A FOURTY-year-old woman of Lusaka’s Arakan Barracks shocked the fully packed Boma Local Court when she claimed that her mother-in-law stopped her husband from making love to her.
Sarah Musole told the court that her mother in-law did not like her and had been forcing her husband Lawrence Sampaya, 42, to chase her away from the matrimonial home.
This is in a case where Sampaya, sued Musole for divorce after she allegedly told him that she was no longer interested in him after 16 years in marriage.
Musole told the court that she loved her husband and was sure that he also loved her but claimed that Sampaya’s mother was interfering in their marriage.
“I love my husband and I am sure he loves me, but when his mother visits, she tells him to beat me which he does and throws me out of the house,” he said.
“Last week my husband moved out of the bedroom after he sued for divorce, and when I asked him why he was leaving the bedroom, he told me his mother advised him to do so in order to succeed in divorcing me,” she said.
She said her husband had been embarrassing her, at times even insulting and throwing her underwear in presence of the children.
But Sampaya said he could no longer live with his wife because she never wanted his relatives, claiming all of them had abandoned him apart from his mother.
Sampaya said his wife had even chased his younger brother out of their house and was now trying to evict his son.
He said Musole was violent and had assaulted him on a number of times whenever he tried to dialogue with her.
“She is very violent, when we were in Kabwe, she assaulted me twice and three times here in Lusaka, she recently hit me with a pan on my mouth,” he said.
Sampaya denied that his mother had stopped him from sleeping with his wife but that Musole had been refusing to sleep with him.
Magistrate Prudence Bwalya sitting with Mable Mwaba and Grace Kanta granted the couple divorce and asked Sampaya to pay K10,000 to Musole as compensation.