Travails of an Africa village girl child

In Africa, every day is a struggle for even the most basic of life’s requirements, from food to clothing, bedding to shelter, and healthcare. It is one of the worst places in which to grow up as a child. But it is even worse for the girl-child, one more so in the village.

First, chances are high; you are born into a polygamous family - one which came about in large part because of you! Your mother, likely the first of your father’s three wives was unable to, or delayed to give birth to the more treasured male children.

The experiment with two or three more wives grew the family into a kraal of over a dozen siblings. And now you have to share one ramshackle grass thatched room, maybe even a bed, with your male siblings.

You are only 12, but every morning, you must wake first to set the cook stones and set the wood on fire. Almighty papa prefers to bath with warm water. And that has to be ready before he belches his way out of bed and off to the market to drink away the day with his peers.

Next you have to put the kidney beans on fire to boil away until the water lowers down to soup. No need to worry for cooking oil or tomatoes. Those are not necessary. Meanwhile you shortly get down to prepare and mingle the accompanying truckload of bread – a gummy blend of millet and cassava flour- for the whole extended family of over 2 dozens. Not that it is to be eaten early morning, not by any chance! Meal time (one of the two meals of the day) is strictly at 1 PM.

Preparation must however start much earlier. The Aluminum source pan you use for mingling is way too small, and you have to go through four or five rounds of mingling if the bread is to be sufficient for everyone. Of course should meal time come, and the food is short, the loss is yours. You will have to surrender your portion for others and, depending on the mood of the day, to re-mingle for yourself, otherwise, you miss out altogether, and you will be lucky to get away without a few canes for being badly brought up by your lazy mother!

Meanwhile, besides preparing food, in between morning and meal time, you do the laundry, for Papa and your male siblings, and fetch water from a water spring over 3 km uphill away in the next village. That water is to be used by the whole extended family for bathing, for cooking, and drinking.

So to reduce on the number of to and fro rounds it takes you to fetch enough water to be used on that day, you make sure to carry a 20 liter metal can, and not on anything but on your head. The effect on your hair shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as you really don’t have braids.

Thus is constructed your daily routine of chore after chore. It basically means that you are home all through. Do you have dreams? Of course you do. You admire and want to grow up to be a nurse, a doctor or something about those women and men in white clothes at the health center who routinely treat you of malaria. Or may be like the politician who drives a big car and comes once a month to host a village eating party.

But that requires school. And talking of school. The direct and indirect costs mean that only your eldest brother attends school and the rest hang around playing, between the market square very early in the morning and home sometime nearing the lunch hour and again back to the market square after lunch. With good luck, some distant uncle or aunt will someday come around, maybe during the December Festive season, and decide to assume the responsibility of paying for another of your brothers.

License: Creative commons: Photo Credit: Laura Pannack/Oxfam/

How about you? Well. Don’t even get started on that. You are a girl. School for what? Your work is to take care of the homestead, and its chores, and the toddlers. It is to learn how to be a good wife, a good mother. If you happen to attend school it is only the lower levels, and only as you bide time to grow the two humps on your chest. You are as ripe, as old as their size. And that should make you ready for your ultimate purpose, your highest mission as a woman, which is to marry and give birth to children.

And you better hurry up and grow those breasts, and become a woman! It is your only your redeeming advantage as a female. In return for your hand in marriage, the family will receive dowry (cattle, goats).

That is wealth for the family, part of which will be used for, on the other hand paying dowry for your brothers’ marriage, with the rest rather than being sold to fund the education of your younger sisters, instead kept in the Kraal for prestige.

Obviously the future is grim. You hear of places beyond, of towns and cities, and videos and cars…but your reality is way too near, way too urgent, you quickly grow out of those fantasies as fast as you grow older and riper for marriage.

Now there is pressure, from home as from the neighborhood. Your childhood friend got married last week. Another just yesterday. Your own younger sister was taken only recently. What are you still doing in your father’s compound instead of your own compound? At the village water well, disapproving glances are cast your way, giggles go off behind you when you walk past a group of other women……the girl who has failed to get married….And so you pray, you hope for some sort of salvation. .

Some men in suits and ties came around the other day, registering your peers apparently to go and study in the city, but you don’t even have the lowest qualification. If anything, they ask for registration fees which again you don’t have, and which papa won’t hear of. And you are not even sure that they are genuine, and/or will not take you to the city to join a prostitution cartel. Rumors to that end are ripe.

And so your torment continues. Any small mistake at home and you are reminded of why you should be in your own home. The pressure mounts on, and you start to realize that maybe, just maybe it’s a hopeless wait, a fruitless hope…but no, just a little while longer, may be something good will come, they say you have a distant uncle in the city. You think if he comes, you could leave with him, and off to a new life.

But days run, the clock ticks on, and nothing…..your faith in God is stretched. Suddenly the village drunk who said God is too busy in other parts of the world seems to have a point….because of anything, by the time he makes it to your far village, your fate will have been sealed - married away to a 45 year old at 16 years, likely as a second or third wife…

And so it is, that from dreams of becoming a nurse, you end up becoming a housewife. From youthful dreams of marrying a tall broad shouldered husband, you end up with a stout bald head of a man too short; he has to stand on a stool to kiss you! Okay, that is an exaggeration, as there is really no such thing as ‘kissing’. But yes, you ended up with him not because you really wanted to, but because he was the once who offered more cattle.

Not long, and you have your own children, one per year…by the time you make age 24 or thereabout, seven kids on the trot, you are lucky if someone does not mistake you for being 42 years old.

Now every day, you sit and look back on your life's journey from dreams to dread. Yesterday is gone. Today is hard. How will tomorrow be? Your circle is almost complete, and now you have to wonder what fate awaits your children. Will they be fortunate? Or will they continue your unfortunate lineage?

What do you want to be, when you grow up? You ask your eldest daughter. Nurse! Lawyer!....she innocently says - the same things you fantasized about. But then you look back on your own life, the early days of similar dreams, and then of what became...Inside you, you are thinking something like: God, She doesn't deserve this! And to your knees, you go down in prayer, God has to hear this time, He has to be near this time!