CHIKUTU,
Malawi Mapendo Simbeye's problems began early last year when
the barren hills along Malawi's northern border with Tanzania
rejected his attempts to grow even cassava, the hardiest crop of
all.
So to feed his wife and five children, he said,
he went to his neighbor, Anderson Kalabo, and asked for a loan.
Kalabo gave him 2,000 kwacha - about $16. The family was fed.
But that created another problem: How could
Simbeye, a penniless farmer, repay Kalabo?
The answer would shock most outsiders, but in
sub-Saharan Africa's rural patriarchies, it is custom. Simbeye sent
his 11-year-old daughter, Mwaka, to Kalabo's hut. There she became a
servant to his first wife - and, she said, Kalabo's new bed partner.
Now 12, Mwaka said her parents never told her she
was meant to be the second wife of a man roughly three decades her
senior. "They said I had to chase birds from the rice garden," she
said, studying the ground outside her mud-brick house. "I didn't
know anything about marriage."
Mwaka ran away, and her parents took her back
after six months. But a week's journey through Malawi's dry and
mountainous north suggests her escape is the exception. In remote
lands like this - where boys are valued far more than girls, older
men prize young wives, fathers covet dowries and mothers are
powerless to intervene - many African girls like Mwaka must leap
straight from childhood to marriage at a word from their fathers,
sometimes years before they reach puberty.
The consequences are staggering: schooling cut
short; early pregnancies and hazardous births; adulthood often
condemned to subservience; and in recent years exposure to HIV.
Increasingly educators, health officials and
legislators discourage or even forbid these marriages. In Ethiopia,
for example, where studies show that in one-third of the states
girls marry under the age of 15, one state took action in April.
Officials said they had annulled the marriages of 56 girls ages 12
to 15 as underage and filed charges against parents of half the
girls for forcing them into the unions.
Yet child marriages remain entrenched in rural
pockets throughout sub-Saharan Africa, steeped in centuries of
belief that girls occupy society's lower rungs from Ghana to Zambia,
according to Unicef.
Studies show that the average age of marriage in
Malawi remains among the world's lowest, and the percentage of
adolescent mothers the world's highest.
"There is a lot of talk, but the value of the
girl child is still low," said Seodi White, Malawi's coordinator for
the Women in Law in Southern Africa Research Trust. "Society still
clings to the education of the boy, and sees the girl as a trading
tool. In the north, girls as early as 10 are being traded off for
the family to gain. After that, the women become owned and powerless
in their husbands' villages."
Many choose misery over divorce because custom
decrees that children in patriarchal tribes belong to the father.
Uness Nyambi said she was betrothed as a child so her parents could
finance her brother's choice of a bride. Now about 17, she has two
children and a husband who guesses he is 70. "Just because of these
two children, I cannot leave him," she said.
Beatrice Kitamula, 19, was forced to marry her
wealthy neighbor, now 63, five years ago because her father owed
another man a cow. "I was the sacrifice," she said.
Malawi government officials say they try hard to
protect these girls. Legislation before Parliament would raise the
minimum age for marriage to 18, the worldwide norm. Marriages of
Malawian girls from 15 to 18 are now legal with the parents'
consent.
Women's rights advocates say they welcome the
proposal, even though its effect would be limited because many
marriages here, like much of the sub-Saharan region, take place
under traditional customs, not civil law.
The government trained about 230 volunteers last
year in ways to protect children, especially girls. Volunteers for
Malawi's Human Rights Commission, Roman Catholic Church workers and
police victim-protection units also try to intervene.
In Iponga, for example, Mbohesha Mbisa averted a
forced marriage to her uncle at age 13 last year by walking to the
local police station, where officers persuaded her father to drop
his plans.
Still, Malawi officials say this region's growing
poverty, worsened by AIDS and a recent crop-killing drought, has put
even more young girls at risk of forced marriage.
"This practice has been there for a long time,
but it is getting worse now because there is desperation," said
Penston Kilembe, Malawi's director of social welfare services. "It
is particularly prevalent in communities that have been hard hit by
famine. Households that can no longer fend for themselves opt to
sell off their children to wealthier households."
Rights advocates want to abolish dowry-giving, or
lobolo, saying it creates a financial incentive for parents to marry
off their daughters. But even they describe the tradition as
politically untouchable. In much of northern Malawi, lobolo
negotiations are typically all-male discussions of down payments,
installments, settlements and the occasional refund for a wife who
runs off.
Mwaka Simbeye has her fellow villagers in Chikutu
to thank for her return to her parents' home after her sojourn in
her neighbor's hut.
Her father, Mapendo Simbeye, who repaid his $16
with Mwaka, said he took her back after hearing that the local
police could arrest him.
He said he underestimated her, adding, "My
daughter is worth more than 2,000 kwacha."
"I did it out of ignorance," he said. "I had five
kids, no money and no food. Then Kalabo wanted the money back so I
thought of selling the daughter. I didn't know I was abusing her."
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