NO S33X SINCE 2022, MY PHD CANNOT SLEEP WITH AN UNEDUCATED WOMAN — THE ALLEGED SUICIDE LETTER OF MAI ASHY LEAVES ZIMBABWE IN TEARS
Tsamba yakasiya yanyorwa neMai Ashy vasati vazvipfuudza. Note: This letter has NOT yet been confirmed as authentic and neither family has confirmed it. I am publishing its alleged contents as shared on social media for public reflection.
Zimbabwe is crying again.
The late Lyliosa Chirara, known as Mai Ashy, a nurse by profession, a healer by calling, who allegedly axed her husband Commissioner Dr. Martin Muduva to death in Dzivarasekwa Extension before taking her own life, allegedly left behind a letter written with tears streaming down her cheeks.
In that letter, she alleges her bedroom had become a desert since 2022.
“From 2022 to 2025 he never entered our bedroom and he never had sex with me because he now had a PHD so his PHD did not want him to have sex with a woman who was not educated.”
A PhD that cannot touch its own wife. A tower of certificates that became a wall between husband and wife. Let that sink.
She alleges that behind the degrees and the suits, she was suffering in silence while her husband told people he loved her. That he told her his money was his money and as a wife she had no right to know his salary. That when she tried to hustle to feed her dignity — 500 chickens for eggs — he said “handidi huku pamba” and she was forced to sell them.
She alleges he spent a whole year staying with his girlfriend and came back to tell her he had finally found a proper wife who fits his status, a wife who knows IT, a wife he can take to public gatherings. She says she only learnt of the secret lobola for second wife Patience Mangwiro when she saw the Roora Day status on WhatsApp.
“I have done this because of being tormented and the suffering I have endured for a long time,” she allegedly wrote. “Forgive me my relatives I have taken the wrong decision but I have done it because of the suffering that I have endured. Leave me to rest.”
To her children she allegedly wrote, “My kids, they don’t know anything, yes, I wanted to see them grow but I would still have died because of stress, sorry, I have failed.”
To the Muduva family she allegedly said, “I, the fool, the dog, the waste, has gone. Now you can be happy… go and take Patience Mangwiro, the one you went to marry secretly. She is the right daughter-in-law who is educated.”
And then the most painful Shona line that has broken many women: “Murume avekundisema, kundisvipira mate nhasi nekuti ave nemari, akanganwa kwatakabva.” My husband now despises me, spits on me because he has money, he has forgotten where we came from.
Yet I must also put on record what was said at his burial in Buhera. His friend said his bedroom, where he was axed to death on his bed, looked like an abattoir. That this was inhuman. That Commissioner Muduva suffered quietly, that Lyliosa was counselled with her sisters, initially accepted the second marriage, that Misheck Muduva accompanied him to pay lobola, that US$2,000 was allegedly paid as a fine for defiling the matrimonial bed, and that Patience Mangwiro herself attended the burial.
That is why I say today without fear: A wife was never supposed to act the way she acted. An axe is never a language of love. Violence is never justice.
But this alleged letter, if true, forces us to ask — was marrying another wife good advice for a man who was already failing to give attention to one wife and children? If one garden had not been watered since 2022, why plant a second? If a woman is already crying that she has been intellectually shamed, sexually starved, financially excluded, does announcing a status wife heal her or finish her?
Degrees without tenderness build empty homes. Money without transparency builds resentment. Polygamy without honest conversation builds graves.
I do not justify what happened. I mourn it. Two graves in one week. Three children from Hwedza to Buhera with no mother and no father. May we learn before we bury again.
Rest in peace, Dr. Martin Muduva. Rest in peace, Lyliosa Chirara.
#Zimbabwe #GBV #RIP