Parents Sell Girls As Child Brides

South African girls as young as 14 are being abducted and forced into marriages from hell under the pretext of the age-old custom of ukuthwalwa.

Ukuthwalwa (literally, ‘to be carried') traditionally allowed parents to arrange the marriage of their children, but was never intended to violate the rights of children, experts say.

Traditional experts and senior government officials have expressed outrage that the custom - abandoned as far back as the '60s - was still in use in the Eastern Cape villages of Lusikisiki, Bizana and Flagstaff.

The Sunday Times this week spoke to dozens of young girls who had been set up - sometimes with the help of their families - to be kidnapped, locked up in guarded huts and forced to have unprotected sex with strangers who had suddenly become their husbands.

A place of safety, Palmerton, has been set up by OR Tambo municipality's executive mayor Zoleka Capa in Lusikisiki, to deal with the many girls who flee at the first opportunity.

Since January more than 31 girls between the ages of 14 and 16 have found refuge there.

Capa was alerted to the problem when her own daughter, while driving through KwaCele in January, came upon a hysterical 14-year-old who had just run away.

The girl begged to be saved from a group of men chasing her after she escaped from a hut where she had been kept under guard. Capa said the child had pleaded not to be taken home and said she "did not want to marry a madala (old man) - all she wanted was to go to school".

The 14-year-old was lucky to escape before being "made a woman," said Capa.

This week the Sunday Times spoke to several young girls at Palmerton. In most cases, they had been kidnapped with the help of their parents; beaten if caught trying to escape; and, if they managed to get away, disowned for defying tradition.

One girl, from KwaCele, told how - when she was just 14 - she had been sent by her mother to collect a parcel from a neighbour, only to find she had been duped into going to a house where two men were waiting to take her away, to marry a 24-year-old man who was not known to her.

"I screamed and told them to let me go, but they told me to shut up as my husband was waiting for me," she said.

She was thrown into a hut and watched closely by the two men, but managed to escape a day later and went home. Here she was puzzled by her mother's indifference to her ordeal.

That night she was woken by four men, who abducted her.

"I screamed until my voice went faint.. . my mother did not do a thing," she said, tears streaming down her face. Her "husband's" family had paid three sheep as lobolo.

"It feels like I was sold like a slave and that my mother doesn't love me."

She said that, three days after this abduction, " elders shoved us (her and the man) into a hut and told me how this man was now going to make me his wife. . . It was painful. I cried for days," she said.

Another girl was an orphan when she was kidnapped, also at the age of 14, from her aunt's home and forced to marry a 48-year-old man.

The girl, now 17 years old, said: "I cried; this man could have been my father and he was so frail and sickly."

She fell pregnant a month after her abduction and took care of her son while the "malume" (uncle) disappeared to Durban. Her son turned two last month.

Capa said the girls were being violated in the worst possible way, under the guise of ukuthwalwa.

"No child should be subjected to such evil deeds," said Capa.

Last month former minister in the Presidency Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and former minister of social development Zola Skweyiya travelled to the area to investigate the situation.

The newly appointment minister of women, youth, children and the disabled, Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, has been briefed on the matter. Her department is in discussions with the Human Rights Commission, the Department of Social Development and the House of Traditional Leaders to deal with the abuse of ukuthwalwa.

"This issue is a priority for the minister who has made it very clear that injustices to women and children are a grave concern that will receive immediate attention," said her spokesman, Lionel Adendorf.

The chairman of the Ngquzu municipality house of traditional leaders, chief Advocate Mdutshane, said the custom had been abandoned in the '60s. The current practice amounted to rape, he said, in which girls were violated in the "most horrific" way.

"We are very concerned about this. We think the problem is much bigger."

Mdutshane said in most cases the men were between 55 and 70 years old, widowed and HIV-positive - and believed that sex with a virgin would cure them.

In South Africa, 16 is the legal age of consent. Children aged 15 and under have to get permission from the minister of home affairs to marry.

Lisa Vetten, a researched and policy analyst at the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to End Violence Againt Women in Johannesburg said parents who forced their underage children into marriage could be charged with sexual exploitation if they benefited, for example, by accepting payment or lobolo.

Those who partake in the abduction can be charged with kidnapping, and the husband charged with rape, Vetten said.

But KwaCele's chief, Constance Cele, denied that young girls were forcibly married, and lashed out at the girls who had escaped for "embarrassing our village".She claimed to have received only one complaint, which was "resolved" when brought to her attention.