The joke is on us

The games. Toddler-wedding games. Four or six years – thereabouts. We were that young. In those games, incest was no big deal. It was in fact no deal at all. Sister married brother. Sometimes boys dressed as brides/bridesmaids or girls as grooms/groomsmen in order to perfect the games. They were games. We ate, laughed, danced, cut cake, and did everything else they do on weddings. We would have a priest. A black banana fiber (ekyireere kyirikwiragura) would work for the priest’s cloak (engoro). Fun, fun and fun is what our weddings were.

Fast forward, we have grown. We are not exactly adults, but we are grown. We can’t vote yet, we still stay under our parents’ roofs, but we are not young. The girls do not have flat chests anymore; the boys’ voices have deepened. We are grown-ups. The ‘child’ tag is not appropriate anymore, we tell ourselves.

In this growing, we have gathered a granary of knowledge about adulthood. About what separates children from adults. We have seen some of our mates slip into adulthood. We know how they did it. It did not just happen. It was planned. Meticulously so. Daphne grew into an adult the day she was given away in a traditional ceremony; to a man older than her by so many seasons, some of his first children are the same age as herself. Maurice, our seventeen or eighteen year old neighbor became a man, an adult, when he brought Meresi, a primary six pupil then, into his hut.

We all want to grow. To be adults. But you see, some of us are taking long and longer to grow because of school. We are told that to grow, to marry, to wed, we must first finish school. By finishing school, they mean, we must finish university. Then we can grow. But it is not enough to finish school and university. Those who have indeed finished school and demanded to grow have been told to first make money; to secure a source of livelihood; before they can grow. Before they can marry; before they can wed; before they become adults.

That is how Yakobo and Sulayina outsmarted all of us. Born into well-off families, only mad people can dispute the fact that the couple’s well-being is secure for the next fifty or more years. They do not need education, we hear. They do not need to worry about a source of living, we so hear as well. And so, with those two things out of the way, we hear that they are planning to marry, to wed, to grow.

We laugh it off. See, while we played our games, Yakobo and Sulayina did not play such games. They were busy being brought up responsibly. So, when we hear that these teenagers are going to marry, to wed, we laugh off their late arrival to the scene of these games. To us, it is a game.

While Sulayina walks around heavy with Yakobo’s child in her tummy, we think she is perfecting the game, amending it, making it better. When some child rights officials from an NGO I forget make noise about teenage pregnancies, child marriages etc, we ignore the noise because to us, those things apply only when it is an old man marrying off, impregnating a young girl, the typical Daphne case. The Maurice-Meresi case is a success story, or should be. It is success achieved early, it is not a case for condemning, we tell ourselves.

We treat the Yakobo-Sulayina case as a joke, as a game. We prepare to be spectators on their wedding-game. But we do not see the day of the game. The day comes. But Sulayina does not see it. She dies the day before it comes. She dies of complications with the pregnancy. It does not matter that Yakobo is not as old as her father; it does not matter that the two regard education and wealth as irrelevant to their choices. Sulayina dies. Teenage pregnancies, teenage marriages involving only teenagers, with no force from elders turn the joke onto us. And guess what, the United States of America unites the world as it leads in statistics on teenage pregnancies. Clearly, the joke is on us. It is not just education or poverty. It is also what we think and say about marriage. How we cap out worldview to marriage as the alpha and omega of success, so many teenagers can’t wait to succeed. The expectations suggest there is a reward for being the youngest person to wed ever.