The 3rd edition of the International Day of Widows was commemorated over the weekend. Reject and neglect! These words best describe the situation of most widows in Cameroon. Besides the psychological and emotional stress the majority of female widows’ face in the community after the passing away of their husbands, regular obnoxious traditional widowhood rites have denied these women basic human rights to better livelihood.
Widows are not only deprived from inheriting their husbands properties but are also subjected to untold hardship and torture such as sleeping on the bare floor, moving bare footed, going for days with neither food nor water, not allowed to take a bath or have a change of clothing or even shake hands with somebody else, all in the name of widowhood rituals. This is why the International Day of Widows this year focused on “acting together to end discriminatory practices and customs against widows”.
It might seem not real to many people, but it is true although absurd to note that some widows in this 21st Century have become a subject of discussion and argument amongst their brothers-in-law over who will inherit her as a wife after the death of their brother. Such is the case with Mary Taka-Tanni, a widow based in Yaounde from the Pinyin clan in the Santa Sub-division of the North West Region. Mary said after the death of her husband, she saw how her brothers-in-law started discussing on who is fit to marry her because tradition demands that one of them inherits her. Mary Taka-Tanni said in the midst of all that mess, she told one of her brothers-in-law: “are you drunk to think that you can marry me.”
Another dilemma Mary noticed was that of inheritance. She said immediately her husband died one of her in-laws entered her bedroom and started ramshackling papers looking for properties her husband had left. As president of the Widows Outreach Association of the Presbyterian Church Etoug-Ebe, Yaounde, Mary Taka-Tanni says the widows do not only feel rejected and neglected but are deprived of sources of livelihood by disinheriting them of farmland, houses and other property left by their late husbands, and even sometimes forcing them to get married to people they have never loved. Mary says she was able to stop her in-laws from inheriting her but other widows were not fortunate to do so.
Like most widows in Cameroon, another widow (names withheld), who was accused of killing her husband and asked to marry her brother-in law or leave her husband`s home, said her widowhood period was horrific as she spent nights on the floor in the same room with the corpse alone, obliged to wail every 5:30 am, place the hands continuously across the shoulders, forced to dance naked or half naked, had to go for days without bathing, had to be served food on a leaf on the ground and forced to be bathed and shaved by older women in a village stream.
