WUNRN
MALI - WOMEN'S RIGHTS SET BACK BY
NEW FAMILY CODE LAW
Opposition by conservatives to legislation dashes
equality hopes in Mali's strongly patriarchal society
Village voice … Binta Samake: ‘We are different from men; we don’t have the power of decision’. Photograph: Andrew Esiebo/Panos
By Soumaila T Diarra - 1 May 2012
Farima
Samake, a widow living in the
"In all the villages of this
region, girls get married at 15 or 16, even if they go to school," she
says. "Their parents must ask the husband to let their daughter attend
school once she is married."
Not having
finished school, Farima's daughter, Wassa Diarra, cannot read or write. She's
not alone – 69% of women aged 15 to 24 are illiterate, compared with 53% of
men, according to Unicef.
"Wassa has eight
children," Farima explains. "The only way for her to make money is
going to fetch firewood in the bush for sale to people coming from
In this
strongly patriarchal society, where many women need to ask permission from
their husbands just to leave the house, women's groups have been pushing for
change for the last 10 years. The hopes of women activists were pinned to a new
Family Code
to strengthen the legal rights of women. Its provisions included raising the
minimum legal age of marriage for girls, improving women's inheritance and
property rights and removing the clause demanding a wife's obedience to her
husband. The law was adopted by the National Assembly in August 2009 but was withdrawn following
uproar from conservative Muslim groups.
Provocative
headlines in newspapers warned that women would no longer have to obey their
husbands and thousands took to the streets in protest. A task group formed by
According to Safiatou Doumbia, a
member of the Malian Association for Care and Assistance to Women and Children,
the new law has set women back. "The new law brings women's rights back to
more than 50 years ago because some rights women had in the former law have
been banned. Before, a woman would automatically keep her children if her
husband died. This is not the case with the new law, which allows a family
counsel to decide who should keep the children."
Under the new Family Code, as in
the original 1962 law, a woman must obey her husband, men are considered the
head of the family and the legal age for marriage is 16 for girls, and 18 for
boys.
In
The acknowledgment of the
religious wedding will "lead to chaos", according to Doumbia.
"Muslim and traditional weddings allow men to marry many wives and divorce
them easily if they want without protecting women's rights," she explains.
Religious ceremonies are now recognised even if there hasn't been a civil
marriage, giving women little protection.
Women's
rights groups say the Family Code needs to harmonise local laws with
international ones. The age at which a girl can marry is a case in point.
"A girl is still a child at 16, according to the international convention
on children's rights that our country signed," says Bintou Coulibaly,
Secretary for Education at the Association for Women's Progress and Development
(APDF,
in French), sitting at her computer in her office in
Farima Samake, and the other
women in Gwelekoro village, have not heard about the new law, or its
controversial reception, but they know little has changed in their lifetime.
"We are different from men; we don't have the power of decision and things
have been like that since God made this world," says Binta Samake, another
villager.
Though these women know little
about women's rights, they know they don't want to depend entirely on their
husbands. "Now I don't have to ask my husband for permission to fetch the
firewood I sell to earn money," says the widowed Binta. "[When he was
alive] I could not travel without his authorisation or go out somewhere else in
the village when he was absent."
Many women of the