The Less You Know Your Guinean Bride, The Better

In Labe, whenever I ate street food, I often had locker room talk with the men sitting next to me. Unlike Moroccans and Mauritanians, Guinean men weren’t obsessed with marrying virgins.

Abdrahamane, a single 25-year-old Guinean man, summed up what others said. While we ate rice with hako pute (sweet potato leaf sauce), he said, “It’s hard to find virgins anymore. Maybe 10 or 20 percent of women are virgins. Even girls who are 13, 14, and 15 years old are not virgins. If you want to find a virgin, you’d having to marry a 10- or 11-year-old, which is not right.”

That was a fascinating comment because it implied that marrying a teenager was fine, but that marrying a preteen was not.

Child marriage in Africa is common. According to UNICEF, 63% of Guinean girls are married before their 18th birthday.

Zainab Oussman, 16, in the village of Kwassaw, Nigeria. She was 14 when her family tried to marry her away. But she refused and stayed in school. She's now starring in a video that aid workers are using to convince villagers to stop marrying their women away at early marriages. Ousman is from the village of Kwassaw, south of the town of Maradi. Nearly 60% of all girls in Niger are married off before the age of 15, some as young as seven or eight. (Photo by Sudarsan Raghavan/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Abdrahamane backpedaled and added that the ideal age for a woman to marry is 20.

However, many Guineans told me that females marry when they’re teenagers, especially in rural parts, which is where most of the population still lives.

Because finding virgins is becoming increasingly difficult, some Muslim men gift a cow to his virgin bride.

Over 90 percent of Guinean women have their clitoris mutilated—the world’s second highest rate.

Zahara Sani, now 12, wants to get married to her 20-year-old fiancee and is upset that village elders and authorities are stopping her in the village of Kwassaw, Niger. Four of her girlfriends, also 11 and 12, are already married or about to do so. Sani Barmo, 81, wanted to marry off his 11-year-old daughter, Zahara off to a 20-year-old farmer in December. But a police officer in their village of Madarounfa learned about the marriage and alerted authorities. This was a rare case of such a marriage being stopped. Under Niger law, girls under 15 cannot marry, but the centuries-old tradition has continued. Zahara's marriage has still not been called off; her fiancee's family is applying pressure on her father to marry him soon. Nearly 60% of all girls marry before the age of 15. (Photo by Sudarsan Raghavan/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Abdrahamane added, “Here if your friends see you with a girl, they will assume that you are sleeping with her. If you have slept with the girl or you’ve been seeing her for a few months, then your parents will never let you marry her.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “In America, it’s the opposite. If you have not slept with her and spent at least six months dating her, then your family will not accept her! They’ll say, ‘Are you crazy? You hardly know her!?’”

He laughed and said, “It’s different in Guinea. Imagine that one day your parents bring you an unknown cousin and order you to marry her. You can’t refuse to marry your cousin because you’ll offend your family. Sometimes your mom’s best friend will collude with your mom to get you to marry her daughter. Again, you can’t let down your mom’s best friend.”

A Guinean man works hard to earn $2 per day to accumulate enough money to pay the brideprice of a teenaged girl. Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg

I asked Abdrahamane, “Why do most couples divorce and what percentage get divorced?”

“Maybe 40 percent get divorced. The main reason why wives leave is that their husband stops giving them money. That’s also why men don’t marry. They can’t afford to.”

“But at the same time, there are plenty of men who marry multiple wives when they really can’t afford to.”

“That’s true too,” he admitted.

Why do Guinean men take on multiple wives when they can’t afford it?

For the same reason why some American men buy cars or houses they can’t afford: to impress people; to make it seem like they are richer than they are; to acquire a status symbol.

Since everyone in West Africa knows that Islam only lets you have multiple wives if you can afford to support them, that means that someone who has three wives is richer than someone who only has two. So when men brag that they have four wives, it’s another way of saying, “I’m richer than you.”

When I asked Abdrahamane if he wanted multiple wives, he said that one was enough. Many Africans who lived in polygamous societies said that one or two was enough.

However, when I asked Abdrahamane if he would have more wives if he had more money, his answer was typical, “Oh, in that case, sure!”

In other words, African men often have just one wife not because they only want one or because they think it’s immoral or unfair to have more than one but rather because that’s all they can afford.