BEHIND THE VEIL

Chris Aikoshoria Omiyi

Description

Behind the veil chronicles the sad evil of forced child marriages, the tragedy of Almajiri a system where children are born to this world and abandoned to fend for themselves, sex trafficking and terrorism in Nigeria. It unveils a wicked system of man’s inhumanity to man at its worst case.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse UK
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798823084048
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BEHIND THE VEIL
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHRIS AIKOSHORIA OMIYI
 
 
 
 

 
AuthorHouse™ UK
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403 USA
www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: UK TFN: 0800 0148641 (Toll Free inside the UK)
UK Local: (02) 0369 56322 ([phone] from outside the UK)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2023 Chris Aikoshoria Omiyi. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  07/27/2023
 
ISBN: 979-8-8230-8403-1 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-8404-8 (e)
 
 
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
CONTENTS
Prologue
 
Chapter 1     Agony at its peak
Chapter 2     Follies in families
Chapter 3     The long-wait
Chapter 4     The Almajiris: anger and hunger
Chapter 5     Frying pan to fire
Chapter 6     Light in the tunnel
Chapter 7     Barbarian and primitivism
Chapter 8     The turning points
Chapter 9     The struggle, the fight
 
Epilogue
Glossary of Terms
PROLOGUE
One day she is a child, the next day she is a forced bride. Brutal reality of many under-aged children of the female gender in Africa with majority coming from Nigeria. Voiceless victims of stolen innocence and then abandoned to suffer the consequence, Viscos Vaginal Fistula, while others are left vulnerable for human trafficking.
Infant male, called Almajiri , intentionally abandoned by parents, scorned by society and abused by politicians. Born to suffer, denied of parental love at infancy, taken to unknown destination far from his place of birth to be religiously indoctrinated at childhood; given a plate as tool for survival to beg for alms to survive, then gets above the age of begging to survive, for lack of nothing to do, takes his destiny in his hand, reluctantly throws the plate away and overnight turns into a beast with gun in his quiver. A bandit and violent criminal!
The summary of their lives is thus ‘childhood a mistake, adulthood a struggle, old age a regret.’
This book is a true story chronicling the societal atrocities meted against the girl child who becomes a bride as early as eight years old and the young boys who are left to fend for themselves as soon as they begin to walk. Nigeria, the largest country in Africa, has the largest number of child brides and abandoned boys. The practice is most prevalent in the predominantly Muslim north where conservative Islamic groups and the state legislators staunchly resist efforts to criminalize child marriage and the infant male, popularly called Almajiri, who are left to fend for themselves beginning from the age of four. An obviously evil system created to refuse and smash the innocent male children of their childhood. These practices are justified by cultural beliefs instigated by the myopic and uninformed position of religion. When evil hides behind tradition, culture and religion, things get complicated and extremely difficult to correct, and then things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. It is a cultural manipulation wrapped under religious ambience, holding strong to nonsensical traditions in conflict with modernity which puts the female gender in perpetual servitude and bondage.
Behind the veil is a book with sordid tale of the creation of Almajiri system. A system that deliberately creates a class of people denied of moral instructions, persuaded to use violence as a means of resolving differences, denied of education, born without parentage and put on the street to beg for alms without any emotional attachment to family, loyal to no system but a defender of a long outstanding trading of begging for their uninformed teachers.
Behind the veil also gives experiential exposure of sex slave and human trafficking of Nigerian ladies, majorly in Libya and Europe.
I see many evil in the land of AFRICA, but four evils irk me the most. First is child marriage, second is the Almajiri system, third is woman trafficking for sex slavery, and fourth is banditry created by the system itself– the harbinger of poverty. This is the face of BEHIND THE VEIL.

CHAPTER ONE
Agony at its peak
It was twenty minutes past the hour of fifteen on a very sunny Monday afternoon. The average temperature of the sun is 42 degree Celsius, so many school children were walking bare footed on the undulating dusty road leading to the main market. Behind the main market is a residential quarter, the actual destination of the school children. The residences are shanties scattered carelessly with no particular formation and heaps of dirt makes the sign post for the quarters, one of the largest slums in the vicinity. Among these students trekking under the unfriendly sun is Fatima Garuba, a prodigious child, and even the best brain the community school has ever seen. Her house stands gallantly beside the slum adjacent to the main market.

 
The shanties
Few minutes later, Fatima, the twenty -seventh child of Mallam Abdullah Garuba galumphed into the compound, with pain written all over her face. She saw her father pointed to her and telling the visitors with pride,
‘That is the girl. A ripe one as you can see!’
He spoke rapidly in the native Hausa language. Fatima, pretending not to have heard him, greeted everybody and went into her room, hoping it was not what she was thinking.
“Hope these people have not come here for any marriage rubbish talk”, she thought within herself. Her worst fear is marrying as a child; the fear which grows rapidly in her mind, caused by series of ugly experiences from her immediate family and neighbors. Her best friend and elementary school mate, Aisha, an extremely brilliant girl like her, who followed Fatima behind in class positions. While the former would always have the second or third position, the latter would, without doubt always come out first. On one Monday morning, “A dry one”, as Fatima would always bitterly recollect, the news filtered into the classroom that Aisha would not be coming to school again because she got married the previous Friday. The news spread round the school like wild fire causing seizure of pains on the students, especially her friends. Aisha was only eleven years old when she was forced into marriage. All her hopes of a good life was tied to the whims and caprices of her husband who was 57 years old. The major catalyst of her forced marriage was humiliating poverty which was an aftermath of her father marrying so many women he could not afford to take care of.
When she asked her mother about school, and pouring out her desire to excel in her academics and her aspiration and dreams to become a lawyer, the mother solemnly replied,
‘The same man who will marry you will take you to school.’
But when she got married, she was denied her right to education. It became an imposed duty to take care of her husband, something she never bargained for. Fatima could not fathom how an eleven year old girl, an intimate friend and classmate, a small girl like Aisha will take care of a fifty seven year polygamist and a pedophile.
Aisha’s mother, on her part, nurtured her pain to herself. She was perplexed, she dared not speak out against the practice. She was only burdened in her heart that her baby daughter who can hardly take care of herself will be having new responsibilities as a wife. Sadly and amazingly, she discovered that few months into the marriage, her daughter was pregnant. She was hurt when she discovered she was pregnant, at least the husband would have waited a little for the young Aisha to mature. Her daughter has joined the league of motherhood. Aisha, like her mother, has become a victim. A victim of forced marriage and motherhood at an unripe age. What a vicious circle. Like her daughter, Aisha’s mother remembered how she suffered the same fate, how she had no interest in marriage at that time. An innocent child who was very studious, hoping that one day she would become a medical doctor. She had wanted to achieve her dreams before marriage would come into view but her father forcedly sold her off to a man too old to be her father. Her father, an Imam, insisted she must marry a man she never met before and of course she was nervous and scared. She cried her way to her new home because she was too tender to experience the abandonment of her parents and did not know where she was being taken to. She remembered she got married sixteen years ago. She thinks she was fifteen; she didn’t know her husband’s age. ‘Had she been given the privilege to speak, she would have begged her father to give her the grace to graduate from post-primary school before he gave her to the man, her said husband.
‘Hmm… Aisha is too young,’ she would constantly say to herself. Now it’s no longer her fate but her daughter’s.
‘One thing I secretly used to think is that our life would change for the better when Aisha married Alhaji Haruna. Now even the dream that I had that my other children would live a good life is turning out to be a myth. Is my hope for Aisha’s marriage not shattered?’
To her, marrying out Aisha at eleven years was bad but gett