CULTURE-MALAWI: Hunger Promotes Underage Marriage

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brian Ligomeka

BLANTYRE, Aug 4 2003 (IPS) - Vyalema Mwakasungura (not real name) has always harboured one ambition: to become a nurse.

Her love for nursing began when she was admitted to hospital in Katongo, northern Malawi, after spraining her left leg.

“The nurse looked after me as if I was her child. Since then I have always been dreaming of joining a nursing school after completing my secondary school,” she says.

But her dream was shattered in February when her parents told her that she should quit school and get married.

She protested. “Why should I quit school when the government is offering free primary education?” she asked.

To her astonishment, her pleas were ignored by her parents. By getting married to a wealthy man in the village, her mother argues, Mwakasungura, 16, would save the family from the jaw of hunger. Her son-in-law, she points out, will offer the family dowry: three cows and some bags of maize.

Hunger is responsible for the re-emergence of an ancient custom, which drives desperate families into forcing their underage daughters into relationships with older men in order to pay off debts or secure loans, a new report, published by the Malawi Human Rights Commission, has found.

The report says the practice of ‘kupimbira’, which allows for a poor family to approach a rich man for a loan of cattle or money in exchange for their daughter, regardless of her age – “has resurfaced over the past two years or so, due to the devastating hunger that has hit parts of northern Malawi”.

Malawi is still recovering from the acute food shortages caused by a combination of erratic weather conditions and the impact of HIV/AIDS.

More than three million people required food aid at the height of last year’s food crisis, according to the country’s Department of Disaster Preparedness and Rehabilitation.

The food shortages have hit the poor the hardest. More than 65 percent of Malawi’s population live below the poverty line of less than one U.S. dollar a day.

The report’s author, Harry Kambwembwe, conducted an inquiry into the practice following a letter to the commission from concerned citizens and articles published in the Daily Nation and the Weekend Nation.

The letter singles out a particular case at Iponga, a township in the far north of Malawi, where a 13-year-old girl was forced by her parents to marry an elderly man in repayment of 4,000 Malawi Kwacha (about 44 U.S. dollars) which the parents owed him.

Some parents apply a custom called “kuhaha/kuhara”.

“This is when a man admires a small girl and arranges with her parents to take care of her until she is mature enough to marry him. The suitor provides the girl’s necessities, including school fees. But the man has the right to stop her schooling whenever he feels like it. Even before puberty the man has the right to take her as a wife. The girl cannot refuse such an arrangement because her parents will have already taken the dowry,” says the report.

The ‘kupimbira’ is practised by the Nyakyusa and Ngonde peoples in the remote north bordering Tanzania and Mozambique.

“This is a very archaic and inhuman practice that should not be tolerated in this democratic dispensation. The commission has an obligation to safeguard and promote the rights of such vulnerable young girls,” says Kambwembwe.

He calls for direct campaigns, using local languages. Most people in the north are not conversant with Malawi’s official languages: English and Chichewa.

President Bakili Muluzi has visited the region and donated more than 200 metric tonnes of maize.

“I don’t want people here to suffer from hunger. My administration will make sure that you are provided with adequate food so that instead of worrying about hunger you should spend your energies on development activities,” Muluzi said.

Muluzi has repeatedly denounced cultural practices which promote the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“We must divorce all the cultural practices that promote promiscuity and fuel the spread of HIV/AIDS. Cultural practices such as wife inheritance should have no room in modern Malawi,” he said.

More than 800,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi, according to official statistics.

Rights activists believe that if government could break the hunger-poverty vicious circle, the harmful cultural practices in northern Malawi would die. And girls like Mwakasungura would realise their dreams.