“When the Teacher Closed the Door: The Zimbabwe Scandal That Forced Us to Finally Say Boys Can Be Raped Too”

It starts with a grainy video that no one should ever have to see, a sixteen-year-old boy from Glen View, Harare, sitting on the edge of a bed, eyes wide, voice trembling as he explains to the camera how his math teacher turned an after-school lesson into something that has left an entire country arguing about power, consent, and the things we still refuse to call rape when the victim is a boy. Her name is Zvikomborero Maria Makedenge, thirty-three, polished, respected, the kind of teacher parents brag about. She has been teaching for more than a decade, recently splitting her time between Zimbabwe and the United States. To the outside world she was ambition in human form. To the boy everyone now calls “Baltazar the Second” or, cruelly, “Bulldozer,” she was the person who noticed he was failing mathematics and offered private help. He accepted because failing felt worse than fear. The help came with conditions he says he never agreed to. The phone was already recording when it happened; whether he set it up as proof or she did as a trophy is one of the many details the courts will have to untangle. What the country has seen is enough: a minor, cornered by the very authority figure meant to protect him, and a woman who allegedly decided that gratitude could be extracted in the currency of a child’s body. By the time the clip hit WhatsApp groups in late November 2025, the misinformation engines were already roaring. Captions screamed “South African teacher arrested,” “Congolese madam caught red-handed,” anything to make the horror feel safely foreign. It wasn’t. It was Harare, Glen View 3, a modest house with lace curtains and a Form Four boy who just wanted to pass his O-Levels. Zvikomborero appeared in court on the 28th of November looking smaller than her reputation. The magistrate granted her bail—US$100, an amount that felt like an insult to many—and the gallery erupted. Outside, activists waved placards that read BOYS ARE CHILDREN TOO. Inside, her lawyer spoke of “context” and “premature judgment.” On the streets, teenagers turned the boy’s stunned face into memes, because that is what teenagers do when the world suddenly feels too adult and too broken. Across the continent the conversation fractured the way it always does. Some insisted a sixteen-year-old boy cannot be raped by a woman twice his age, as if anatomy cancels out power. Others shared their own stories in hushed late-night threads: the coach who offered extra training, the aunt’s friend who said it was a secret game, the teacher who marked exams with a different kind of currency. The silence around male victims, thick for decades, cracked open just enough for the light to sting. In Harare’s internet cafés and Johannesburg’s shebeens, in Accra’s trotros and Lagos danfos, people asked the same uncomfortable question: why do we still teach boys that any sexual attention is a victory, even when it leaves them shaking on a stranger’s bed? Dr Efio-Ita Nyok, the Nigerian gender scholar who has spent years documenting the invisible wounds of boys, put it plainly: “We have spent so long telling them to ‘be men’ that we forgot to tell them they are allowed to be children.” Childline Zimbabwe’s phones have not stopped ringing. Counselors say the callers are mostly boys, voices cracking, asking if what happened to them years ago “counts.” The Ministry of Education has promised an investigation, the same promise made after every scandal, the same promise that usually dissolves into committee meetings and budget shortages. For now, Zvikomborero is out on bail, reportedly preparing to return to the United States if the courts allow it. The boy, whose real name almost no one uses anymore, has disappeared from school. His family asked only that the memes stop, that the video stop circulating, that their child be allowed to become something other than a cautionary tale with a nickname. In the end, the story is not really about a leaked video or a bail amount or even about who started recording first. It is about a classroom door that closed behind a teenager who trusted the wrong adult, and about a society still learning how to say, without hesitation or qualification, that what happened behind that door was wrong. Full stop. No debate required.