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“My mum told me that my uncle had given me away in marriage without letting her know,” Hadiza says. “She then showed me tins of coke and sweets and said that it was for my wedding’s Fatiha. Then I started to cry too.”
At this time her father was away working in the Ouaga area as a truck driver. Hadiza’s uncle – her father’s younger brother – had arranged the marriage without telling anyone.
He owed money to the father of the man Hadiza was due to marry, but had no way of paying the debt. So he gave away Hadiza’s hand in marriage to settle the score.
As a young girl who loved school, Hadiza knew this marriage would be the end of her education. Looking back on this time, she says: “My childhood was like a broken dream because my dreams never came true.”
She desperately wanted to escape the marriage, so two days after being told the news, Hadiza ran away from her family and hid in the woods. After three days alone, “so exhausted that [she] couldn’t speak”, a local fisherman spotted her and took her back to the city.
Her brother had been searching for her, and on hearing that a girl had been found in the woods went to bring her home.
Hadiza was soon married to the older man who immediately told her she could no longer go to school. The teenager tried hiding again, but soon realised she couldn’t keep running.
“My uncle told my mum, he even called me, and he said that if I refused to accept the marriage, that meant that my mum had pushed me into refusing it so my mum would have to leave the house too.
“My dad wasn’t there and if they had gone after my mum, my sisters’ lives would have been ruined. So that’s why I accepted to stay. I sacrificed myself for the wellbeing of my brothers and sisters.”
Hadiza’s husband took her over a thousand kilometres away from Tillaberi to Agadez, where the relationship would become even more controlling.
“My mum cried for two weeks straight,” Hadiza says. “She even had problems with her eyes as a result.”
Living in this new home in Agadez, her husband began to hit her, and would go long periods of time without feeding her.
Every night after they arrived he would try and have sex with her, and when she refused she would be beaten.
“As soon as your wife is given over to you, the very night that she is given to you, you have to touch her,” Hadiza says. “The day that he took my virginity, a shameful thing to do, he was accompanied by his four friends. His four friends held me down as he took my virginity from me.”
With no friends or family near, Hadiza would regularly sleep in the local station to escape the abuse, and go to neighbour’s houses for food. During this time, she became pregnant – a child that would go on to be stillborn.
After three years of marriage, and having a second child who survived, Hadiza was able to escape her husband and move to Niamey. Rather than moving back in with her mother, she lived with her maternal uncle so her husband would not be able to find her.
“He’s the one that tells me to not go back to Tillaberi because even if I go back, the guy is going to come after me.”
While living with her uncle, Hadiza met a representative from the UNFPA, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency. She became an ambassador, learnt to read and write, and met a woman through the organisation who helped her go back to school. She is also involved in the Sarraounia project implemented by Enabel which is part of the Belgian development agency. The project works to keep girls in school and offer them an alternative to early marriage.
“I went back to year 9 and was luckily top of the class. I carried on to year 10 and was top of the class too.” Hadiza went on to not only graduate from high school, but at 23 is now in the final year of a professional diploma in electronics, as well as continuing to work for non-profits helping young women in Niger.
“I will carry on studying in Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria or Morocco as there are no schools here in Niger where I can study electronics.”
Despite her determination to study, and her previous traumatic marriage, there is still pressure on Hadiza to get remarried.
“Last year, my dad told me that I had to get married. I told him no, that I didn’t need to get married now. I told him that I am going to carry on studying until I finish my studies.”
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Islam, for me, is a way of life and the core of my world. As a Muslim woman I have always been encouraged to be who I want to be.
I get frustrated when people say: “Why do you wear a hijab? Isn’t that a sign of women’s oppression?” I choose to wear a hijab; I choose to be an educated and liberated woman and I choose to follow Islam.
Islam states that a woman’s purpose for existence is not to serve any other human beings or be subjugated by any other person.
I recently visited Niger, where up to 98% of the population is Muslim. The country also has the world’s highest child marriage rate, with three out of four girls married before the age of 18. Key drivers for this are poverty, local customs, tradition and lack of education.
Niger is the fifth poorest country in the world, and I saw for myself acute signs of poverty. I spoke to families who told me how they gave up their daughters for early marriage because they were struggling to feed or protect them, let alone send them to school. Girls suffer more than boys. Only 15% of women in Niger aged 15 to 24 are literate, compared with 30% of men.
In Loga, 140km east of the capital Niamey, I met Mariama*, who was given up for marriage at the age of 12. Traumatised, she escaped on the night of her wedding and fled to the house of Maimouna Djibrila, a volunteer working with Islamic Relief. She of all people understood what Mariama was going through. She too had been given away for early marriage to a cousin, and had a very difficult time.
Maimouna worked with several organisations, Mariama’s school, the police and both families to get the marriage annulled. Unfortunately, two years later (a month before our visit), her father was trying to marry off Mariama again.
Early and forced marriage is a contentious subject in Niger. The country has signed up to international treaties that set a minimum age of marriage of 18. However, the legal age of marriage is 15 for girls and 18 for boys. There have been ongoing discussions in parliament to make sure that the national law respects the international treaties, but this has not yet happened.
Even if the law changes, it is unlikely that child marriage will stop overnight. It is entrenched in the culture in Niger. I want to be clear on this: this is not an Islamic issue, but a cultural issue.
For any change to happen, it has to happen at community level. Islamic Relief is training community and faith leaders, such as Imams and village chiefs, about the importance of women’s rights and child protection.
Imams are vital in this campaign. I witnessed imams preaching about the rights of women and children in their Friday sermons, known as khutbas. They pointed out that the Qur’an states it is not lawful for men to inherit their wives by force, or for parents to let their children be harmed in any way. And how a successful marriage according to Islam promotes love, tranquillity and mercy between husbands and wives.
The latter is particularly important, given the high levels of domestic violence in the country. An estimated 15.6% of women experience some form of sexual violence or harassment.
I met Adama in Loga, who was raped by an extended family member when she was 15 and then ostracised by her family for giving birth to his child outside marriage. She was kicked out of the house while pregnant. Maimouna convinced Adama’s mother to help her, and now she too is being ostracised by the family. It was heartbreaking listening to Adama. She told me that she has been reduced to begging for food and is insulted every day. I could see the pain in her eyes as she recounted her story.
It infuriated me to see Adama treated in this way, and to see so many young girls being forced into early marriage. Allah commands us to protect the honour of women, and the Qu’ran clearly states that violence against women and girls, in any shape or form, is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in the UK; it is not acceptable in Niger.
Adama’s story and many others I heard in Niger have fired me up in support of Islamic Relief’s #HonourHer campaign, which is working towards a global Islamic declaration of gender justice – a call to action against gender inequality from an Islamic faith perspective – to be launched later this year. I will use my voice to play an active part in this.
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