A 14 year old girl who has been married
and divorced twice to men that are old
enough to give birth to her, Maimuna
Abdullahi, has just told her sad story.
Although she has escaped and is now
learning how to design cloths, she
wants her friends who have been
trapped in forced marriages in Northern
Nigeria to be freed too.
Read her sad/Shocking story told to
Dailymail.co.uk below:
Maimuna Abdullahi was sold into
marriage by her parents for £120 and
abused by her new husband, who locked
her away and forced hard labour on her.
When she ran home she was beaten,
first by her father, then her husband,
and was summarily divorced by her
husband for daring to flee – and she is
still just 14 years old.
She is one of thousands in Nigeria with
similar stories – and, shockingly, her
husband blames his beaten former bride
for her ordeal, saying she was
disobedient and over-educated.
Attacker: Saidu, pictured, said he feared
marrying someone more educated would
make him 'the wife'. After Maimuna fled
him, he divorced her
Saidu
Maimuna’s former husband, Mahammadu
Saidu, blames her few years of school
for her disobedience. A handsome man
of 28 who is obviously proud of his
ankle-high boots, he does not deny
beating his wife.
‘She had too much ABCD,’ he says. ‘Too
much ABCD.’
After fleeing her husband Mahammadu
Saidu, who locked her away for days at a
time, she was whipped by her family for
daring to come home, then attacked by
her furious husband as well.
Her battered face swelled so much that
doctors feared her husband had
dislocated her jaw. Her back and arms
bristled with angry welts from the
whipping her father gave her.
She was gaunt from hunger, dressed in
filthy rags. And barely a year after her
wedding, she was divorced.
No sanctuary: Maimuna's parents, Rabi
Abdullahi, left and Haruna Abdullahi,
right, have seven other children and say
it is not unusual to marry as young as 12
Maimuna's parents
It would be a tragic story for a woman of
any age. But for Maimuna Abdullahi, it all
happened by the time she was 14. ‘I’m
too scared to go back home,’ she
whispers, a frown crinkling her brow as
she fiddles nervously with her hands. ‘I
know they will force me to go back to my
husband.’
Nigeria, a young country of about 170
million, has one of the highest rates of
child marriage in the world.
The law of the land states that the age
of consent, and thus of marriage, is 18.
However, the custom of child marriage
is still ingrained enough that even a
middle-aged federal senator has
married five child brides and divorced at
least one.
Across the country, one in five girls are
married before the age of 15, according
to the United Nations.
In the desperately poor Muslim north,
where child marriage is often
considered acceptable by shariah or
Islamic law, that number goes up to one
in two.
This is also where Boko Haram is trying
to impose its extreme version of Islam,
changing the face of the region and
especially of its girls.
Children as young as five now hide their
heads and shoulders in hijabs, a rare
sight just a few years ago. Some girls
become wives as early as nine.
Maimuna was saved from this fate by
Saadatu Aliyu, who has turned an old
family home into a school for divorced
girls.
At the Tattalli Free School, which gets
by on private donations, a couple of
dozen girls gather in the courtyard for a
sewing lesson. Toddlers mill around, the
children of divorced girls who came in
pregnant.
‘Nobody knows how many thousands of
them there are,’ says Aliyu of the girls.
‘That’s why we have so many
prostitutes, and very young ones, in the
north.’
Maimuna grew up on the outskirts of
Kaduna, in a half-finished brick building
on the edge of a middle-class suburb.
Her father, a farmer called Haruna
Abdullahi, picks up a stone and throws it
at a stray dog as scrawny as he is. At
45, he’s been married for 30 years and
has fathered eight children.
‘It’s our culture to give our girls in
marriage,’ he says in a reasoning tone.
‘From the age of 12, a girl can go to her
husband’s house.’
His wife, Rabi Abdullahi, nods, and asks
her husband’s permission before talking.
She too was a child when she married,
although she does not know exactly how
old.
‘It is our way of life,’ she says. ‘In my day,
a bride would never dare to run away.’
Her life is hard, she says, but her
marriage good. She insists that her
husband is not a cruel man, pointing to a
well he built so she did not need to walk
more than a mile to collect water.
So in late 2012, Maimuna’s father
arranged to marry his eldest daughter
to his best friend’s eldest son.
The son, Saidu, paid a dowry of 35,000
naira (£120) for Maimuna – more cash
than Abdullahi has had in his life. She
was 13, and he twice her age.
Saidu farms his own plot of land and
owns a small motorbike, making him
relatively well off and eligible.
He says he has known Maimuna all his
life, and waited years for her to reach
what he considers marriageable age.
‘When she was a kid, I would bring her
candy and call her “wifey”,’ he says. ‘We
were always meant to be together.’
Saidu left his village school at fifth
grade, the highest level offered, and
says he regrets it.
The high school was in another village,
too far to walk. Now he cannot write,
and must find someone else to read him
even the most personal of letters.
He says he promised Maimuna she could
carry on going to school, even if it meant
he had to find work in town. But he also
worried.
‘If she is educated, she will be looking
down on me because I didn’t go to
school, so she will be the husband and I
will be the wife,’ he explains.
Maimuna said she did not love him and
begged her father to let her stay in
school. She had always been a good
daughter, obedient, hard-working and
popular among her friends, so her
stubborn refusal to accept her marriage
surprised her parents.
But her wishes were not up for
discussion. Her father was clear on
what counts: ‘It’s what is good for the
family and the community.’
Many of Maimuna’s friends from school
were already married and not one was
happy, but they had no idea how to
escape.
Nobody prepared Maimuna for the
marriage bed. There was no advice, no
warning of what to expect, even from
her married friends.
She settled into a new life where she
felt like a slave. When she wasn’t
working in the fields, she was cleaning,
carrying water and firewood, cooking
and at the beck and call of her husband’s
demanding parents.
Every day she was exhausted, and
when she finally got to bed, her husband
wanted to ‘bother’ her, she says.
He never kept his promise to let her go
to school.
When she objected to her treatment,
her husband locked her into their hut,
for days. He would not even allow her to
visit her parents.
Maimuna bided her time until the rainy
season was over and her husband went
to town to find work.
Nine months ago, she took off, escaping
to her father and begging him to let her
return home.
Instead, he whipped her until her back
was raw. Then he summoned her
husband and forced her to go back to
him.
Saidu, humiliated and furious, slapped
her repeatedly in the face, jerking her
head from side to side with the force of
his blows.
She fled once again, first to a
sympathetic aunt in a nearby village and
then to a cousin in Kaduna.
She now shares one cramped room with
her cousin’s family, just a short walk
away from Tattalli school, down a dusty
alley and along a road lined by open
drains stinking of stagnant water.
When Maimuna showed up at the school,
she had been badly beaten and refused
to speak, says teacher Victoria Dung.
They took her to the hospital, where
doctors found she was badly
malnourished. The whip marks on her
back may last a lifetime.
Her husband waited the customary
three months to make sure there was
no baby. Then he divorced her, as a
husband can do under shariah or Islamic
law by declaring the divorce aloud three
times.
He informed her parents of the divorce
in a letter dated Feb. 14, which he could
not write himself.
Maimuna considers herself among the
lucky ones. She balances a broken chair
on a tree stump at the school to sit in
front of a sewing machine, learning to
make garments she can sell in the
market.
She thinks she’d like nursing, and wants
to master English and Arabic.
‘I don’t know what I want to be when I
grow up but, even if I get married, I want
to have some education to back me up,’
she says in her native Hausa, with a
teacher translating.
‘I pray that what I have done will help
the younger ones, that my parents
learn from the experience of my running
away from home.’
It is by no means certain.
After her departure, Maimuna’s father
called a community meeting to discuss
the problem with elders.
He says he knows of many girls who ran
away from home because of marriages,
but the elders have not yet come up
with a solution.
Some girls are rebelling in other ways. A
14-year-old forced to marry a 39-year-
old in April poisoned the groom’s food a
week after their wedding, killing him and
three of his friends.
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