Photography for this
story was supported
by the Pulitzer Center
for Crisis Reporting.THERESA KACHINDAMOTO REMEMBERS the first child marriage she ended,
just days after she became the first female paramount chief of her south-
ern Ngoni people in Malawi. In Dedza district, southeast of the capital,
Lilongwe, she’d walked past a group of girls and boys playing soccer, a
common sight, but then one of the girls stepped away from the game to
breastfeed a baby.
“I was shocked,” Kachindamoto recalls. “It pained me.” The mother
“was 12 years, but she lied to me that she was 13.”
Kachindamoto informed the elders who had appointed her chief about
the young mother, a girl named Cecilia. “They said, ‘Oh yes, here it’s
common everywhere, but now you are chief, you can do whatever you
want to do.’ ”
So Kachindamoto did. She annulled the marriage and sent the young
mother back to school. That was in 2003. The chief paid the girl’s school
fees until she completed secondary school. Cecilia now runs a grocery
store. Every time she visits her, Kachindamoto says, “she always comes
here and says, ‘Thank you, Chief. Thank you.’ ”
Since Cecilia’s annulment, Paramount Chief Kachindamoto, 60, has
terminated a total of 2,549 unions and sent the girls back to school. She
also has banned an initiation ritual for girls who reached puberty that
involved losing their virginity to strangers.
Kachindamoto’s voice is one among many pushing for women’s rights
around the world. A woman’s voice, as Egyptian protesters in Cairo’s
Tahrir Square once chanted, is a revolution. The slogan was part of a 2013
campaign against rapes and sexual assaults, a strike against the silence
that often is the status quo—in Egypt and, as the #MeToo movement
showed, around the world.
56 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC