“Revenge Wives”: The Girls in Mozambique Paying the Price of a Forgotten War

This story is published in collaboration with Minority Africa.

In rural parts of central Mozambique, the ghosts of a 15-year civil war have not yet vanished.

At 14, Beau Pinto’s father pulled her out of school in Chikwidzire, a remote district 100km from Manica, and forced her to become the fourth wife of a much older man. But the marriage was not for love — it was a kind of spiritual score-settling meant to appease the restless spirit of a young man her uncle had killed during the war decades earlier.

Among the Ndau ethnic group, the historically impoverished majority in Chikwidzire, so-called “appeasement marriages” are often still demanded of girls as compensation for wartime killings. The belief is that if a man is murdered, his spirit will return to torment the killer’s family with sickness, death, madness, or mysterious accidents. If the victim was unmarried, the spirit is said to require a “spiritual wife” from the offender’s family. These practices are not unique to the Ndau: variations exist across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Malawi, reflecting the persistence of deep-rooted spiritual traditions. In Mozambique, such rituals were entangled with the country’s brutal 1977 - 1992 civil war, when the chaos of conflict often merged with personal vendettas and ritual obligations.

“They [women and girls] pay a price for a crime they don’t know; for a war they hardly remember,” said Test Matsatswa, a Baptist priest and longtime missionary in the region. 

In 2020, Pinto gave birth to a daughter at the age of 15 and developed an obstetric fistula, leading to chronic pain and health complications to this day. Pinto said that in Chikwidzire, she knew of at least eight other girls who had become appeasement brides.

“Every incident — whether it’s tuberculosis in the family, a house fire, or a near-miss car accident — is seen as an ominous sign from vengeful spirits of the deceased,” said Panoda Garwa, 55. She and her daughter fled their village and started a new life in Beira, a coastal city, after her husband tried to force her to give up their then-13-year-old girl as an appeasement wife. The marriage was meant to pacify the spirit of a man her husband’s uncle had killed at the height of the civil war in 1989.

Forced marriage to appease vengeful spirits is a contributing factor to girls in rural Mozambique becoming less likely to finish school, explained Miguel Mausse, director of Social Action for Mozambique's Ministry of Women. 

Mausse said the prevalence of appeasement wives is difficult to survey because the practice largely occurs in remote districts. In Manica province local law enforcement recorded 15 cases over the last year, mainly reported by moms whose daughters had been pressured into the arrangements, or young women who managed to escape their own appeasement marriages.

“If the tribal chief and herbalist rule that your family must offer up a daughter as appeasement, disobedience can result in fines and banishment from one’s family home,” said Garwa.

Mozambique remains one of Africa’s least literate nations, with more than half of rural residents unable to read or write. That lack of education, says Sheila De Roso, a care worker at the Maputi-based women’s shelter Hanhane, leaves communities more vulnerable to entrenched customs like so-called “spiritual revenge wives.”

“When I worked in Beira, every year we would take in half a dozen mothers fleeing rural Manica,” she recalled, noting that many were desperate to save their daughters from being pledged as “revenge wives.” Some of those girls were just 12 years old.

Despite its prevalence, the issue has drawn little scholarly or political attention inside Mozambique. The country is vast but sparsely populated, and many of the districts where these marriages occur are so remote that the state’s presence is almost nonexistent. Media rarely reach these areas, too; in many villages, there isn’t even a local radio station, allowing crimes and violations to go on silently, unlike in the cities, De Roso explained.

Across the border in Zimbabwe, however, the story is different. With far higher literacy rates, the country has criminalized “revenge wife” arrangements, and police regularly arrest and prosecute offenders. “Having an education helps,” said Matsatswa, the Baptist cleric. It allows parents, children, and police to see these marriages for what they are — “dodgy customs that strip girls of their dignity.” 

But while Zimbabwe’s smaller size and stronger institutions have made crackdowns possible, activists there have yet to turn their efforts into a blueprint for Mozambique.

Women’s rescue shelters in Mozambique are scarce, and the few that exist survive on small donations from well-wishers. With recent cuts to international aid, their future looks precarious. “Networks of shelters that rescue and rehabilitate women like Pinto ‘could actually vanish,’” warned De Roso. The broader impact of U.S. funding cuts is already being felt: UNHCR data shows that shrinking funding forced the closure of four out of 15 safe spaces for women in Mozambique between 2024 and 2025. Meanwhile, 2,500 humanitarian jobs were cut, and among 300,000 internally displaced women and girls in northern Mozambique needing help, only 40,000 are being reached. 

Rather than relying on money to rescue women who are victims of appeasement marriages, it is better to be proactive and make “the law bite,” said Garwa. ‘Girls must never be pledged in the first place. Make a deterrent – arresting and prosecuting male family members, tribal chiefs, or herbalists who enable the practice.  

Mozambican police say the law is clear. Aquilasse Manda, the deputy Commander-General of the national police, told reporters: “No mercy will be shown to parents, relatives, or tribal heads who enable this vile practice. In 2024 alone, 20 parents and relatives were arrested across Mozambique for pledging their underage daughters.”

But activists warn enforcement remains weak. “This is likely a tiny fraction of the real problem out there,” said De Roso. “The police are the main drawback in the fight against this practice. They don’t actively go out and sensitise communities on the need to end this practice. They wait for abused women to come to the police station and report their ordeal. This transfers the burden of exposure to the victim who has already been traumatized.”

De Roso, who has counseled nearly 15 girls who escaped such marriages, said their stories reveal the same patterns: police stations often lack dedicated victim support units, officers are unsure whether such cases fall under criminal law, and pro-bono legal aid is almost nonexistent. “I was startled when one of the girls said that upon reporting her case to a local police station, the officer at the desk asked her to ‘be a good wife and return to your marital home and resolve issues.’”

For her, the roots of the practice run deep. “‘Revenge wives’ beliefs are simply manifestations of untreated war trauma. Sadly, literally, young women pay a heavy price.”