[Reba]

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 northwestern Nigeria's remote, dust-blown state of Zamfara, but he considered the suitor too old for his only daughter, Zainab (13).


https://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-06-...des-in-bondage


"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 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 – even though such a betrothal is illegal.

For Kanuma and many others in northern Nigeria, the recent outcry over child marriage is puzzling.
Zainab's marriage is prohibited under Nigeria's Child Rights Act, which bans marriage or betrothal before the age of 18. But federal laws compete with age-old customs, as well as a decade of state-level sharia law in Muslim states.

"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 Sahara belt. In the years when rains or crops fail, so-called "drought brides" – who bring in a dowry for the husband, besides being one less mouth to feed for her parents – push numbers up dramatically.

Prevailing attitudes
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 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 Kano.

Other grassroots 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 (9), 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".