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After having sex with her new husband, the 34-year-old discovered
she had syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to
blindness and stroke if untreated.
"He accused me of infidelity. He called a meeting of our families
and told them I was a prostitute," she said tearfully, fiddling with
the gold wedding ring from her first marriage.
"Everyone accused me of being a witch and said it was me who had
killed my husband ... my stepmother threatened to kill me," added
Clarisse, who fled with her daughter to the outskirts of Douala,
where she lives in an old wooden shack on a riverbank.
Millions of widows in sub-Saharan Africa are left destitute after
being disinherited and robbed of their property, women's rights
campaigners said ahead of International Widows' Day on Thursday.
Many, like Clarisse, are abused and exploited by their in-laws,
forced to undergo cleansing rituals or marry one of their husband's
relatives in a practice known as widow inheritance.
Traditional cleansing rituals are intended to rid a widow of her
husband's spirit. In some communities widows are forced to have sex
with a stranger, in others they have to clean their husband's corpse
and then drink the dirty water.
Widow inheritance, cleansing rites and the eviction of women from
their homes are fuelling the transmission of HIV across the
continent, and may have contributed to the spread of the world's
worst Ebola outbreak in West Africa, experts say.
"Widows are damned if they go through the rituals and damned if they
don't," Karen Brewer of Widows Rights International (WRI) told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from London.
"If you accept these inhumane and degrading rituals, you run the
risk of disease. If you don't, you are condemned for not saying
goodbye to your husband, and are abused and ostracized."
HIV THREAT
Widows across Africa are often kicked out of their homes by their
in-laws because national and community laws do not allow them to
inherit their husband's property, or because women do not know if
they have rights to the land, campaigners say.
In Cameroon's capital Yaounde, Berthe sits outside her flimsy house,
watching her two sons play football as she recalls the beautiful
home they lived in before her husband's death.
After the funeral last year, her husband's brother and sister asked
Berthe if they could see the deeds for the house.
Without thinking, the newly widowed mother handed them over. A year
later she was told the house had been sold.
"When I threatened to complain, they beat me nearly to death -
saying I was just a poor woman married to a rich man," said Berthe,
who now carries facial scars and walks with a limp.
Fearing the consequences, many widows decide not to pursue their
land rights, said lawyer Yveline Ntanfa Bandji, director of the
Douala-based Women's Counselling and Information Center.
Yet widows are entitled to live on their late husband's land until
they die, and their children, not the in-laws, are the legal heirs,
she said.
With no income or possessions, widows forced out of their homes are
vulnerable to rape and may resort to selling sex to survive, putting
them at greater risk of HIV, experts say.
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Many women in Africa are widowed very young after marrying much
older men. If they cannot support their children they may in turn
marry off their own daughters early, said Bethany Brown, an expert
on widows at Human Rights Watch.
"There is a vicious cycle of widowhood and early marriage -
impoverishment among widows is a major factor in perpetuating child
marriage," she added.
NEGLECTED
There are more than 258 million widows worldwide, nearly 10 percent
of whom live in sub-Saharan African, according to the Loomba
Foundation's 2015 World Widows Report.
Around one in 10 African women are widows, yet there is little data
on their lives or well-being.
Widows are often overlooked because they do not know their rights,
or feel compelled to stay silent about the abuse they face, said
Naana Otoo-Oyortey, head of women's rights charity FORWARD.
"Widows may not see the rituals as violating their rights, but as a
normal way to honor their husband. Even if they want to speak out,
they know there will be repercussions," she said.
While many African countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon and
Ghana have laws to protect widows' rights, these are often trumped
in rural areas by customary laws, campaigners say.
Widows' rights activists across Africa are now pushing to change
harmful cleansing rituals.
Rather than having sex with a relative of her late husband, many
widows in Zimbabwe offer a bowl of water if they want to stay with
the family.
In Sierra Leone, women were encouraged to wash stones instead of
corpses during the Ebola outbreak to avoid spreading the virus.
"Traditional cleansing rites helped spread Ebola until they were
halted and changed ... there is no reason these alternative mourning
rites could not become common," said WRI's Brewer.
Several civil society groups across sub-Saharan Africa work to
inform widows of their rights, support their inheritance claims, and
provide refuge for those evicted or ostracized.
But Marthe Chantal Ngouassa, president of the Cameroonian charity
Widows in Distress, said governments too often neglected widows and
ignored the hardships they faced.
"All widows have the same problem - they are marginalized,
stigmatized and abused," she said. "The death of the widow begins
with the death of the husband."
(Writing By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Emma Batha; Please credit
the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking,
corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
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