A teen from Malawi, Memory Banda has told a horrible story at the 2015 Technology, Entertainment and Design Women conference about how girls in her country are treated immediately they reach their menstrual period.
According to Memory, once a girl sees her period, and notwithstanding on her age, she is sent to a camp where she is taught how to satisfy a man on bed. Other ritual acts are also performed on the girl, and the girl has to compulsory have sex with a man who the traditional leaders have hired to clean her ‘childhood dust’. This final sex acts is known as kusasa fumbi in her local dialect. At least, 40 percent of girls living in Malawi have been through this practice.
It is said in many cases, this Kusasa Fumbi results in Sexually Transmitted Diseases such as HIV/AIDS or unwanted pregnancy. Memory testified that her younger sister became pregnant during her time at the camp when she was 11 years. Facing pressure from her parents, her sister married the man who impregnated her but the marriage ended on rocks. Her sister remarried but has been divorced for the second time and she now has three children without a husband at age 16.
But before her sister was initiated, Memory was supposed to have been first initiated but she defied the traditional practice. She said her disobedience earned her names like “stupid and stubborn” by her family but fully aware of the dangers associated with the practice, she stood firm on her grounds.
After rejecting the initiation, she did not stop there. According to the Take Part, Memory used her sister’s experiences to galvanize young women in her community, hoping to end the early teen marriages among girls in the country.
Before 2015, the minimum marriage age in Malawi was 15 but through the activism of Memory and other human rights organizations, the country upped it to 18 in April 2015.
Memory is reportedly to have lobbied Members of Parliament, asking them to support the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act of 2015 when it was presented before them. She also spent time and resources texting influential people in the country to support the bill.
Recently, a queen mother of a village in the country annulled some 330 marriages consisting of young girls who were forced by their parents to marry men triple their age.
Queen Mother Kachindamoto, of the Dedza District, is said to have reversed the marriages and also fired the village heads who presided over the ceremonies to wed the young girls to the men.
According to the United Nations’ statistics, one out of two girls will be married before their 18th birthday and one in eight will be married before they turn 15 in Malawi. One in four will also be a mother by their 18th birthday.
It is also said one in ten people in Malawi is HIV positive and the country has a high maternal mortality rate. Adolescent mothers are at much higher risk for potentially fatal medical complications such as ruptured birth canals. Seven percent of girls have given birth by age 15 while 65 percent have given birth by 20.
Social commentators have said the major cause of early marriages in the country has to do with economic incentive for parents raising their children in poverty. The system is in such a way that when one of their daughters is married, the economic burden of caring for her is passed on to her husband and the family’s economic status rises. Three out of four people live below the poverty line in Malawi.
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