The Continued Struggle of Customary Law Wives for Recognition of Their Inheritance Rights in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Twenty years after the landmark Constitutional Court’s judgment in Bhe and Others v Khayelitsha Magistrate and Others , which declared the exclusion of women from inheritance under customary law unconstitutional, women married under customary law in South Africa continue to face systemic discrimination. Drawing on the experiences of attorneys at the Women’s Legal Centre, this paper explores how patriarchal norms persist in shaping living customary law, particularly in the context of inheritance. Despite legislative reforms such as the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act 120 of 1998, women often encounter legal and bureaucratic barriers when asserting their inheritance rights following the death of a spouse. The registration requirements under the Act have placed a disproportionate burden on women, especially in proving the existence of a valid marriage. This paper critically examines how the codification of living customary law has contributed to ongoing gendered discrimination, and how jurisprudence and policy frameworks have failed to fully realise the constitutional promise of equality and dignity. It argues for legislative reform and an intersectional feminist approach to ensure substantive equality for women in customary marriages and to dismantle the legacy of male primogeniture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".