In this investigation done with the support of the Ford Foundation and the International Centre for Investigative Reporting , it was established that inspite of the existence of the Child’s Rights Law, child and forced marriages still go on unabated in several communities in cosmopolitan Lagos.
Amina Hassan spotted the signs with much trepidation. First, they came for her eldest sister, Zainab and two years later, they came for the second eldest, Maimuna. After another two years, when they came for her as soon as she turned 16 like the other two before her, as usual with the gleeful wedding party in tow, Amina bolted with all the strength in her sprightly teenage legs. It was only a few months to her Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE).
“No, child marriage is not for me; my education first,” she blurted under her breath as she fled her home in Ajegunle, a Lagos slum community.
“I ran away from home to stay with a school friend of mine but my family and that of the groom waited patiently for me for those three days,” Miss Hassan recalled, “My father was no more; so, it was my uncle who was in charge. When I made a brief appearance at home to check if they had left, he got hold of me, beat me black and blue and said I was disgracing the family and shaming our tradition.”
The next alternative was to seek refuge with the police. So, Amina again sneaked out and reported at the nearby Ajegunle-Boundary police station.
“I looked him in the face and asked: ‘If I were your daughter, would you also say the same thing—that I should cooperate with them and get married at age 16?’”
The obviously ruffled police officer, whom she remembered as having ‘bold, unforgettable tribal marks’, berated her for being a ‘stubborn girl’ and promptly discharged her case from his station. The wedding party disappeared in great sorrow.
Thus, given up by both family and the police, Amina went on to finish her secondary school in that same year (1993), and university education at the famous Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria and went on to obtain a Masters Degree, the very first person and woman in her generation to accomplish that the feat.
Though Amina set herself free by her determination and sheer guts, her two other sisters, Zainab and Maimuna who could not, have continued to live with the consequences of child marriage, decisions made entirely on their behalf by their elderly relatives.
Amina still recollects their ordeals with heavy heart. Fragile-framed Zainab had been tricked into a party ostensibly held in her uncle’s house in the Oregun, Lagos mainland not knowing it was her own traditional wedding. She was later taken to Asaba in Delta State where her elderly husband, a polygamist, was waiting for her. She later ran back home from her elderly husband, unable to cope.
But the most dramatic was that of her sister Maimuna. “We had all prepared for school that morning and were all in our school uniform,’’ Amina recalled, “Our uncle addressed Maimuna and told her no school for her that day as her husband had come for her. She had no idea who the man was or what he looked like. My uncle had made the choice on her behalf. We all started wailing. Our neighbours’ children also came and joined in the wailing, but it was too late as a station wagon was already parked outside ready for her. They took her away in her school uniform. She was in SS1 at Oregun High School and was one of the best in the entire school, always coming first or second.”
Maimuna was virtually bundled and taken to Chad from where, unable to cope with the domestic work (including cooking for her husband’s large extended family), she ran back to Lagos, selling her belongings along the long lengthy and traumatic way from Chad to Lagos heavy with pregnancy, giving birth and losing the child thereafter. Like her sister before her, Maimuna never went back to school.
“My sisters were very intelligent and were well known in school for their brilliance, but these people just ruined their lives,” said Amina, who established the Shuwa Arab Development Initiative (SADI), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), after graduating from the university in 2009, to try and right the wrongs of the past and save other girls from the ordeal of child marriage.
Through SADI, she has facilitated the education of more than 100 children, boys and girls among the Shuwa Arabs (an indigenous community with roots in Northeast) in Lagos.
