By, Kike, front page blogger on Amplify

Gender discrimination, an ill that still festers in various recesses of our society. Even today we find that every woman has and is still suffering one form of gender discrimination or the other. This is an interview of a young lady who has suffered this in no small way. Her name and certain other facts have been withheld for obvious reasons.

Question: Could you please say where you are from?

Answer: I am from Bida, in Minna, Niger state. I am 19 years old.

Question: Tell us a bit about your family background?

Answer: My father had two wives who didn’t produce sons for him so he married my mum as his third wife. After my elder sister, myself and my younger sister, my mum gave birth to a boy.

Question: Why did your father insist on having a boy?

Answer: From where I come from it is viewed as a sign of weakness if a man had no sons so my dad had to have a son at all cost. In the village we stay in huts which are in compounds.

Each man would have a compound and he and each of his wives would stay in separate huts within the compound.

Question: So when did you start school and what happened?

Answer: I started school early, I don’t really remember when. What I do remember is that when I was about 4 years old my father came to the school I was attending with a cane and beat me terribly. I remember that I had not done anything wrong and even my mother didn’t know that he did that. My dad felt it was “useless” to educate female children.

Question: So you left school?

Answer: No I continued. He repeated the beatings 3 other times. When he did it the last time he insisted that my name be removed from the registers, exercise books and so on.

Question: What did the school authorities say?

Answer: They couldn’t do much, he is my father. Though my teacher at that time tried to convince him but he didn’t agree.

Question: Where was your mother in all this?

Answer: She couldn’t object because of fear.

Question: What happened next?

Answer: My father inherited a fourth wife from his dead brother. She already had two sons. One of my step sisters had to go and work as a help to pay for the education of one of the boys. He is now in his final year in the university. After I stopped schooling, I used to just play about with other girls in the community. A lot of them then started going to other states to work as helps, so I decided I wanted to go as well.

Question: How old were you when you started working as a domestic?
Answer: 8 years. I worked with my first mistress for 6 years before I returned home.
Question: So what happened back at home?

Answer: My younger sister had fallen ill and needed medical attention, so all the money I was paid in those 6 years went into paying for drugs and medical bills. But she still died.

Question: What then happened next?

Answer: I was fourteen at that time. It is customary that when a girl goes to her husband’s house that she goes with a box with clothes and other belongings, also she is to fend for herself and her home for the first year in the marriage. So I decided to go and work again to gather money for that purpose. And I worked for 4 years with another mistress.

Question: Was there ever any case of abuse or beatings?

Answer: No. All my mistresses were good to me.

Question: So what are you doing now?

Answer: Am working with another family here in Abuja. I plan to learn how to sew before I return back home. I already know how to plait hair.
 
As I interviewed this young lady I wondered how different the picture would have been if she had been “allowed” an education. More disheartening is the thought that a female child would be considered so undeserving of enlightenment and education that she would be used as a domestic so that she could earn money for the male children’s education, how sad. She has been fortunate to have worked with good people, imagine the countless others who not only are deprived of quality education but are abused in various ways by their employers. A mind, whether female or male, is an amazing tool capable of tremendous things under the right circumstances. It is criminal and evil to consider a person unworthy of education, enlightenment and the many other RIGHTS just because she is a woman.

Kike is a front page blogger on Amplify and a member of the International Youth Speak Out program in Nigeria