Our Moslem Sisters / A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It

by Unknown

I was once sitting in my compound when a well-covered and veiled woman came to see me, with the excuse that she wanted medicine. After some conversation I found it was trouble that had brought her. She had been for some years loved by her husband but had had no children; so her husband had married another wife and disliked her now, and she wanted medicine from me to make him love her again! She begged me never to mention that she had come to me, saying that her husband would certainly beat her nearly to death if he knew that she had come out, and much more so if he knew she had come to me.

The ease with which all Hausa women, but specially those of the middle and lower classes, can obtain divorce for almost any reason; also the frequency with which they can obtain redress for cruelty from their husbands in the native courts, gives them power and a position in the community not to be despised. A man, for instance, in order to get a girl of sixteen years in marriage will pay her parents a sum of perhaps ten or twelve pounds. If at any future time she desires to leave him and marry another man, she can do so by swearing before the native courts that they have quarrelled and that she no longer wishes to live with him. But if that is all she merely gets a paper of divorce and either herself or her next husband has to refund to the aggrieved former husband the sum originally paid for her. If, however, she can prove violence or injury from her husband she has not to pay him anything, but may even in some cases get damages.

A girl is usually given the option of refusing the man whom her parents have arranged for her to marry. This is not often done, but I have known of some cases in which the girl has availed herself of the privilege, and stated that she prefers some one else, in which case the engagement is broken and the new marriage arranged at once with the man of her choice.

In the villages, and among the lower classes in the cities, girls are not usually married until they are about sixteen. Frequently, however, among the higher and wealthier classes the engagement is made by the parents when she is much younger, perhaps eleven or twelve, and she is after that confined with some strictness to the house or else carefully watched.

There is a very vicious and terribly degrading habit amongst the Hausas, which is known as "Tsaranchi." One cannot give in a word an English equivalent and one does not desire to describe its meaning. It has the effect of demoralizing most of the young girls and making it almost certain that very few girls of even eleven or twelve have retained any feelings of decency and virtue.

In this the girls are deliberately the tempters, and many boys and young men are led into sin who would not have sought it. Here one must not blame the women or the girls, for the original sin is with the men, who, through the terribly degrading system of polygamy and slave concubinage, have introduced since centuries that which destroys the purity of the home, and makes it impossible for the children to grow up clean-minded. It is a sad fact that the evil effect of this seems to have acted more on the women and children than on the men.

One feels sorely for the boys brought up in this land without a glimpse of purity in true home life; with never a notion of a woman being the most holy and chaste and beautiful of all God's creation, and never seeing even the beauty of girlhood purity.

One is glad to see that among many of the men there is a growing feeling that they have lost much in this way; and often in talking to men on the subject of women and their naturally depraved condition, I have shown them how, where women are given the place God meant them to have in the home and in the social and religious life of a people, their character is always the most regenerating thing in the life of a nation, and that it is useless for them to wish their women to be different when they do everything to prevent the possibility. With the boys in my own compound and under my own care I am bound to forbid all intercourse with girls because of their evil minds and influence. Of course such a thing is fearfully unnatural and cuts off from a boy's life all those influences which we in Christian lands consider so much tend to strengthen and deepen and soften his character.

It is easy to see from the above the reason why amongst those who are careful to preserve a semblance of chastity, the girls are carefully secluded from a tender age and not allowed outside their compounds except under exceptional circumstances, until the time that they are about to be taken to the house of the man to whom they have been betrothed.

This preservation of virtue by force, points to the fact that there is no public opinion; no love of purity for its own sake; no real and vital principle in Islam which tends to preserve and build up purity.