FORCIBLE MARRIAGE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4956, 16 February 1937, Page 3

FORCIBLE MARRIAGE

South Seas island “Paradise,” marriageable girls are imprisoned under conditions which are worse than the restrictions of a leper colony. . .

Violently protesting -native girla dragged forcibly along the public roads to the marriage mart, there to be sold as wives in exchange for cattle and goats... These, it is claimed, are everyday happenings, the one in one of the world’s loveliest beauty spots in the Pacific, the other in Africa. Organised women of both hemispheres are seeking to end such scandals as these, and all those in other parts of the world where the buying and selling of girls ana women into “marriage”—actually another word for slavery—is “legal” according to native rites. The International Council of Women, which held its assemblies at Doubrovnik, Yugoslavia, last month, immediately after the women’s great peace conference at Brussels, debated the problem. Mui Tsai, so-called dowry systems, and the barter of girls claimed attention, and some startling evidence was submitted. In Yap, an island of Micronesia, South Seas, a stone-age social order exists. Every girl, when she reaches the age of 12 or 13, is confined in the “dopal”—a retreat and a prison. There she must remain for six or eight months until she has reached full womanhood. Then the “mara-fau,” necklace of lemon hibiscus, is placed on her neck. This marks her as marriageable.

Stone Money Marriage consists merely in taking a girl home, when the boy’s family makes a gift of food to the girl’s family, and a piece of stone money passes from the girl’s family to the boy’s. Divorces are frequent, relationships are casual, fidelity is unknown. A man inherits the wives of brothers who die. The boy of ten is expected to live in the All-Men-House from the age of ten until marriage. Yet such is the erratic nature of Yap taboos, that when ten of the loveliest Yay girls were taken to Tokyo to dance at an exhibition, they comported themselves with the precision of strictly brought-up English school-girls, and staunchly rebuffed all would-be admirers. At the London offices of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, details have been received of the case of Kekwe, 18-year-old Tanganyika beauty, whose parents accepted for her a “bride price” from a man for whom she had expressed her aversion. The “bride price” was an agreed number of goats. Kekwe ran away from home and sought shelter in the home of the man she loved. The man who had paid good goats for her companionship traced her and tried to take her away. She was entitled, by tribal custom, to defend herself with a knife, and in the presence of her relatives she stabbed her would-be husband. That gained her freedom from the man she detested —but, unfortunately, the stab proved fatal, and then the White Man’s law stepped' in. Kekwe was accused of manslaughter. She was found guilty and sent to prison for ,18 months.