When Domestic Violence Gets a Gender Pass
Some cheered when a wife killed her husband. No one cheered when a husband killed his wife and daughters.
By: Nyasha Simon Dick
Two women stood in a bedroom in Dzivarasekwa Extension and in a ยฃ1.3 million mansion in Bedfordshire, and neither one is alive to tell us what happened next. Between them, three children lost a mother. One of them, a teenage girl named Faith, walked into her parents’ room and found her father lying in blood, an axe nearby. Days later, in England, two other girls, aged five and fifteen, were found dead beside their mother, allegedly at the hands of the man who was supposed to protect all three of them.
Two households. Two sets of grief. And a vocal slice of women online showed up to receive one death as tragedy and the other as a verdict fulfilled.
What happened in Dzivarasekwa
Dr Martin Muduva was a Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission commissioner, an engineer, and a Midlands State University lecturer with degrees stacked across data science, innovation and governance. In the early hours of September 9, police say his wife, nurse Lyliosa Chirara, struck him with an axe at their home after he posted a “roora day” photograph of himself paying lobola for another woman, Patience Mangwiro, to his WhatsApp status. Muduva died the following morning at Parirenyatwa. Chirara reportedly drank rat poison shortly after the attack and did not survive the night. Police have confirmed the couple had been arguing over the infidelity when the violence erupted, and the case remains under investigation.
It is, by any honest reading, a double tragedy: a marriage that curdled into betrayal, humiliation broadcast on social media, and two deaths that have left three children without either parent. There is no version of this story that ends anywhere but grief.
What some women decided about it
Under a Zimpapers post carrying the story, a cluster of women commenters decided the story needed a verdict, and they delivered one instantly, without a trial, without a magistrate, without the slightest interest in the three orphaned children. “Well done mommy,” read one comment, cheering Chirara on as though she had won something, before sending Muduva to hell for good measure. It was not the only voice in the thread, and it was not the majority voice either. But it was loud, unembarrassed, and repeated often enough to form a pattern rather than a one-off lapse in judgment.
This is not an isolated tone, and it is not new. It surfaces every time a man is killed by a woman he has wronged: a segment of women turn the comment section into a courtroom that has already reached its sentence, cheering the axe because the man deserved it. Infidelity, in this reading, is not a betrayal to be litigated through separation, custody arrangements or, at worst, a magistrate’s court. It becomes a death sentence that any wronged wife is entitled to carry out herself, with a sympathetic crowd as her jury.
The Tshuma standard
Compare that to how the same online public reacted, only weeks earlier, when Ndodana “Mark” Tshuma, a Zimbabwean-British IT executive, allegedly killed his wife Zandile and their daughters, Natalie and Nala, at their home in Bedfordshire before fleeing to Zimbabwe. There was no “well done” on that thread. There was horror.
There was an international manhunt, extensive coverage, a funeral in Bulawayo that drew a grieving nation, and a demand that justice run its full course wherever Tshuma was found.
Nobody suggested Zandile Tshuma had it coming because the marriage had problems. Nobody weighed her death against whatever grievances her husband may have nursed. She was simply a victim, and he was simply a man who had no right to end her life or her children’s.
That is the correct instinct. It should never depend on the sex of the person holding the axe.
GBV does not have a gender exemption
Gender-based violence is not a crime that only men commit, and it does not become less of a crime when a woman commits it against a man she believes has wronged her. Chirara had every legitimate avenue open to her that morning: she could have left, she could have filed for divorce, she could have gone to her family, her church, a lawyer, a counsellor, even the police, given that infidelity while cruel is not itself a criminal offence. What she could not lawfully or morally do is pick up an axe and settle the matter with it. Two people are dead and three children are now orphaned because a moment of pain was answered with a moment of violence, and no infidelity, however publicly staged on a WhatsApp status, changes that arithmetic.
Zimbabwean courts have already settled this question, and not gently. In 2025, Chimani Tsambola was handed a 35-year sentence for beating his estranged wife, Portia Masaiti, to death with an iron bar after she left him over his jealous rages. Rage was not a defence then. Betrayal was not a defence then. There is no reason the same principle bends because the axe was in different hands this time.
What those comment sections reveal
The instinct among some women to cheer Chirara and treat Muduva’s death as deserved, while recoiling in horror at Tshuma, is not really about gender solidarity. It is about revenge dressed up as justice, and it shoulSeptember 9,d worry the very women cheering it far more than it currently does. Applauding one axe murder while condemning another identical act is not a nuanced position on domestic violence. It is a taste for vigilante justice that flatters whichever side it happens to be rooting for that week. That same logic, extended one degree further, is what allows communities to look away from mob justice, from necklacing, from any violence at all provided the crowd has decided the victim deserved it.
The numbers behind the noise
This is not a hypothetical problem confined to one Facebook thread. Zimbabwe’s own police have repeatedly flagged the scale of it.
The Zimbabwe Republic Police has issued public statements expressing concern over the volume of murder cases rooted in domestic disputes, extramarital affairs, and couples’ failure to resolve conflict without violence, alongside a broader national homicide rate that climbed sharply through the early 2020s. ZimStat recorded 326 intentional homicide cases in a single quarter of 2023 alone.
Divorce, separation and infidelity disputes sit at the centre of a meaningful share of that toll, year after year, and the ZRP’s own statements keep pleading with the public not to resolve marital conflict with weapons. Every one of those homicides began, in some Facebook thread somewhere, as a story with two sides and a comment section already certain of the verdict.
What should actually be said
The honest response to the Muduva tragedy is not celebration and it is not exoneration.
It is grief for a family destroyed twice over, first by betrayal and then by violence, and it is a hard, unfashionable reminder that marital conflict, however painful, has functioning off ramps that do not end in a mortuary. Zimbabwe does not have a shortage of ways to leave a marriage. It has a shortage of patience for using them.
Nobody deserves an axe for cheating. Nobody deserves a knife, a rifle or rat poison for it either. Faith Muduva, the daughter who found her father in a pool of blood, does not get her parents back because a comment section decided her mother was a hero.
She and her siblings simply lost both of them, on the same night, over a fight that a divorce lawyer could have settled in a matter of months. That is the whole story, and it deserves mourning, not applause.
If you are in a marriage or relationship that has reached this point of pain, rage or humiliation, that is a sign to seek help, not to reach for a weapon. Marriage counsellors, family therapists, pastors, lawyers and organisations that specialise in domestic conflict exist precisely for moments like this, and reaching out to them is not weakness.
It is the off ramp that keeps a bad night from becoming a mortuary and a courtroom.
