Early to wed: child marriage in Africa

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. This weekday, though, we in Britain are on holiday, so we've got a few stories we've been saving up for you. In China, there's a growing trend for wearing Hanfu clothing inspired by the traditional dress of the majority Han ethnicity. Much of it is goofy fun, but there are ethnic overtones to the hobby that could soon worry the country's leadership. And for some, Scrabble is more than just a word game. It's a globally competitive pursuit. For many players, it can even be a way out of poverty. Perhaps foolishly, I challenge Africa's first World Scrabble champion to a match. But first, Each year in Sub Saharan Africa, more than a third of girls marry before the age of 18. In a country such as Niger, the rate is as high as 3 out of 4. The practice persists mainly in places that are remote and underdeveloped. But as our Ethiopia correspondent Tom Gardner found, some lessons on how to reduce child marriage rates can be gleaned from an unexpected place.

I went to this village in highland Ethiopia called Kamat, the sort of place that hasn't changed a great deal over the centuries. It's still very much a traditional society. Religious, smallholder, farmers. But what's interesting is it's seen particularly good results in the last four to five years in bringing what was a relatively high prevalence of child marriage down quite dramatically. One third of the villages in this district reported no child marriages at all last year, and the Kamat, the village I went to, only had one.

And is that unusual in Ethiopia?

Well, I mean, this, broadly speaking, is the story of Ethiopia. It was once among Africa's top five countries for child marriage. So we're talking almost 50% of women marrying before they were 18. The practice has dropped by a third in the past decade, which is the world's sharpest decline. So in the village of Kamat, I met werke, who was 13 years old. Two years ago, when she was 11, her parents decided to have her married, basically for economic reasons, which is to a large extent the root of this practice. School was too expensive for them, so it was time for her to be married.

And what did she tell you about how she felt when this plan for her had become clear? What was she worried about?

Well, she told me through my translator, I knew that she'd seen other girls, other women who'd been married young, and she saw how they'd suffered. In particular, she mentioned her mother, who married at the age of 10. And you know, how much she had suffered physically when she gave birth.

But Werka managed to escape the marriage that had been arranged. How?

Crucially, she took the initiative. She essentially reported her parents to her school principal and to the local officials. The officials then came to her parents and persuaded them to cancel the wedding, cancel the preparations.

And you mentioned that her mother herself had married young. Is that common for victims of child marriage to pass the practice on to their own daughters?

Well, yes, in this village, you know, I met a woman called Berhanella. Who was married herself at nine. And then she tried three times to force her teenage daughter Tesseyu into marriage with an older man. She told me just how much she suffered as a child bride. She called it dark times repeatedly, and that she'd had her first child at 14.

Then why did she want that for her teenage daughter?

Her husband was sick and couldn't work on the family farm. She was sick herself, and she said she wanted to bring another man into the household who could help her. She also told me that Taseu's two older sisters had gone to school and hadn't been successful, so she didn't want to sayu to do the same. I think that kind of speaks to some of the kind of cultural Factors as well that are at play here beyond simply the economics. I was told by some of the locals that there's a belief that girls won't succeed in education. Worke, the first girl, she mentioned that particularly among the older generation, there are still these derogatory terms for girls who marry at an older age. We met a boy in the village as well who told me that the older generation believes the practice leads to stronger marriages because the children marry and then grow up together. So they have this kind of strong bond. But I mean, in practice the groom is much older and the concern really is to ensure the virginity of the bride by marrying them young.

But what can be learned from Ethiopia's success in reducing child marriage rates?

I think we've had some really good positive improvements and declines in child marriage at the national level.

Annabel Erolkar is Ethiopia Country Director at the Population Council.

I think though that the progress that we've made has been patchy and confined to certain regions. Most of the declines have been in urban areas and also in specific regions like the Amhara region. Because Amhara has traditionally been known as a child marriage hotspot, it has had a lot of attention over the past 10 years, perhaps to the detriment of some other regions that received less attention.

But in terms of the progress that we're seeing, albeit in a patchy way in Ethiopia, are there lessons to be drawn about what's being done that could benefit other countries?

Yeah, I think first and foremost is government commitment in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government has committed at the 2014 London Girls Summit to eradicate child marriage and FGM by 2025. Up to now, they still chair the alliance to Marriage and they're making a lot of efforts to really see that this is the last generation of girls that's affected by the practice. But at the same time, I also think that across sub Saharan Africa, different governments and also programmers have to pay attention to the patterns of child marriage because it's not a one size fits all solution. You have different patterns and different cultural practices surrounding child marriage, and that kind of implies different approaches to tackling the practice.

I think a critical variable tends to be buy in from community leaders, in particular religious ones like priests or imams. So in Kemata, I spoke to the village priest and he was very much a supporter, an advocate of ending child marriage, which I think really mattered in terms of changing the attitudes of the rest of the community. Because, I mean, Ethiopia is very religiously devout country and traditionally Orthodox Christian priests have promoted child marriage because they themselves practice it in order to marry virgins. And, you know, similarly, imams often invoke the prophet's marriage to a young girl as a justification. So if you can get the religious leaders on side, then the rest of the community is likely to follow.

And so, Tom, you really do see this message being spread and change really kind of taking hold?

Well, I think it's going to be very hard to eradicate it entirely, but I think there are reasons to be hopeful. I think the better educated society becomes, the more the practice will fade away. And I think attitudes among the younger generation are changing. You could hear that from one of the girls I met, Tesseyu, Who seemed hopeful about her future and the future of her generation. They would marry out of choice and out of love.

Tom, thanks a lot.

Thank you, Jason.

More than 90% of people in China are of the Han ethnicity. Some of them have found a flamboyant way to reconnect with their ancient past. They're followers of Hanfu, the movement associated with traditional Han dress. And enthusiasts say there's more than a million of them. But some worry that a strain of Han chauvinism lurks on the fringes, and that could stoke resentment among the country's 55 official ethnic minorities. The Communist Party is watching closely.

I turned up late at night to this tourist town, and the streets were full of people dressed as Ming Dynasty soldiers or Han Dynasty archers.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief.

There's a Starbucks in this town. It's a tourist town, and, you know, you'd queue up for your coffee. And the guy selling the coffee, the barista, was in something that looked a bit like a kind of pastel toga. There was a guy in chainmail with a kind of banner, a battle banner, waiting for his coffee. But it's quite a sight to be in a kind of tourist town with several thousand people dressed in, so, third, fourth, fifth century robes.

And what kinds of things were people telling you about their involvement with it?

So a typical and really interesting guy that I met was a teenage undergraduate from a nearby university called Chen Bolin. And he had got interested in hang fu while he was still at high school. He wears third century robes, kind of silken robes with wide sleeves and a sort of belt. And he talked about how he had been to a museum near his university and had found a statue of some sages from the Wei and Jin dynasties that's kind of basically third century. And he was extremely happy to find that their robes were the same as his. And so he made a kind of traditional obeisance to his ancestors and then greeted them out loud in this museum and said, you know, my dear ancestors, I've. I've heard all about you and I'm very pleased to meet you. So for him, this was a real sense of connecting with something much larger than himself.

It sounds to me as if that's kind of more paying respect to history rather than to some ethnic question.

That's right. But there is an ethnic edge to it. And one of the odd things about China's way that it handles the 55 official minorities, the non Hannah chunk of the population, who include Tibetans, people from Inner Mongolia. One oddity is if you go to a sort of official big communist gathering in Beijing, people from those ethnic minorities, delegates to the legislature, they will turn up in traditional folklore costumes. The vast majority of the delegates who are ethnic Han, they turn up in suits and ties. So it's almost as if the Han are a kind of invisible majority and everyone else gets to be a minority. When you ask people about that, they talked about how the Han culture had been somehow lost. Even some teenage school girls who'd been coming for three years to this annual festival, they were all very clear that what they were wearing was much more than just fun. It was about the culture that had been lost because the Han had somehow disappeared from sight.

Chaddy and Bill Moondy on the lease.

And what does the Communist Party make of the movement?

The Communist Party always has to decide whether to crush and suppress something or kind of take ownership of it. And for the moment, there are kind of signs that the state media has written pretty positive articles about Hanfu. But it's quite interesting that the more official bits of this have stressed that it's traditional Chinese clothing and that it's all part of a kind of revival of traditional Chinese culture. And so instead of being Han culture, they talk about huafu, which is the traditional clothing of all Chinese people. And it's meant to be much more inclusive because China tells a story about how it's a happily unified, multicultural society. So you can see that kind of asterisk in the way that the state is embracing the movement that matters.

Do you think those concerns are justified? That Han fu is a way of asserting Han ethnicity over the non Han minority?

The accusation from some critics of the Hanfu movement is that it's is a little bit like kind of Han supremacist movement, that there's quite a kind of dark edge to it. And, you know, people will draw comparisons with some of the stuff Kind of similar to complaints about affirmative action in America and rights for minorities that the majority feels are denied. It has to be said that although that kind of thought is out there in the harmful movement, and some of the founders back in the 2000s thought that way, this big festival, which is one of the biggest annual festivals, was much more a sign, I think, that a lot of particularly college students, younger Chinese, they're just looking for interesting sort of forms of fun that gives them a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves. And in this case, it could be religion, it could be, you know, nationalism. In this case, it's dressing up as their ancestors might have done centuries ago.

And you've painted a picture here for us. And so I'm imagining you at this festival were. What are you wearing?

That was a tricky one because technically they said that a journalist from the Economist was welcome at the festival, but that everyone at the festival had to wear Hanfu. I felt that this would be cultural appropriation. I decided. And so I wore a tweed suit because I thought this was yingfu or the traditional costume of the English.

Now I'm imagining that picture even better. David, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Scrabble, that game in which you arrange words on a board to score points, is for most of the world a pretty low key way to spend a rainy Sunday. But in some places it's a whole different scene.

Way back in Nigeria, we've had Scrabble recognized as a sport as far back as 2001.

This is Wellington Jigere. He became the first African World scrabble champion in 2015. And he's kindly joining me over the Scrabble board to tell me about it. Who starts?

You start.

I can't think too long about this, can I?

Just find something that is acceptable in the English language and you'll be fine.

I am playing jowl J o w L but we're not taking score because I don't want to be embarrassed by the final numbers.

You probably. It's actually possible. Scrabble is one game that is unique in its own way. It's possible that we play this game and you win.

Is that is indeed unusual for me.

It could be highly unlikely. But it is very, very possible that we play this game and you win.

So, Wellington, when did you first play Scrabble?

I first played Scrabble in 1996. Scrabble was taught to me by my elder brother. And at first we had the understanding that Scrabble was supposed to help us with our academics.

And when you were A kid. Did you meet international Scrabble players?

Definitely not. I grew up in a very rural sett, so there wasn't really much to aspire to in terms of what you can see in the environment. Scrabble play was a means to any little living.

So I've played jowl. I said that. And what have you played? Bevel.

Bevel, yeah.

Should we start keeping score? Okay, we'll have a W. We'll have a J. You've already calculated this, I can tell. So what's my score?

The score was 28.

28. And you've got 20. 20. Okay. So you said when you first started that you were making a little bit of money in playing Scrabble. How?

We have tournaments in Nigeria, so if you perform consistently. Well, there are prize moneys to be won in such tournaments.

Who supplied the actual prize money?

It was the state government.

Right. Okay. So it's sort of subsidizing through prizes.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. I think it's your turn.

Okay.

You've long since figured out what you're going to do. Let's figo F I G O25, you have taken the lead. I knew this wouldn't last long. And as someone who has been competitive, how did it feel to actually win the World Championship? What was that like?

The moment at which I won the World Championship, I was too fatigued to feel anything. I was too fatigued because the circumstances surrounding my winning the World Championship were very, very. We originally denied visa, it was hold in Australia and we actually got the visa about 48 hours to when the Championship was to start. So we left Nigeria almost immediately and we got to Perth, Australia about less than 12 hours to when the Championship was to start. It went. So by the final day, I was more like inside a chair in my own self. So when people were even celebrating me, I wasn't totally aware of the surrounding enough. I was very, very fatigued. I was very, very tired. The only thing I could think of was how to get home and sleep.

So how did you feel then after you got some sleep and woke up again?

Yeah, when I got some sleep, it dawned on me what I had just accomplished. Because it was. It was. It was a whole. It turned out to be a very big deal because it was the first time that an African was winning the World Championship. And prior to that time there were a lot of what I say, how do I call it, misconceptions that evidently my feet helped to disprove and all that. So an hour later, the president of my country called me personally, and it felt so good to have the opportunity to speak with my commander in chief and all that. So it was, it now started all of a sudden becoming a very, very, very, very euphoric experience for me. And everything started falling into place.

Do you still play Scrabble for fun?

I actually don't enjoy playing Scrabble. It is work for me.

So what's your preferred game then, if you don't want to be taxed?

I prefer chess.

Chess.

I have a lot of fun playing chess.

Right. Well, I feel bad now for having made you do something that is too mentally taxing.

No, actually wasn't that hard for. Wasn't hard. It wasn't mentally tasking that much.

Wellington, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.