The Sunday News
“I NEVER wanted to get married but I was forced into the union as I was now pregnant and my parents pushed me out of the house to go and stay with my partner.”
These are the tear-jerking words of a young and naive girl who turned 16 in March; she is a victim of child marriage who sees no hope as she feels she has no other option in life.
Born in Inyathi, Bubi district, in 1999, Penelope (not her real name) is the last born in a family of five. She did not sit for her Grade Seven examinations as her family could not afford to pay for her studies. So she just sat at home and watched the sun rise and set without anything productive to do.
Home for Penelope now is Ngozi Mine, a Bulawayo City Council dumpsite which has seen an illegal settlement mushrooming over the years. She and her family have been resident at the mine for the past 14 years and she now has a shack of her own with her 22-year-old husband who is unemployed.
Asked why at the tender age of 15 years she decided to get married, Penelope said she had no option.
“I was 15 years old and I discovered that I was now pregnant and I thought I would just stay at home since I was young but my parents said I should leave and go and stay with my boyfriend. I never wanted to get married at all,” she explained.
A classic case of a child having a child.
She said she left to go and stay with her husband who is a scavenger at Ngozi Mine and who in turn told his parents who reside in Nyamandlovu that he had impregnated his teenage lover and they accepted the new bride.
The innocent looking, small-framed Penelope could hardly sit still as she is nursing a seven-month-old pregnancy and is due to give birth in August. She admitted that she has little knowledge about contraception which is not surprising as she is still a child and issues of sex may not have been explained to her fully as she dropped out of school.
“I know a little about these things and I never thought of using them when I started having sex with my husband and now I am pregnant. I will have this child only though,” she said.
She also revealed that she had no access to contraceptives in the compound as it is an illegal settlement with no health services available.
Penelope’s sister, Phoebe (not her real name), said she was also a victim of an early child marriage in the compound having conceived and unfortunately lost her first child at the age of 15.
“We come from an illegal settlement that everyone in Bulawayo knows about. People look down upon us at school because we come from a dumpsite, so such things demoralise us and we leave school. The next thing is getting married,” she said.
Phoebe said she actually pressed forward with school and reached Form Three but dropped out due to mounting pressure and she subsequently fell pregnant. She said if she had her way she would move out of the settlement and pursue other avenues to eke a living.
An elderly woman from the settlement, who only identified herself as MaDlamini, said the economic pressure on families was fuelling child marriages.
“Parents do not have money to send children to school so they (children) have a lot of idle time and the next thing they do is engage in sexual activities which they know little about and fall pregnant when they are young,” she said.
Penelope’s family once stayed in Bulawayo’s Magwegwe suburb but relocated to Tsholotsho as they could not afford rentals. Life got tough in that end of the country and they later settled at the dumpsite.
“When you stay with relatives there is a lot of talking that happens and that was what happened such that we moved to stay at Ngozi Mine where no one would bother us,” said Phoebe.
Phoebe said she had no national identification card while Penelope has no birth certificate, which means she cannot get documentation for her own child.
The case of these two girls is common in various communities but in some cases is ignored as parents and guardians do not make conscious efforts to protect their children from early marriages.
Although Penelope said her parents forced her to leave home as she was pregnant, Phoebe said they did it out of frustration.
“Ubaba always warned us about our behaviour when we started dating and we never really listened until I got pregnant and he chased me away,” she said.
However, Penelope says if she had her way she was never going to leave home to live with the father of her baby but since she was forced out of home, she just had to go and cohabit.
Penelope said she wished she could go back to school one day and sit for her Grade Seven examinations.
So desperate is her situation that she has no clue as to where her next meal will come from, as she and her husband are unemployed and live on discarded food they find at the dumpsite.
She hopes she will leave the dumpsite and start a small business to fend for her child.
She, however, expressed her concern over child birth saying she was scared of going through labour as she had heard that birthing was a painful experience.
