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Opinion Jephiter Tsamwi
A wise man once said, “A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” What is peculiarly factual is that many times, illusions, deceptive tendencies hold more power than the actuality of any circumstance. That power is even more concretised if it is hidden in the golden robes of a cultural norm that is neither here nor there. Child marriages in Africa, in Zimbabwe to be specific, are a challenge that has mastered this art. It deceives the gullible imaginations of the civic by presenting itself as a traditional or cultural practice, when in fact it is a painful outcome of poverty.

Ostentatiously, we have sections of the society that are blindly accepting it, painting it with sacred statements like “It was passed on to us from generation to generation by our ancestors.” That can be taken as an insult to our ancestors, especially in a cultural context like Zimbabwe’s. Primitive as some might claim they were, it is far from true that we had an ancestry that celebrated the marrying off of girls who have not even experienced their first menstrual cycle.

History and even folktales told us that the marrying off of young girls was usually practised in crisis situations, especially during drought periods. According to the traditional, it was during such times when a young girl will be given to a rich man, whatever the age, in exchange for bags of grain. Child marriage has never been a cultural practice. It was and still is a product of poverty. In traditional practice, it manifested itself in the form of a dubious practice called kuzvarira.

Today, the world is living in an illusionary dungeon, convinced that the fight against child marriage is a fight against culture. It is not and it never was. It is a fight against financial desperation especially in economically strained families and countries.

The global trend is that the level of poverty in any society or country is almost directly proportional to the levels of child marriages in that country. In other words, the poorest countries are more likely to have serious cases of child marriages than the economically better nations.

The top 10 countries with the highest cases of child marriages, according to the pressure organisation Girls not Brides Global, are Niger, Central African Republic, Chad, Bangladesh, Mali, Guinea, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Malawi and Mozambique. These are the same countries that are classified among the world’s poorest.

If we look at a country like Chad, we are talking about a nation with barely any electricity in its capital city. World Bank notes that in terms of other economic performance indicators, the Gross National Product (GNP) per-capita, for instance, was $180 in the late 1990s, compared with $490 for sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011, UNDP noted that in the world ranking, Chad was 183rd out of 187 in the UNDP Human Development Index, and with 83 percent of the population living below the poverty line of $2 per day. It is no big surprise that Chad is a competitor among the countries worst hit by child marriages.

Outside Africa, Bangladesh was in 2009, reported by UNICEF to have 33 million children living in poverty which is about half of all the children in that country. About one in four children is deprived of at least four basic needs which include food, education, health, information, shelter, water and sanitation. The country has the fourth highest cases of child marriages in the world.

It is sad to note that our Zimbabwe has become a hotspot for child marriages ever since our economic fortunes started collapsing. We are a country importing almost everything including toothpicks, mineral water and tissues. We have an industry that is operating below 30 percent capacity utilisation and we are running a $4 billion budget economy, which is far less than that of Johannesburg.

According to the 2015 study to establish the determinants of child marriages in the country’s most affected district, Hurungwe carried out by the Ministry of Health and Child Care with support from United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), out of every 100 girls aged 18 and 19 years, 42 of them had fallen pregnant. The prevalence of teenage pregnancy among girls in the 15 to 17 years age group was 6.6 percent.

If you thought child marriage is a cultural concern please think again. However, this writer acknowledges that child marriage is a complex challenge that is mostly fuelled by interplay of factors.

We have some parents who attach a materialistic and financial value to the girl child, and not treat her as an independent person with a separate destiny outside feeding into the pocket of the selfish, greedy father or mother.

Today the practice of marrying off girls is still the same but the practice is hidden in some twisted cultural practices like lobola that have since ceased to function according to their true intended traditional purposes. If a parent attaches only a financial value to his/her daughter, surely that parent can sell the daughter at any given point provided there is a “Mr Rich” to pay with a herd of cattle or some few thousands of the United States dollar.

It is clearly evident that even in this country; many cases of child marriages are all concentrated in the poorest parts of the country or society. Even at localised levels, there are villages that are more synonymous with this practice than others. Some religious practices thereof, are also inclined towards supporting and sanitising practices that lead to the promotion or acceptance of early marriages as part of their way of life.

As long as we still have parents and guardians who take the girl child as a source of income, a financial surety that can be used to cushion them in times of financial desperation, we are most likely to witness more young girls married off even before they start their menstrual cycles. Girls are not a tool for poverty alleviation; they are human beings with full sexual and reproductive health rights that include the right to choose who to marry, when and where.

Usually, culture is used as a scapegoat to undermine women’s independence, authority and destiny. We have to understand the nexus between such corrupted systems and poverty. Poverty limits the horizons of the affected and their ability to grab economic opportunities that can sustain individuals’ lives.

In poor societies or families, the girl child is the ultimate sacrifice. She is the one who is hardly given an opportunity to further her education. She is the one who is mostly taken to be more of a burden than a resource to the family aspirations. In these circumstances, sending the girl into marriage is like lessening the burden to the family. Surely if we have a family that views its daughters as an economic burden, seeing the little girls getting married, even at nine years old would put some splendid smiles on their shameless faces.

It will be unjust to put the blame on parents without looking at the responsibility of our little daughters. Of course it remains the ultimate responsibility of every individual to take charge of his or her health but there are underlying barriers that make it not so obvious. For a person to take charge, he/she needs enlightenment and empowerment. Do we have such young girls who dream big, girls who can start aiming higher right at a tender age? Girls who have that appreciation that success is not in any way defined by one’s ability to clinch a marriage deal at the earliest stage of development? The answer could be yes, but the biggest challenge remains a disempowering family, society and other support systems.

Can we really say relationships that have minor girls as wives are marriages? How many of these marriages are legal and registered? To call them marriages is absurd. Most such unions don’t even last. Those that last expose the girls to a lifetime of torture, abuse and shame.

Most of these young girls never got a chance to sit in a Form One class room. The scope of thinking of such an unsharpened mind is usually very limited. They are not empowered to make sound decisions that are informed by conscious realisation that they are equal to their male counterparts. It is for this reason that they always celebrate getting married than anything else. But the bottom line for this is poverty.

If we are to win this battle against child marriages in Zimbabwe, and in Africa as a whole, we need to make sure that girls are economically empowered. It is more of an economically related challenge than a cultural problem.

Jephiter Tsamwi is an independent writer based in Harare. He can be contacted on [email protected]