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Cameroon: Akwaya is Scar On Nation's Conscience - NGO Personnel
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The Post (Buea)
5 May 2008
Posted to the web 5 May 2008
Ernest Sumelong
Akwaya has almost become a hell, dead end or nightmare to those who have gone there. It is cut off from the rest of the country by road; it has no electricity, no TV or radio signals, no telephone network.
Akwaya people find it difficult trading within Cameroon and are sometimes forced to use the Nigerian Naira instead of the FCFA. A team leader of a Limbe based NGO, EMPOWERMENT, Divine Ewane, who has worked in the area in collaboration with the Social Welfare Commission of the Catholic Diocese of Mamfe paints a bleak picture of the war between the Olitis and the Yves and says it might escalate if nothing is done.
You are the team leader of EMPOWERMENT, a Limbe-based NGO, working with the Social Welfare Commission of the Diocese of Mamfe and your focus is on early marriages, especially in Akwaya. Could you tell us about your activities in the area?
Let me first of all define early marriage as it obtains there. It is a situation that is common in many parts in Mamfe, especially Akwaya, whereby children are betrothed to old men or even women while they are one year old or when their mothers still bear them in the womb. These men or women are those who can pay some money probably to solve some family problem.
Early marriage is a very big problem and it is one of the main causes of under-scholarisation of girls in Akwaya. What we notice in the field is that when the already betrothed child gets mature, the husband requests that she comes to his house and so the parents have to stop the child's education.
In most cases we have investigated, the husband instructs the girl's parents to stop her education. It has been hindering development in the area a lot. In one of the workshops we organised, some people told me that some villages do not have a single girl with the Advanced Level.
You said most of these girls get married early. At what age do their husbands take them and when do they start bearing children?
What happens is that the girl's parents may run into trouble, either the father is sick or something and they don't have money to go to the hospital, but the wife may be pregnant and they know that they are expecting a girl child. They would borrow money from somebody on the agreement that when that child is born it would now be that man's wife.
After that initial amount of money, the man continues to bring other things like goats, chicken, etc. Then when the child is about five years old the man would request that his wife should come to him. The man's intention would be that from that early age the girl would become used to him and when she is mature she would assume her role as wife.
At times the girl may go in as the second or third wife when the man already has children. I must say there are two kinds of marriages happening there; there is one they call the "njumba" marriage and the "money woman" marriage. In the "njumba" marriage, a man could marry a woman and have children and because he did not dowry the woman the children he has with the woman do not belong to him.
The children are considered to belong to the woman's family. If those children are girls, it is the woman's uncles or brothers who can give them out for marriage. So, some people, because they might not have had the money to engage in marriage, first start with "njumba" and when they beget children,
they may now work alongside their wife to raise money and do what they now call the "money woman" marriage. So, any child they get after the "money woman" marriage will be considered to be the legitimate children. Most of the arrangements in these marriages are largely polygamous.
You mentioned that young girls also get married to older women; how does this happen and how do the women consider these girls?
It is a very strange phenomenon that I observed. There are two phases of it; there is a situation where a woman marries another woman in anticipation that the son would like the woman when he grows up and eventually marry her. But most of the cases that came to me, the sons did not like the choices of their mothers, yet the mothers continued paying the dowry just to keep the woman.
They do this because even if the woman gets children out of wedlock the children would belong to them. There was another pathetic case I witnessed; there was a particular woman who paid dowry for a girl but refused to give out this girl to one of her relatives who wanted to marry her even when the community insisted that she should do so.
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Even when the girl got fed up and abandoned her house, she continued to consider the girl as hers since she had paid the bride price. There girls are used more or less like commodities.
Are there schools in Akwaya and what level of schools are they?
There are schools in Akwaya. When I went there, I met many schools; both government and Catholic Mission schools. There are also secondary general and technical secondary schools.
Can i please have the address of the NGO group that is taking care of the Akwaya people?. I will like to thank these people for their effort in this region and the country as a whole.
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