WUNRN
NIGERIA - CHILD BRIDES - ISSUES OF
LAW, CULTURE, RELIGION
Nigerian child bride activist
Zainab Oussman, 16, in Kwassaw village. At 14, she refused to marry, instead
staying in school. Photograph: Sudarsan Raghavan/Getty
By Monica Mark
in Gusau, Zamfara - 2 September 2013*
*This article
was amended on 6 September to reflect the fact that child marriage is not
illegal as such under Nigerian law but is covered under the Child Rights Act, a
federal bill which competes with state and customary law and has not been
enacted in 13 of Nigeria's 36 states
Ibrahim Kanuma winces as he recalls the moment a 63-year-old man asked him
for his teenage daughter's hand in marriage. The proposal was not unusual in
north-western Nigeria's remote, dust-blown state of
Zamfara, but he considered the suitor too old for his only daughter, Zainab,
13.
"Even if he had been aged up to 50 – OK. But that old, he'll soon die
and leave her lonely," says the civil servant in his peeling office in
Gusau, the state capital.
To protect his
school-aged child from the crushing stigma
of widowhood, Kanuma instead gave his blessing to a union with a
"reasonably aged" colleague – in his 40s.
For Kanuma and
many others in northern
Warning posters about female
circumcision and fistulas. Photograph: Monica Mark
"I wouldn't force my daughter to marry somebody she doesn't like, but
as soon as a girl is of age [starts menstruating], she should be married,"
Kanuma says.
Four of the 10
countries with the highest rates of child marriage are in west Africa's Sahel and
But the practice came under scrutiny in July, when legislators tried to
scrap a constitutional clause that states citizenship can be renounced by
anyone over 18 or a married woman, apparently implying women can be married
under 18.
The obscure
ruling will have little direct impact on the one in four rural northern
Nigerian girls married off before they turn 15, but it reveals prevailing
attitudes in a nation with acute gender disparity.
A successful
vote was later derailed by senator Ahmed Yerima, who in 2010 married a 13-year-old
from Egypt. A former Zamfara governor who introduced
a rigidly enforced version of sharia law in the north in
2000, Yerima argued that a married girl was considered an adult under certain
interpretations of Islamic law.
That prompted
outrage. "Does it then follow that the married girl who is below 18, at
election time, would be permitted to vote?" says Maryam
Uwais, a lawyer and child rights advocate in the northern
capital of
Other grassroot Muslim activists, however, fear the oxygen of negative
publicity trailing the high-profile Yerima, coming most vocally from
non-Muslims, could trigger a backlash among conservative, rural Muslims. This
would threaten painstaking progress towards modernisation over the past decade.
In the week headlines erupted over Yerima, Aisha, nine, was quietly rushed
through the corridors of Zamfara's Faridat Yakubu general hospital. Its
cheerful cornflower blue walls belie stories of the hidden horrors of early
marriage. Aisha does not have the words for what happened to her on her wedding
night. Her husband, she says, did something "painful from behind".
Nearby, Halima was on her third visit in three years. "I like it here.
It is the only time I ever see a television," she says. Just shy of 13,
the newlywed came under pressure to demonstrate her fertility. "I thought
[being in labour] would never end," she adds softly.
In the tradition of the rural Hausa people of the north, women are expected
to give birth at home. Crying out while in labour is seen as a sign of
weakness. But after three days close to death in her village, Halima begged to
be taken to a hospital. By the time her relatives had scraped together enough
to ferry her to the state capital, it was too late. The baby had died.
The prolonged labour left Halima with a fistula, which causes uncontrolled
urination or defecation. "Fistulas can happen to anyone, but are most
common among young women whose pelvises aren't at full capacity to accommodate
the passage of a child," says Dr Mutia, one of two practising fistula
surgeons in Zamfara.
Despite the obvious link, he is reluctant to blame child marriage for
Small victories
There have been
small victories in reversing the ripple effects of early and forced marriage,
defined as forms of modern-day slavery by the International Labour
Organisation.
Fifteen years ago, Zamfara's statistics director, Lubabatu Ammani, carried
out a census to record the number of girls attending secondary school in the
state. The results were shocking: fewer than 4,000 girls were enrolled out of a
population of 3.2 million.
"It was a combination of dropouts, early marriage and religious
misinterpretations," explained Ammani, who proposed creating a female
education board to help remedy the problem. "We asked all the local emirs
and found the main problem was that parents didn't want girls who had hit
puberty to be in co-ed schools."
Female enrolment in Zamfara is at its highest since independence five
decades ago, with 22,000 secondary school students. On most days, Ammani visits
wavering parents to encourage them to keep their daughters in school.
Ammani welcomes the reawakened debate on child marriage but warns of its
limits: "The fact is, a lot of people [here], when they hear the
campaigning is by people from a different tradition or religion, they won't
agree with it."
Others are more blunt. Haliru Andi, who served as Yerima's top aide while
he led the call for sharia, bristles at the idea of interference with his
faith. "How I even use the toilet, how I share my time with my family –
everything is contained in my religion," he says in his Persian-carpeted
living room. "How, then, can I take instructions from anybody who does not
have a deep understanding of Islam?"
Cultural norms further muddy the issue. Posters outside Mutia's office
exhort against another disturbing practice related to child marriage. In one, a
woman is being forcibly restrained on a woven palm-frond mat. An assistant
grabs her legs; another sits on her chest, and yet another reaches between her
legs with a razor blade.
The scene shows a common recourse when a child bride refuses to sleep with
her husband, prompting her parents or in-laws to drag her to the wanzan, or traditional
barber. "This traditional barber, he doesn't understand anatomy. He thinks
there's something obstructing the girl down there, and that's why she fears her
husband. So anything he sees, he will just use his knife to cut it," Mutia
explains. "They think they are helping."
None of the northern-based grassroots Muslim activists the Guardian
interviewed wanted to go on the record about child marriage – reflecting, says
one activist, the difficulties women face "going against the grain".
The storm of Twitter and online commentary has translated into a handful of
protests in the more liberal south, which is predominantly Christian but also
home to millions of Muslims.
In the tiny