When Hauwa Ibrahim first met women sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in Nigeria, she felt a strong urge to offer them her services as a lawyer, even if this meant working endless hours for free. She recognised herself in the stories of poverty, repression and sexual taboos. She is the woman behind the women sentenced to death by stoning in Nigeria.
Ibrahim’s own first marriage collapsed when a strict interpretation of Islam and local culture prevented her from having sex with her husband. Of her casework for women, she says: ”There is a drag from inside me, which I cannot control, even if I have a strong opposition from my family. My husband feels that these people will soon kill me and tells me that I have two little children that he can’t take care of himself.”
The husband’s fear stems from the aggression that has accompanied the introduction of strict sharia laws in northern Nigeria from 1999. Thousands have died in clashes fanned by ethnicity and religion. Occasionally these tensions spill over into the courtroom with Ibrahim having to protect her clients from threats.
I first met Ibrahim and her most famous client, Amina Lawal, in May 2002 in a sharia court of appeal in Funtua in the state of Katsina. Four months earlier Lawal had been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.
The international human rights community had lobbied heavily against the implementation of strict sharia law.
But Ibrahim and her fellow attorneys chose a slightly different route. Rather than attacking Islam and sharia itself, they concentrated on finding flaws in the actual cases as Ibrahim is acutely aware of the deep-running religious sentiments and the local reluctance to be taught by outsiders what is appropriate and what is not.
Her own education happened only because of her ability to attack the system from within. She found the gaps in traditions designed to prevent women from reaching positions in which they could stand up — in courts and elsewhere.
”In my village girls were not supposed to get educated. So my sister and I were very privileged that my father allowed us to go to primary school. It was with the instruction that [the moment] we finished, we must be married away.”
In the village where Ibrahim grew up, girls still sleep on a white piece of cloth on the first night they spend with their husband. This allows the villagers to check that there is bleeding from the penetration of the hymen.
From the age of seven girls are supposed to start saving for pots and pans in preparation for establishing their own home. But Ibrahim used her savings and her experiences as a street vendor of vegetables and cooked maize to finance her secondary schooling. She became a teacher at the age of 14 after her good marks had allowed her to skip some classes.
Meanwhile, the family was frantically looking for a husband for her. But with the help of a female local government official, Ibrahim got herself into university where she had to learn proper English while following the rest of the courses.
”At university I got in contact with a mix of men and women for the first time. It wasn’t pleasant. Even the women were not dressed in a way which in my understanding was decent.
”At one time I packed my things to go home as I had been told by Islamic teachers that I would go to hell if I saw evil things and kept looking. I had to choose between the deep blue sea and the devil. I didn’t want to go to hell because I wanted a Western education — I wanted to make heaven. But if I left, I would have to go home to a family I had already disobeyed.”
Other students talked her into staying. By reverting to the role of a village girl whenever she visited home, Ibrahim eventually convinced her family that it was possible to both study and remain a decent woman. But as her studies were coming to an end, her father was waiting for her with one of his friends who wanted her as his fourth wife.
”I pleaded with one of my father’s three wives to tell him that I would bring a husband, someone I liked. I got a younger man, a university lecturer who was friendly and had indicated he wanted to marry me. I didn’t love him. But I was afraid of getting married to an older man who could have been my father.”
The marriage never blossomed in the shadows cast by Ibrahim’s conservative upbringing. ”I had been told that sex is wrong. They didn’t tell me that when you have it with your husband, you can do it. He got very aggressive and started beating me. But the more he beat me, the more I resented him. So I ended up in hospital on three occasions.”
It does not seem a coincidence that Ibrahim’s next marriage was to a foreigner, an Italian builder who had arrived in Nigeria at the age of 21.
”I liked him because he is honest, straightforward and truthful. Even though he was known as a Casanova, he accepted that he couldn’t take me to bed until we were married. So we dated for three years. After we got married he was very patient and explained that it’s not bad to have sex.”
Ibrahim’s experiences with strict sexual norms in their local Islamic interpretation has been one of her most important qualifications as legal counsel for the victims of sharia. She fully understands the hell that her clients go through.
As Muslims, they often firmly believe that stoning to death is the proper punishment for adultery. But as women and mothers, they want to live to bring up the children who are the results of their alleged crimes. It was altogether no wonder that Amina Lawal’s stock answer to any question about her case soon became: ”I have left everything in the hands of God.”
Another of Ibrahim’s clients, Safiya Hussaini, immediately started teaching herself to read after she was acquitted on appeal. Hussaini wanted to check the Qur’an herself. Her conclusion is that, even if sharia had almost cost her her life, it is a good system when used correctly.
”If I had come forward myself and admitted my guilt, I would have had no reason to regret being stoned. I am a Muslim, and sharia is our way of life. There is hardly a day when I don’t think about death. I always think of what I have done with my life and how I’m going to face my Lord,” says Hussaini.
Ibrahim’s first case involved a pregnant 15-year-old girl from Zamfara state. Since she had never had a sexual relationship, she could only explain the pregnancy in terms of an incident that happened at the house of one of her father’s friends.
She had been hawking rice — ”just as I used to hawk rice, moving from house to house,” says Ibrahim — when her father’s friend and two other men offered her a Coca-Cola.
The soft drink was apparently laced with some sedative and made the girl fall asleep. She had pain between her thighs when she woke up. When her pregnancy started to show, she was charged with fornication — sex before marriage — which is punishable by 100 lashes.
In court she told the story of the three men, who were then called to testify. But since they all denied her account, she was given a further sentence of 80 lashes for telling lies.
”Eventually,” says Ibrahim, ”they stopped after 100 lashes and said, ‘This is our mercy.”’
The lashings happened after Ibrahim and the rest of the legal team had pleaded in vain with the government to postpone the punishment until the girl had weaned her child.
This experience marked the beginning of Ibrahim’s love-hate relationship with the international media. She acknowledges that publicity around the sharia cases can be helpful in highlighting them and questioning the legalities. But she becomes very wary if an international audience, or even Christian southerners from Nigeria, attack Islam as an institution in the process.
In the case of the 15-year-old girl, she saw a reaction of defiance from the Zamfara state government: ”They said, ‘The international press thinks it can come and govern the state by their pressure.’ So in this case the media was a bad thing. In the end, they [the government] turned their back on it and just flogged her.”
In this climate Ibrahim and her colleagues insist on sticking to the words of the law, often getting their clients acquitted on technicalities. Last month they finally got Lawal off the hook in this manner. The main problem now seems to be the cases that never find their way to the public eye.
”Through the legal system, it is very difficult to get a stoning sentence confirmed. But we have some fanatics, some fundamentalists who want to help Allah to do this work through mob action,” says Ibrahim.
This is an edited extract from Reality Bites (Double Storey), based on 10 years of reporting on Africa by Swedish correspondent Görrel Espelund, Danish correspondent Jesper Strudsholm and South African photographer Eric Miller. Reality Bites features 14 ordinary, extraordinary people who have often chosen to stand up in times of crisis.