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AGRICULTURE: Liberia’s Land Just for Some

Rebecca Murray

MONROVIA, Jun 9 2009 (IPS) - After watching the murder of her husband and his three other wives by Charles Taylor’s rebels, Fatu Bonah and her seven children fled into the dense forest to hide. “The rebels burned down our home and when I returned my in-laws had taken the land,” she says. “I went to the town chief, who tried to resolve it, but the family refused, saying they had already taken over the land.”

Bonah lived on a fertile farm in Kolahun, Lofa County, along the northern mineral-rich Guinean border. The second of four wives, middle-aged Bonah had laboured in their garden and home for years until Liberia’s brutal civil war shattered everyone’s lives.

Now unable to support her children, Bonah trekked to a farming sanctuary near Monrovia run by social benefactor Mama Tumah. Surrounded by similarly dispossessed widows, Bonah spends her days planting fruit and vegetables, weaving homemade fabrics and making honey in exchange for small earnings. She is also determined to learn her rights.

“We have two systems of marriage in Liberia: the traditional system of dowry, where men could marry more than one woman. Then there is regular civil marriage, which is done through the church,” explains Lemuel Reeves at the Carter Center, which has joined forces with Mama Tumah to highlight Rule of Law issues. “Many of the rights enjoyed by women in civil marriage are not enjoyed by those in traditional marriage,” he says.

In the absence of official statistics, Reeves estimates about one third of Liberia’s 3.5 million people are disinherited women and children, constrained by rural customary law that classifies wives like Bonah as ‘property’, and consequently blocked from inheriting land.

In 2003, the Association of the Female Lawyers of Liberia (AFELL) finally pushed through inheritance legislation securing for widows – regardless of their civil or traditional marriages – the right to a one-third total of their husband’s property, with the remainder divided among their children.

“What our work is now is to bring this law back to the people,” says Deweh Gray, AFELL’s determined president. “The challenges are great because people had this life for over a century and getting them to, especially the male folks, to accept this change, what they see as a radical change in their lives is a difficult thing.

First, we had to simplify this law into simple English. And we are now translating it into the local languages. And taking it out to the rural areas where this form of marriage is predominant.”

Hawa is a quiet widow at Mama Tumah’s farm. She was young and shy when she married her husband in Lofa County. The second of ultimately three wives, Hawa laboured all day on their rice farm and bore him nine children. On the morning her husband was shot dead by Taylor’s rebels, Hawa fled across the border to Guinea with her children.

“After the war I went back to the village and the farm. But my husband’s family said the land was not for me, and my in-laws ordered me to bust our house down.” Hawa fears the threat of witchcraft against her. “As a woman I have no power,” she trails off, fixated on the loom in front of her. “I don’t want to go back there,” she says. “I want some different land. I’m scared of them.”

Ella Colleman from the National Traditional Council of Liberia believes threats to instil fear, like those against Hawa, are commonplace. A social services administrator working to preserve indigenous traditions and culture, Colleman discusses women’s rights and the new inheritance law with rural communities throughout Liberia.

“Women from the beginning of the war have been the backbone of every society, of every home, of every sector,” says Colleman, herself the former Commissioner of Westpoint, a devastated Monrovia neighbourhood at the centre of the fighting in 2003. “Men could hardly get out, and it was women who were out there looking for food, taking care of the children, and advocating for peace to come to this country.”

But while Colleman heralds the groundbreaking elevation of women as traditional town leaders, known as Paramount Chiefs, in the country’s South East, she acknowledges traditional resistance against the new inheritance legislation is especially tough in remote counties like Lofa and Cape Mount.

Even with the revised law on their side, enlightened widows like Fatu Bonah face formidable obstacles to winning the legal battle. Overcrowded, under-budgeted and corrupt rural courthouses, expensive lawyers, a lack of transportation, and predominant sexist mindsets persist. And even the revised law needs to address the discrepancies between female rights in customary marriages and those in civil unions.

AFELL, the Carter Center, the Ministry of Gender and Culture and the Ministry of the Interior, all working towards Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, are partners in spreading awareness to rural, traditional constituencies about the women’s rights and the inheritance law just passed.

Deweh Gray laughs. “At some meetings all the women will sit on one side and all the men will sit on another side. One time I said, ‘I’m going to close my eyes, and there is going to be a man and a woman, a man and a woman. If you have a wife, sit down by your wife.’ And then they all complied and laughed about it all.

And so that’s the first step. Once you start to change the way they do things in life, then you get a general acceptance of the law. Some are very receptive to it, it’s just that it needs time …”