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/ 23 December 2007

Forced marriages: a pan-African reality

Thabile* was 15 when she was forced to marry a man in his thirties in the Mgudlulweni village near Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape. Her parents agreed to "give" their daughter to him. She did not know about the marriage or consent to it. On her way to school one day, four men abducted her. "I was walking to school and they grabbed me. They took me to a man I did not know to be my husband," Thabile says.