'He promised to marry me'

2004-10-26 13:43

Sidai - A pregnant Nigerian teenager will appear before an Islamic court on Wednesday to plead for her life after she was convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.

"I swear by the Koran I never slept with any man but Dauda. He promised to marry me," a terrified 18-year-old Hajara Ibrahim said, choking back tears running down cheeks scarred with Fulani tribal marks.

Hajara is the latest young woman to be swept up into northern Nigeria's stumbling five-year-old attempt gradually to replace the vast region's poorly administered secular criminal justice system with Islam's strict Sharia law.

Nobody has yet been stoned, but dozens have been sentenced to death, and in Hajara's native Bauchi State alone five men and women convicted of various sexual offences are waiting for a chance to appeal their punishment.

Marriage was never consummated

Hajara's case has been taken up by rights lawyers and she has plausible grounds for appeal: since her marriage was never consummated, her relationship with her boyfriend Dauda ought not to be considered adultery.

The appeal has given Hajara more hope, but the tears still flowed as she told how she came to lose her husband and her boyfriend and end up back home, seven months pregnant and with a death sentence over her head.

She was promised to a man in a city two states and 220km away, but instead fell for a local boy, Dauda Sani.

"I was married to a man in Lafia, but before I moved into his house Dauda came with the promise to marry me which made me insist on dissolving the marriage," Ibrahim said, dabbing her eyes with the edge of her veil.

"After he promised to marry me, I submitted myself to him and this is the result," she explained, patting her womb, the heavy bulge clear through her modest robe because of her short stature.

It could be the sad story of an unexpected teenage pregnancy anywhere in the world, but in northern Nigeria the sequence of events is crucial.

Conviction of fornication is better

If the court decides that Hajara had been married to the man from Lafia before she had sex with Dauda - irrespective whether or not she was divorced - then she is guilty of adultery and must be stoned to death.

If, on the other hand, she can be considered an unmarried virgin then she is guilty simply of fornication and could escape with 100 lashes of a cane.

"Being married is not enough. The marriage has to be consummated before an extra-marital affair becomes adultery. That is what Islam prescribes," said Hajara's 44-year-old father, Ibrahim Auta Iman, an Arabic teacher.

Whatever Hajara's eventual fate, her former lover has nothing to fear but his conscience. When he was accused of being the father of the young woman's child Dauda denied ever having had relations with her.

- AFP