From an article in the New York Times:
In interviews, fathers and daughters here unapologetically explained the rationales for forced, intergenerational unions. Uness Nyambi, of the village of Wiliro, 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, the oldest nearly 5, and a husband who guesses he is 70. “Just because of these two children, I can not 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,” Ms. Kitamula said, holding back tears. She likened her husband’s comfortable compound of red brick houses in Ngana village to a penitentiary. “When you are in prison,” she said, “you have no rights.” In tiny Sele, Lyson Morenga, a widower, financed his re-marriage two years ago by giving his daughter Rachel, then 12, to a 50-year-old acquaintance in exchange for a black bull, according to his new in-laws. Mr. Morenga delivered the bull to his new wife’s family as a partial payment, said his wife’s uncle, Stewart Simkonda. Mr. SImkonda said Mr. Morenga had promised to deliver a larger payment after the impending marriage of Rachel’s younger sister. Malawi government officials say they try hard to protect girls like Rachel. Legislation before Parliament would raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, the legal age in most countries. Currently, marriages of Malawian girls from 15 to 18 are 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. […] Malawi officials say that this region’s growing poverty, worsened by AIDS and 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.” “The gains which were made in addressing early marriages are being lost,” said Andrina Mchiela, principal secretary for the Ministry of Gender. Women’s rights advocates want to abolish marriage payments, or lobolo, saying they create a financial incentive for parents to marry off their daughters. But even the advocates describe the tradition as politically untouchable. In its most benign form, lobolo is a token of appreciation from the groom’s family to the bride’s. At its most egregious, it turns girls into the human equivalent of cattle. 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. The entire article is worth reading.
@Dianne: I guess the silver lining with Italy is that it shows that even when fascists can capture the executive…
This has been going on since before the start of recorded history. The relevance of that being that there’s a whole lot of tradition behind this, and as noted later in the article it’ll take more than just a government fiat to stop it. How do you stop something like this? What actual effective measures can be taken?
Legislation before Parliament would raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, the legal age in most countries.
It is? Is that true? This is certainly not the case in the U.S., and what tables I’ve been able to come up with in a quick Google would seem to indicate that a minimum marriage age of 18 for both men and women would seem to be the exception, not the rule. Anybody got a good source for this?
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. […]
Illustrating the kind of problems you run into when you have multiple systems of law in a country.
How do you stop something like this? What actual effective measures can be taken?
by setting penalties like jail time and significant fines for selling daughters into forced marriage and enforcing them rigorously.
woman have always been considered property, to used at men’s discretion and it really is a shame that tradition determines what is right and not moral values, and of course some are forced into it. you either sell your child to a wealthier person or watch them starve.
if these people would be helped economically, job creation and better health care system and other things that we have here you would see tradition start to fall by the way side except for the die hards.
because when it comes to money if more people in africa were at least middle class instead of in poverty there would be incentive to fall in line with the international community in ways of dealing with human rights.if they have money and the international community requires that they follow human right protocols or else lose their jobs and subsides you can bet most would fall in line. trouble is investment in africa is minimal as there is so much instability in government and fighting and such that corporations would lose money investing in many of those countries there. and many in trying to get power or keep it sabatoge efforts by investors in the economy there.
money talks very loudly!
RR
A few million could build a women-only sanctuary where girls and women forced into marriage could stay,be fed, be taught how to run a farm on thier own, etc…
None of the work being done *needs* men. Women can do it just as well as men can. The slavery is in the tradition that binds women to men, and leaves them thinking that they have no choice, in the government that allows it, and in the economic situation that gives the women no way out. Of course, no one in cultures like this will deal with women as buisness equals, so there’s no chance for them to create work on thier own.
That can change, but it’d take a large amount of cash, dedicated workers, and it wouldn’t happen instantly. Women there would have to be cared for until the society adapted to deal with them as equals, moving slowly in to doing so over time.
It’d probably be cheaper than invading Iraq though.
by setting penalties like jail time and significant fines for selling daughters into forced marriage and enforcing them rigorously.
Be careful what you wish you. An “object” such as a daughter that is viewed as having only financial value will not suddenly gather “intrinsic value” if you ban the sale of the commodity. Rather, it (she) will go from having value as a commodity to becoming valueless.
A person who would sell his daughter in exchange for a cow will not suddenly love her as a person when the law is changed. The more likely scenario is infanticide, as in the extreme gender imbalanaces of India and China.
As in everything else, you have to change the culture — not just the law.
Africa, contrary to African-American legend, has never been a striking locus of the recognition of human rights. Neither has China, as we have recently noticed. Nor has India.
Those who would scorn “Eurocentric” value systems should give this some thought.
I hate the idea of forced marriage, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was practiced here in the west. I’ve heard that some wealthier families still do a form of forced marriage to make alliances between families, but this is changing (I don’t have direct links, but I will hunt some up.)
I believe that if the strain of the drought, economic strictures, and health issues are addressed this may begin to fall off and eventually become nonexistant. And I’m not sure that passing a law advocating jail time is going to be a good thing. This society recognizes women as property and if a girl’s father is jailed and she has no brothers then she’s going to be “up for grabs” to whomever has the strength to take her. Not a better situation for the women, imho.
These are complex issues that have no easy solutions.
This is an oddly sobering story. It is making me reflect on my value system, anyway.
I read about a father who sold his 11-yr-old daughter into marriage to save his family from starving – and my first reaction was to be shocked at the father. What am I thinking? Do I really prefer starvation to exploitation?
Yes, at some level, I do. That is, I fear for my daughter’s exploitation; I don’t fear for her starvation. And at that same level, I don’t care at all about people in Africa except to the extent that they push my emotional buttons. Sex is a button. Sexism is a button. Humans oppressing each other is a button. But poverty? Starvation? Not so much.
So if the father had refrained from offending my sensibilities, his family might have starved. And if they had, would the author have written a story about them? Would the Times have published it? Would Amp have cited it? Would I have read it? Wouldn’t be sexy enough, literally.
I understand that in the middle ages, the Church taught that the world was not real, but merely an allusion to the Christian story and the afterlife; once you understood the allusion, you could safely disregard the rest. I’m coming to suspect that I harbor a medieval attitude about most of the world.
I read about a father who sold his 11-yr-old daughter into marriage to save his family from starving – and my first reaction was to be shocked at the father. What am I thinking? Do I really prefer starvation to exploitation?
the person who disgusted me most was not not the father, but the man who took the girl as payment on the loan. that man was more than willing to exploit the poverty of the girl’s family.
those who don’t want to criminalize the practice of selling girl children: did you read the part about where the 11 year old girl’s father took her back after six months because he heard that he could go to jail for selling her.
But will he sell her again at 16? Or what about selling her at 18? I agree that selling children (of any gender) is abohorrent, but I’m afraid that criminalization will create hoards of girls that are either killed as infants or just abandoned, because they have little worth in their society.
And I’m not entirely sure if I lived in that area, what I would do if faced with the starvation of my children.
None of the work being done *needs* men. Women can do it just as well as men can.
Most of the work in Africa is done by women, anyway.
I think the issue here is demand: As in all slavery, as long as there are people who are allowed to buy people like cattle, and feel no remorse in doing so, there will always be people who, for economic reasons combined with not-so-high morality, have to sell people like cattle. In this case, women. There needs to be stronger enforcement and acknowledgement of invidual rights, in this case a womans right to refuse marriage, and economic opportunities to fix these kind of blatant abuses of economic imbalances (like nobody.really wrote, choice between death and slavery is a horrible one).
It is sad that currently much of Africa is a hotpot of racism and tribalism, with all the resulting corruption and civil wars (“us” vs. “them” zero-sum logic). Frankly, I have no idea how “the West” can fix this. Surely, if all the effort used to fight civil wars and commit genocides was used on building a better future, things could be better.
this feels to me like another manifestation of a principle i wrote in a recent post about health care.
the moral outrage seems to happen because something we consider a right (in one case decent health care, in the other freedom to choose partners and economic self-determination) is being subjected to market forces.
anything subjected to market forces will (by definition) have quantifiable value attached to it. rights (by definition) have essentially infinite value. this strikes me as the fundamental paradox of any highly market based economy.
“if these people would be helped economically, job creation and better health care system and other things that we have here you would see tradition start to fall by the way side except for the die hards.”
But where does the job creation come from? Jobs don’t get magically created. They are the result of investment of capital and the use of a labor pool. Those things in turn improve the economy and provide the resources to improve the health care system.
Do traditions like this die when economic conditions improve? Or do economic conditions improve when traditions like this die? The problems in the Middle East are often blamed on American policies; that somehow the superior American economic strength is due to American exploitation. But in my view, it’s due to the fact that in the U.S., people are citizens, not subjects. And we allow all of our citizens, not just the half with “Y” chromosomes, to be productive in any endeavor they wish.
When I was a graduate student, the woman who ran the Italian restaurant (and who was not much older than I) that I worked at was in an arranged marriage. We once discussed it quite frankly. She said that she was very anxious about it at first but that they had grown to love each other; I had a number of opportunities to observe her and her husband together and it certainly seemed to me that they did. They had a couple of great kids.
i also know some women who had their marriages arranged who are happy with their husbands and families. they also had the final say in whom they married. it’s just that their families took a significant role in helping them find husbands. they weren’t coerced. admittedly, they were not from dirt poor families, and all of them had college degrees.
Some arranged marriages work very well. Let’s be candid here – certainly not every marriage created by the free will of the parties works out!
Susan,
That’s true as evidenced by the US’s fifty percent divorce rate. But, I don’t think I’m for everyone just betrothing their offspring at birth either. I know that I should have listened to my parents when they told me not to get married the first time, but I was in love and knew everything. Boy, was I wrong! But, I learned from my mistakes and have a wonderful husband this time around.
The complaint is that the maliawi girls are being treated like cattle. There are two ways to address this concern. One way would be find methods to enhance the privilege of the class in question, malawi girls. Another way would be to treat cattle better, so being treated like them would be less of a problem.
Africa, contrary to African-American legend, has never been a striking locus of the recognition of human rights. Neither has China, as we have recently noticed. Nor has India.
Those who would scorn “Eurocentric” value systems should give this some thought.
How much of this lack of human rights is due to their “value systems,” and how much to the economic legacy of colonialism? Poverty does not foster human rights.
Those who would impose Eurocentric value systems should give this some thought.
How much of this lack of human rights is due to their “value systems,” and how much to the economic legacy of colonialism? Poverty does not foster human rights.
Those who would impose Eurocentric value systems should give this some thought.
Take a look at what pre-colonial African, Indian and Chinese history you can look up. You’ll find the allegation holds up.
Does a perusal of pre-colonial European history lead one to the conclusion that people living in that time and place had any particular concern for human rights, RonF? Certainly, pre-colonial Africa and Asia weren’t egalitarian wonderlands, but there are cases where colonialism did have an adverse effect on gender relations in a given society. For example, the Igbo of Nigeria used to feature separate, autonomous and roughly equal political institutions for men and women; after the colonial encounter, the Igbo’s political system changed into one in which women were subordinated to men.
we musn’t ignore that these practices however barbaric and inhuman they are , they are largely deepseated and are a representation of the culture and tradition of Africa, which aludes to one thing they are not gonna go away overnight. The elders condone the practice and use the excuse of tradition as a shroud, you could write a book on this topic. What about women who are inherited upon the demise of their spouses, if i had to go on the list would probably be as long as my arm.