[ Women’s rights ]

Destructive bride price

[ By Rita Schäfer ]

“Bride price payments foster the impoverishment and oppression of women, drive young men into debt and aggravate social inequality.” This is how Ugandan lawyer Atuki Turner sums up the consequences of a practice that is common throughout Africa. The situation in Uganda is particularly problematical. The country is one of the frontrunners in comparative violence statistics. That is by no means caused only by the decades-long turmoil of war, but above all due to marked patriarchal structures.

“Many men believe they have the right to control and discipline their wives completely if they have paid a bride price,” says Atuki Turner. For women, that means their scope for economic action, their mobility and their say in family matters are drastically impeded. Women’s rights organisations, founded by female academics and political activists in the wake of democratisation in many parts of Africa, no longer accept these destructive trends. In the late 1990s, Turner started the Mifumi project, the first organisation against domestic violence in rural Uganda. On its agenda are legal advice for women, training for the police and the judiciary, as well as programmes for raising awareness among traditional authorities.

The Mifumi Project became well-known when it mobilised the people of the Tororo Province in East Uganda in 2001 for a resolution against bride price payments. The action caused a stir throughout East Africa, particularly as a number of tribal chiefs did their utmost to thwart the campaign. They said bride price practices were the epitome of the local culture and tradition. Fearing for their already diminishing influence, they claimed to be protecting traditional values and demanded control of social habits in general and over women’s life style in particular. Nonetheless, Mifumi was successful. Committed local politicians with a stake in curbing the chiefs’ power helped achieve this result. The proven majority view is now that only small, symbolic presents should be given instead of high cash payments, whenever a couple is married.

Turner has since become engaged in international activism. Together with other female lawyers and sociologists she drafted the Kampala Declaration against bride price payments. The document, adopted at a conference of pan-African women’s rights organisations in February, calls on African governments, the African Union, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Countries and others to take action against the practice. The GTZ sectoral project “Strengthening Women’s Rights” supported the conference in Kampala, the first exchange between 150 women on national and international strategies against the bride price custom.


Working for new alliances

“In many African countries the problem is similar to that in Uganda,” says sociologist Sylvia Tamale, who heads Kampala University’s Gender Studies Department. She calls for reforms of matrimonial and family laws because, so far, no African country has a law against bride price payments. Although many African governments have signed international agreements on women’s rights and protection from discrimination, they tolerate women’s oppression and marital violence, which in many places are still regarded as a private matter. Based on their international declaration, African womens’ rights activists are now planning to lobby. “We must make new alliances with state and civil society groups in order to change attitudes that are contemptuous of women,” demands Joyce Kathambi Muchena, head of the Kenyan network Coalition against Violence against Women.

While a great number of African men claim complete control over their wives, more and more African women are dependent upon a minimum economic income in order to look after their families. However, dependency restricts their chances of generating income and is, therefore, an obstacle to development. Often, men do not allow their wives to participate in development programmes or in local political bodies. Supposedly private affairs thus cause serious socio-economic problems and have a negative effect on democratisation processes. The feminisation of poverty goes on.

This dilemma is exacerbated by growing AIDS rates and the increasing insecurity of African males with respect to their identity and self-image. Family support networks are breaking down, individualisation and disorientation are on the rise. More and more husbands are ducking their traditional obligations. Nonetheless, “they insist upon their position of power and demand the subordination of their wives,” reports Tina Sideris, a South African psychologist. Often, she adds, men who have paid a bride price for their wives refuse the women’s wishes concerning family planning and the use of condoms.

This is disastrous because it accelerates the spread of AIDS. In Southern and East Africa, regions with high HIV rates, young girls are being wed at an ever lower age. Noerine Kaleeba, of the Ugandan AIDS network Taso, reports: “Older men expect a healing effect from a young, healthy wife, but mostly they just infect the girls with HIV.” If the man dies, his brothers exclude the wife and children from the inheritance – with the result of great impoverishment.

In addition, older men drive bride prices up in order to beat younger competitors. Frustrated with their poor chances of marriage, young men turn to violence and force young girls to have sex with them. This is how they attempt to prove their virility, which the older men prevent them from doing by legal means. High bride prices thus are an expression of a generational conflict between young and old men. They are also a reason for increasing rape rates and teenage pregnancies.


Disastrous source of income

In lack of other means to earn money, fathers in many places see bride price revenues as welcome income. This is so, for example, among East African nomad societies. Ananilea Nkya, who is working for a change in attitude among the Masai by innovative education and advice programmes, says she is again and again confronted with the fact that fathers raise their daughters strictly adhering to tradition. They have them circumcised and do not send them to school. Because such girls are regarded as being very obedient, their fathers will be able to demand high bride prices.

The situation is particularly dramatic in crisis regions such as Zimbabwe and in refugee camps, where parents marry off their daughters for food. The issue, then, is no longer sex for consumer goods. It is about trading very young girls for food (aid). These girls are particularly badly affected by HIV infections, for due to their complete dependence on their mostly much older husbands they have no power of negotiation. Because their own families consume the food, repayment of the bride price is impossible. This, however, would be the prerequisite for divorce. Therefore, the young women are compelled to remain in marriages marked by violence and a family life, which ruins their health.

Ironically, the now common demand for bride prices in cash were invented by the former colonial powers, even if local authorities like to claim that they are an essential tradition. In pre-colonial times, symbolic gifts from the groom’s family to the bride’s parents sealed the new family alliance. Marriages were less regarded as a partnership of individuals and more as a bond between family groups. Although the giving of prestige goods had nothing to do with the idea of buying a wife, the colonial administrations declared all goods transfers in the context of weddings as bride prices. With the introduction of the money economy, purely commercial payments of cash became widespread. They also became an instrument of power for older, wealthier men.

In view of the complex socio-cultural and economic dimensions of the bride price practices, the Kampala Declaration’s demands for legal reforms are only a milestone that marks the long journey towards structural change. The women’s rights organisations know they must work at disparate levels and coordinate their programmes. As representatives of civil society groups, that are intermediaries between state institutions and the local people, they are important partners for development cooperation. Reforms of the legal reality and the abolition of practices, which in the name of tradition violate women, have only just begun.

Website:
The work of Mifumi: http://www.mifumi.org

Dr. Rita Schäfer
is Social Anthropologist
and lecturer at
Humboldt University, Berlin.
marx.schaefer@t-online.de