WIDOWHOOD AND THE WINDOWS OF JUSTICE
The United Nations celebrated the international Widows’ Day on June 23 this year, as every other year. On that day, it was as important as ever to remember and resolve to protect a group that remains vulnerable to shocking human rights violations.
For as long as man has lived, and even longer, death has lived side by side, offering a ceaseless, macabre companionship of cyclopean proportions.
In many ways, to live is to die. This assertion is not only true for human animals but especially for non-human animals, many living things and even for abstract and intangible things like hope, love and joy. That death is such a swift and savage thief is perhaps reinforced by the finality it brings to human life. The consciousness that people will die someday melds with the uncertainty that surrounds the day and even the circumstances of death.
Around the world, for as long as men can remember, death has always come on the wings of so many things too numerous to mention. Disease, conflict, grinding poverty as well as an abundance of other factors make death not just certain for people around the world but common.
While it is true that different countries of the world have different life expectancy depending on a variety of factors, at the end of the day, death is an inescapable necessity.
Around the world, women already lead difficult lives. Along with children, women are a vulnerable group and the unjust targets of some of the worst injustices committed anywhere on earth.
During conflicts, women suffer more than any other group as they have to navigate the dangers and abuses of conflict with providing what little stability their families may enjoy.
But even before full-scale wars break out, women fight wars every day. At home, in the workplace and in public spaces. Indeed, a patriarchal world is one primed to work against women. For those women who lose their husbands anywhere along the line, life immediately takes a swift and savage turn. With the men in their lives and in most cases, their breadwinners leaving the scene, the society invariably turns against them.
In some communities in Africa, upon the deaths of their husbands, many widows do not just have to cope with the unimaginable grief that accompanies their loss but are also subjected to all manner of inhuman and archaic practices.
Sometimes, these practices are supposedly to determine that they did not kill their husbands and at other times, they are to purify them. If that does not sound ridiculous enough, nothing really can.
For widows, the death of their companions and many times their breadwinners is backbreaking enough, and it should be enough agony and trauma. Subjecting them to archaic practices should be completely out of it.
The way some Nigerian communities treat women is in itself a reflection of the horrendous treatment women are subjected to and the way and manner they are perceived by the society as a whole. To correct this, there must be renewed and increased emphasis on the protection of women, especially those of them most vulnerable to abuses of various forms, like widows.
There also must be increased emphasis on the implementation of the laws which protect women in Nigeria. It is only by protecting women as a whole that widows can be sufficiently protected.
These laws which protect women exist but, as usual, they find little implementation in Nigeria owing to the painfully little political will of those who should enforce them. Around the time when the Maputo Protocol on women’s rights is celebrating its 20th year, it is especially important that the protection of women and widows should move from policy and politics to potency.
Across Nigeria, religious organizations and traditional institutions most also take their roles in protecting widows and women most seriously. A gale of unbearable scandal washed over many Nigerians sometimes last year when a video went viral of a widow being paraded naked for supposedly killing her husband in Anambra State.
Ike Willie-Nwobu, Ikewilly9@gmail.com
