Joseph Aduwo reckons he is well shot of his spouse. “My wife…fought with nine persons in a day on our street, wearing only bra and underpants. She is a shameless streetfighter,” he told a Lagos court. It duly dissolved their union.
Official statistics suggest that divorce is exceedingly uncommon in Nigeria. Just 0.2% of men and 0.3% of women have legally untied the knot, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. And well under 1% of couples admit to being separated. Yet such counts exclude the vast majority of Nigerians, whose traditional marriage ceremonies are not governed by modern law, says Chief Robert Clarke, a barrister.
In the mostly Muslim north of the country, men may take up to four wives (so long as they obey the Koranic injunction to treat all equally). Often the younger wives are not yet 18. When a husband wants to trade one of his spouses for a younger model, he need only repeat the words “I divorce you” three times to be freed. In 2008 one pensioner split from 82 of his 86 partners to put himself back on the right side of Islamic law.
Regardless of what the Koran says, politicians in Kano, the north’s biggest city, think divorce is breeding “vices in society”. One former governor came up with an innovative solution. In 2013 he married off 1,111 widows and divorcees in a public ceremony costing just under $1m. Another 2,000 brides were lined up by the state government for marriage late last year.
Couples also marry young farther south, but women there tend to be a little more empowered. Olayinka Akanle, a professor of sociology at the University of Ibadan, reckons that when things fall apart they demand separations more readily than in the north. For instance, one Lagos wife had her marriage dissolved on the basis that her drunken husband confused their cooking pots with the toilet. Another woman complained that her banker spouse spent too long stuck in traffic (hardly his fault, he might reasonably claim; Lagos jams are awful).
Other deal-breakers include a wife’s failure to bring cooking utensils from her father’s house. “How will a woman get married without a grinding stone?” her husband lamented. One woman filed for divorce having found her husband to be rather too well endowed. And a trader complained that his wife was not as buxom as he had thought. “I detest those small-size boobs,” he said after a disappointing three months. “It is better to end the marriage.”
