereas almost all cases of murders committed by males against their female partners occurred after the woman ended the relationship or announced her intention to do so, most of the murders committed by females against their male partners were reactions to severe male domestic violence.

For example, a Zimbabwean woman in Luton, England, "cooked" her husband in boiling cooking oil, burning his genitals and leaving him for dead.

The woman was reacting to sexual and personal abuse. In Corby, a town a few miles from Leicester, a woman drove 30 miles to burn her boyfriend who had jilted her.

Unfortunately, she killed three innocent children and their mother who had nothing to do with the affair.

Sadly, domestic violence in the UK sometimes ends in murder.

According to the Metropolitan police, the number of Zimbabwean men accused of murdering their wives has risen.

These crimes of passion are disturbing. Recently, a woman was allegedly stabbed in a car park in Birmingham by her husband. Identified as Gillian Zvomuya, the woman was found stabbed to death in a Lidl Supermarket car park.

Police officers who rushed to the scene said Gillian was allegedly attacked with a bladed weapon. In a separate incident, a woman was also allegedly stabbed several times in the comfort of her house in London by her ex-boyfriend.

Another Zimbabwean man who will be deported this month scalded his wife completely re-arranging her face living her permanently defaced. The reason was that she was alleged to be using her face to attract men to her.  In a fit of rage and uncontrolled jealous the poor lady was scalded with hot water and the whole face was gone.

Nearly all alleged male murderers claim they committed the crime "out of love".

But then, there is a great difference between love and jealousy.

Due to the general lifestyle in the UK, most men are so jealous and interpret any misdemeanour by the wife to be infidelity.

The painful situation is, even mature couples have joined in the race to murder spouses. What then has gone wrong with our Diaspora society?

There are numerous examples of intimate partner homicide where there is no evidence of previous domestic violence. So, why might a murder occur in an otherwise seemingly non-violent relationship?

The Zimbabwean man who resort to murdering their partners do it out of jealousy. Jealousy homicides involve an offender thinking they are at risk of losing their partner to someone else. Either the offender's lover or their rival may be the target in these homicides.

Jealousy accounted for the largest number of the intimate partner homicides in the UK. These jealousy cases all include husbands who kill their wives. In court documents for these cases, jealous rage or morbid jealousy were often blamed for spurring the murders. Mr Welcome Bhebhe a lawyer in the UK said: "While there was prior abuse in some of these cases, not all were characterised by domestic violence. In some cases, the perpetrator lashed out with lethal violence, despite being previously non-violent."

Most of the victims are stabbed or beaten to death. These types of attacks speak to the frenzied and emotional nature of jealousy motives, even for those who usually do not commit domestic violence.

There is no Zimbabwean family in UK which does not know  a family in domestic violence. And there are always reasons for such cowardly behaviour by our people in the "land of the queen".

The murders stem from masculine possessiveness; it is the embodiment of the murderer's psyche triggered by sexual jealousy and anger.

Murder is the climax of a history of violence that preceded it. Although killing for love is never justified, spouse-murder is undoubtedly the most extreme manifestation of male violence. Because of the shock of the changes in finances, culture and behaviour, a sense of insecurity manifests through killing of the spouse.

The other most-common motive for the intimate partner homicides by Zimbabweans in the UK is gain.

In these cases, the primary reason for the homicide is to acquire some personal and tangible benefit.

These victims are killed because they had something the offender wanted, such as money or property.

In contrast to the jealousy homicides, gain homicides are more often committed or solicited by females. Those that involved females (five out of seven cases) were committed for financial gain either because the woman wanted an insurance pay out and assets, or because they thought they were going to be cut out of wills following a divorce.

Importantly in these cases, there was no prior abuse from the women's husbands.

For some women, the feeling of entitlement and the need to financially secure themselves and their family may develop into a heightened risk for their male partners during divorce. Wife murderers in the UK are not only ‘druggies' or those who financially depend on their wives; some of them are pastors and professionals and their actions leave one wondering ‘what spirit has visited us'.

The murder is not an unintended result of violence that went too far — as most of these murders are well-planned.

Furthermore, spouse-murder cannot be understood in terms of loss of control or local insanity.

The murders are mostly caused by the man's perception that the woman is his whole world to the extent he feels any separation from her entails a loss of his own identity; he feels there is no other reason to live without this woman.

When they (men) are thrown out or feel they will be thrown out, they see the end of their world and make the fatal decision to kill in order to avoid humiliation.

The man's prevailing beliefs about love appears to justify the sacrifice of his wife on the one hand and of persistence on the other. homicides motivated by love are committed so the offender can remove a person they love from a situation they believe to be "worse than death". This can manifest in two ways.

Altruistic homicides may involve an offender perceiving the situation to be so bad that they would rather see the victim die than be alive to experience it. In this case, the philosophy behind love provides the legitimacy for terrible crimes.

When all the above conditions pertain, the risk of spouse-murder significantly increases.

The specific event that ignites the explosive barrel often revolves around the woman threatening to, or actually separating from her partner.

Understanding the man's state of mind could prevent future murders hence, we should examine the real state of mind that leads these men to kill their partners, without worrying about whether our findings are politically correct.

The fact that Zimbabweans in the Diaspora have no cultural guidance has contributed to these murders. Zimbabwean home-grown churches are not making the situation any better.

The church spends time fundraising, buying the pastor clothes, cars and suits.

The closeness of the pastors to these women has made husbands jealous, inevitably causing some of these murders.

These are some of the issues pertaining crimes of passion by Zimbos in the UK. And whichever way we look at it, life in the UK has made husbands and wives strangers.

Vazet2000@yahoo.co.uk