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The Flogging of Bariya Magazu: Nigerian Politics, Canadian Pressures and Women's and Children's Rights

Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, McMaster University

The Case of Bariya Magazu

… if the charge proves true, the girl was found not to have been a virgin, then the girl shall be brought out to the entrance of her father's house, and the men of her town shall stone her to death.
— Deuteronomy 22:20 (Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures)

In late 2000 a legal case in Northern Nigeria involving women's and children's rights attracted much Canadian attention. Bariya Magazu was sentenced to be flogged for having sexual relations outside marriage, and that sentence was carried out. Her case raises the issue of cultural imperialism in promoting supposedly international human rights norms. In particular, it raises the questions of what is a child, and what is "cruel, unusual or degrading punishment." It also shows how women's rights can become a focal point for indigenous politics, thereby also raising the question of who is the most appropriate actor to defend an individual's human rights. This case addresses the larger issue of world human rights politics, and the fear that many Western human rights advocates express of inadvertently acting as cultural imperialists.

In this working paper I analyze various elements that affected this case. In so doing, I put my own personal views aside. I support unreservedly all the rights of women and children enshrined in international human rights documents; I oppose all forms of corporal and capital punishment; and I oppose punishment of individuals merely because they engage in consensual sexual relations. Certainly, women should not be punished for acts for which men go free, nor should women be used as ideological scapegoats in situations of economic and political uncertainty, as now appears to be the case in Northern Nigeria. Many Nigerian feminists, Muslim and other, agree with me, as I will discuss below. Nevertheless, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the social, legal, and political issues surrounding the Magazu case, not to advocate for her rights.

Bariya Magazu is Found to be Pregnant

In July 2000, a young unmarried woman living in Zamfara state in Northern Nigeria was found to be pregnant.¹ Bariya Ibrahim Magazu's age was variously estimated to be between fourteen and seventeen years; she herself thought she was thirteen or fourteen years old (Afrol.com.News 11 January 2001). In June 2000, Zamfara state had adopted a very strict variety of what the authorities deemed to be Islamic Sharia law. Prior to this adoption, Sharia law was used in Nigeria to regulate personal affairs among Muslims, but the very strict, if not idiosyncratic, interpretations that Zamfara state imposed were very unusual. Under this interpretation of Sharia, Bariya was liable to punishment by 100 lashes for committing the crime of zina, or fornication (sex outside marriage). This punishment was in accordance with the Quranic verse 24:2-4: "Flog the adulteress and the adulterer, each one of them, with a hundred stripes, and let not pity for them restrain you from executing the judgment of Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day."

Bariya claimed that she had been raped by three men. She further claimed that her father had allowed these three men access to her in payment of a debt. There is an ancient custom in Africa of "pawning," by which a parent may give a child to a creditor to work off a debt, the child returning to its parents' home once the debt has been paid in full. Women or girls could become pawn wives, with fewer rights than free wives (Iliffe 1987). Daughters could also be given as gifts to influential men (Salamone 1983). On the one hand, if Bariya Magazu's father did give her to these three men, this act may have been a form of gift or pawning in his own mind. On the other hand, it may simply have been an act that he knew was illegitimate, both under traditional customs and under Islamic law.

Bariya produced seven witnesses testifying to her version of the event, but they were not believed. Nor, apparently, was any witness produced to testify that she had willingly had sexual relations (Afrol.com.News 11 January 2001). These absences were important. For her to be convicted of zina, her accusers technically needed "at least four witnesses of good character" who had witnessed the actual act of zina, and could testify that "a hair could not pass between their bodies." Consistent with practice in local courts, Bariya had no legal representation. Inconsistent with Islamic law as interpreted by her defenders, she was not allowed the right of appeal, either to secular or a higher Islamic court (Tempo 8 February 2001). Once Bariya's claim was disallowed, she was then also sentenced to be flogged an additional eighty times for the crime of qadhf, or false accusation (against the men she had originally named) of zina. Once the charge of rape was dismissed, no attempt appears to have been made to ascertain who the father of the child was and to punish him as Bariya was to be punished. As noted above, verse 24:2-4 of the Quran proscribes, that both the adulteress and the adulterer must be flogged. Thus, the Zamfara judge applied Islamic law in a discriminatory fashion, punishing a woman but making no attempt to also punish her male partner.

A further complication was that if the three accused men had been convicted of rape, they could have been sentenced to death by stoning, the punishment under the form of Sharia law introduced into Zamfara for fornication by married men. Their deaths might well have left their families without support and their wives and children turned out of their homes. Thus, apparently some of Bariya's fellow villagers pressured her to confess to zina, to protect the men she had accused.

In the event, Bariya withdrew her accusation of rape, and her conviction for false accusation was therefore overturned. Her conviction for zina was not overturned. Although the sentence should not have been carried out until forty days after she had given birth, she was flogged earlier than that. The flogging also took place despite earlier assurances that the court would wait until she had weaned her baby, and despite the court's knowledge that Nigerian lawyers were preparing an appeal to a higher Islamic court. Reportedly, despite having been flogged, Bariya was able to walk home to her village, a distance of fifteen kilometers. The spokesperson for the Governor of Zamfara State said that no more force had been used on her than would be used to beat a donkey. Witnesses said that although Bariya cried from the pain, they saw no sign of blood on her.

Canadians Become Concerned

A small report in the Toronto (Canada) newspaper, The Globe and Mail, on the accusations against Bariya Magazu and the possibility that she might be flogged generated strong public reaction. As a result, the The Globe and Mail decided to feature the story for the next several weeks, even going so far as to send one of its reporters, Stephanie Nolen, to Nigeria to interview Bariya. As the weeks wore on, Bariya's contention that she had been raped was repeatedly reported as fact in the The Globe and Mail, reinforcing the image of an innocent girl victimized by men, namely, her father, her rapists, and the male Sharia judge. Nolen reported that "She became pregnant by one of three middle-aged associates of her father…" (28 December 2000), while another reporter, wrote, "[s]he was impregnated by one of three middle-aged men…" (Globe and Mail 29 December 2000). Canadian members of the public and of Amnesty International sent many letters. As Nolen herself noted, even "grannies from Moose Jaw [Saskatchewan]" were caught up in this story, and Amnesty International received many letters from individuals who were not the type of people who normally wrote to it.² The congregation of the First United Church of Ladysmith, British Columbia, even offered to sponsor her for immigration to Canada, angering a Nigerian diplomat who argued that his country was perfectly capable of taking care of its own children.

As soon as Bariya was flogged, however, reporting on her case was dropped. There was no follow-up in the The Globe and Mail as to what had happened to her and her baby, other than a brief report that a man in his thirties had offered to marry her. Nevertheless, this case became the first of several regarding women's transgressions of supposed "Islamic" law in Northern Nigeria that attracted Canadian and international attention in the ensuing years. Nigeria joined Afghanistan (both under the Taliban and afterwards), Pakistan, Jordan, and several other predominantly Muslim countries as exemplars of the persecution of women, but not men, for violating social and religious norms.

Culture Wars

Cultural Resentment and Humiliation

The early flogging of Bariya Magazu may have been in response to outside interference and pressure to overturn her sentence. Resentment of Canadians' interference may have pushed the authorities of Zamfara to take more precipitate action than they might have taken, had their only criticism come from fellow Muslims or fellow Nigerians.

The constant reporting in Canada of Bariya's sentence as if "Sharia" or "Muslim" law is a monolithic, inherently cruel form of law did not contribute to cultural understanding. Ordinary readers of the The Globe and Mail and other sources were under the impression that Bariya Magazu had no recourse under Muslim law. They were not informed, for example, that under Zamfara's own legal code her sentence could have been reduced to twenty strokes, rather than 100, because she was under eighteen (Tempo 8 February 2001). ³ Nor were they aware that Quranic law had been violated, in so far as there were no witnesses to her alleged act of zina, and other rules of evidence had not been followed. As reported in Canada, the case of Bariya Magazu may well have reinforced pre-existent anti-Muslim stereotypes. Muslims in Canada and in Nigeria were told by the The Globe and Mail headline, "Barbarity in Nigeria," that their legal system was backward and barbaric (8 January 2001).

These Canadian misunderstandings of Islamic law may well have contributed to resentment of the West in the Muslim world. As one Muslim Canadian put it, "[t]elling Muslims that they should not apply Sharia is neither a wise step, nor a productive one" (The Globe and Mail, 3 January 2001). A lopsided ideological war between the West and the Islamic world has been going on for some decades. Simplistic notions of these two different "civilizations" obscure the realities of complex societies on both sides (Esposito 1999). On the Islamic side, protection of the Muslim community seems to require active ideological activity in the face of the onslaught of Western values, consumer products, and media images. To some Muslim religious and political leaders, the West is as barbaric as Islam seems to some Westerners. The West is the symbol of decadence, while Islam is the symbol of righteousness and purity. For such leaders, human rights activity is an attempt to impose the Western culture of decadence on good, believing Muslims. As a spokesperson for the Zamfara authorities is quoted as saying about Bariya Magazu, "We will not be intimidated by any human-rights group" (The Globe and Mail, 23 January 2001).

In the minds of those in the Islamic world who conduct this ideological war, the role of women in the two civilizations exemplifies what is wrong with the West. Since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has undergone civil war, several military dictatorships, and economic chaos. When society seems disrupted, men often look to women as symbols of tradition and social order. Women are supposed to carry and perpetuate their culture, adhering to traditional norms and ways of behaviour, even as men urbanize, migrate, and adopt Western dress and customs. The family, it seems, is a sphere that can be protected from the larger winds of social change, as long as women continue to respect and to transmit a society's ancient rules, values, and customs.

Western critics of women's rights in Islamic societies seem to encourage women to discard their familial and social obligations in favour of an unrestricted hedonism. Thus, explains Bishop Benjamin Kwasi of Jos, Northern Nigeria, "Islam is growing very fast. For many Africans, it makes more sense to reject America and Europe's secular values, a culture of selfishness and half-naked women, by embracing Islam" (New York Times 1 November 2001). The secular values to which the Bishop refers seem intended to undermine traditional customs and laws regulating those most private of areas — sexuality, marriage, and the family. To some in the Muslim world, deliberate human rights advocacy is evidence that the West is not willing to stop at political and military imperialism, nor at economic domination. Rather the West appears to demand complete conformity by all others to its own decadent, individualistic, and self-indulgent moral code. This form of psychological and social humiliation is sometimes a cause of political violence (Lindner 2001). The question then becomes, should Canadians contribute to this sense of humiliation, possibly increasing the propensity to international violence, or should they keep their opinions to themselves, even if they witness what obviously seems to be a violation of a woman's (or child's) human rights?

Western Sexual Liberalism

In the eyes of the Muslim Court, the Canadians who tried to persuade the authorities in Zamfara not to flog Bariya Magazu condoned pre-marital sexual relations. Indeed, some Canadians dismissed as entirely irrelevant the question of how Bariya had become pregnant. To them, it made no difference whether she had been raped (for which, under Muslim law, her rapist should have been punished) or had agreed to have sexual relations (for which, under Muslim law, she and her male partner should have been punished). Instead, they argued that although this might be a moral issue in some Muslims' eyes, it was hardly an issue for the courts. Canada's Acting High Commissioner in Nigeria argued that the matter of consensuality was trivial, in light of the severity of the sentence (The Globe and Mail 28 December 2000).⁴ Canadians did not agree that Bariya should be punished in any way for being pregnant out of wedlock. In taking this position, they reflected a world view now prevalent in Canada, that issues of sexuality such as adultery, pre-marital sex, even homosexuality, are strictly private matters, and thus of no interest to society as a whole nor a concern of the courts. In the eyes of some Zamfara Muslims therefore, Canadians possessed no sense of moral rectitude: they inhabited an "anything goes" sexual universe in which young girls had sexual relationships without considering any religious or social strictures on their actions.

In fact, Canadians are not devoid of moral codes. As recently as thirty-five years ago, Canadians punished unwed mothers not physically, but via shunning. Unwed pregnant women were sent to secretive "homes" to await the births of their babies often under morally punitive conditions, with the women caring for the young expectant mothers showing their moral disapproval at every opportunity. The babies were frequently given up for adoption, but were spared knowledge of the circumstances of their own births because of the extreme stigma of illegitimacy. Girls who did not want to give up their babies were often forced to marry the boys who had impregnated them: such girls were held up as a moral caution to the "good girls" who had evaded pregnancy. Even in the late twentieth century, while not wanting to express moral censure of unmarried pregnant women, many adult Canadians were concerned about what appeared to be relatively high rates of pregnancy outside marriage. The Canadians interested in Bariya Magazu's case, then, were in all likelihood not the sexual libertines that some Islamic ideologues take all Westerners to be.

Nevertheless, the Zamfara judge clearly resented Canadian interference in the case of Bariya Magazu. The politics of resentment pervades much of the international discussion of women's rights. Westerners are frequently thought to be "Orientalists" (Said 1979) imposing crude stereotypes onto non-Western societies. Just as common, however, are "Occidentalist" stereotypes of the West. According to Buruma and Margalit (2002), a key aspect of the Occidentalist stereotype is a cluster of images, "the City, the Bourgeois, Reason, and Feminism." The freedom of women is particularly problematic. Echoing the Nigerian bishop quoted above, Buruma and Margalit argue that "Pictures of partly naked Western women … are … frustrating, confusing and sometimes enraging. For … they promise a sinful, libidinous world of infinite pleasure ….". The West seems to promote individualism, the breakdown of social mores, and lack of responsibility to the collectivity. In the West, sex and marriage are not the family and collective affair they are elsewhere: they are individual choices. Indeed sex appears to be completely outside the realm of social regulation, and completely devoid of reticence or modesty.

Within this rhetoric then, human rights are frequently taken to be an imposition of Western culture upon "the Rest." In reality, though, this is not a Western/non-Western debate, as much as a liberal/communitarian debate (Howard 1995). Liberalism values individualism, human rights, self-assertion, and autonomy. These values permeate the sexual as they do other realms. In contrast, communitarianism tends more to collective orientation, duties, consideration of social good, and social regulation. Sexuality, in particular, must be regulated so as to ensure the overall family and collective good. Non-industrial societies, such as still exist in much of the African and Islamic worlds, tend to have a more communitarian outlook than do industrialized societies. The West, by contrast, is industrial, urban, and secular, and seems to indulge in a shocking libertarianism.

This shocking libertarianism seemed to emanate from those Canadians who expressed concern about the fate of Bariya Magazu. They seemed to be saying that even if she had not been raped, as she had claimed, she had a "right" to pre-marital sex without punitive sanction. The correct punishment for Bariya was no punishment: a young woman such as she, having had a child, needed support, not shame. Thus, the First United Church of Ladysmith offered to adopt both Bariya and her baby. Far from punishing her, this church seemed to be saying, Bariya should in fact be rewarded for her sins by passage to Canada.

Cruel, Unusual and Degrading Punishment

Amnesty International argues that the flogging of Bariya Magazu constituted cruel, unusual, and degrading punishment ("Court ordered torture," 23 January 2001). This contention is certainly in accord with international law. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights both state that no one should be subject to torture. Torture is defined in Article 1, 1 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, … intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as … punishing him [or her] for an act he [or she] … has committed or is suspected of having committed … when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official … ". Nigeria, however, did not ratify the Torture Convention until 28 June 2001, after Bariya Magazu's punishment. And although it acceded to the Convention on Civil and Political Rights (29 July 1993), as of 21 August 2002, Nigeria had not yet ratified that Convention.

The same articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights cited above both also prohibit cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, as does the Convention against Torture. In the eyes of many Canadians, the flogging of Bariya Magazu was cruel, was unusual, and was degrading. But in the eyes of the Zamfara Court, the flogging was not cruel or unusual; it was a regulated and normal punishment. There was no intention to be cruel to Bariya: rather, the intention was to impress upon her the enormity of her crime in deviating from Islamic (as the court interpreted it) rules of sexual behaviour. The sentence was also meant to act as a deterrent to others in Zamfara who might be contemplating adultery. And the sentence was not unusual: rather, in the judge's eyes, it conformed to known Islamic rules.

Moreover, the punishment was meant to be degrading. Bariya had done something shameful that brought disrepute not only on herself but on her family. In many societies, persons bringing disrepute on their families are deemed to deserve to be de-graded. It is believed that they should be brought down a peg or two and be shown to be unworthy of respect in the eyes of their families and their communities. Although none of the Canadian reports mentioned Bariya's ethnic affiliation, she may be a Hausa, as are the majority of the people in Northern Nigeria. The idea of shame, or kunya, is a central aspect of Hausa culture and a central concept controlling women's behaviour (Dauda 1992). As the Canadian branch of Amnesty International noted, "The Deputy Governor [of Zamfara State] said that the main purpose of the punishment had been to inflict public disgrace rather than physical pain …." ("Court ordered torture," 23 January 2001). In Western societies several centuries ago this type of disgrace might have been inflicted on moral deviants by displaying them in stocks in the market square (Laslett 1965). Such deviant women underwent a public process of status dishonour: their respected status as wives or mothers was removed from them because they had acted dishonourably by violating the society's moral code.⁵

Degradation ceremonies are a normal function of almost all societies (Garfinkel 1967). The purpose is to publicly denounce the individual who has transgressed social mores. In so doing, societies reinforce solidarity among all those others who have not transgressed (or whose transgression has not yet been exposed). Shaming, then, is a social good. It keeps the society together. By showing shame, an individual transgressor agrees that society's moral standards must be preserved. "Acknowledged shame … could be the glue that holds relationships and societies together, and unacknowledged shame the force that tears them apart" (Scheff 2000, 98).

Many contemporary Westerners do not approve of such public shaming. Stigmatization and shaming ceremonies have been renounced in the West in favour of universal self-esteem and respect. In the late twentieth century North American culture came up with the radical idea that individuals deserve respect merely by existing: the inner person, the soul, always deserves consideration by others, regardless of what the outer person has done. This is an unusual and modern idea. As the epigraph to this article shows, it was Judaeo-Christian culture that originated the idea that adulteresses should be stoned. An American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote The Scarlet Letter, a novel in which the heroine, Hester Prynne, is obliged to wear a large scarlet "A" to publicly announce her adultery. Moreover, even though North Americans now disapprove of ritualized public shaming, the fear of shame still influences private behaviour. Most North American families go to considerable lengths to hide members' disgraceful or deviant behaviour from outsiders, indeed even from themselves. Social degradation is still a form of social control in North America, even if the principle of degradation is rejected as contrary to the respect that individuals are supposed to enjoy.

The flogging of Bariya Magazu was meant to shame her. Even if the flogging did not physically affect her, the humiliation she endured was meant to be a lesson to all others to accept the moral code. The lack of analogous public shaming in North America is evidence for many people in other parts of the world that it is a decadent society (e.g., Lee Kwan Yew in Zakaria 1994). To them, North Americans seem to be without pride, rectitude, or sexual modesty. Individuals seem to do what they want, when they want, without regard to consequences or the honour of their families.

Childhood and Children's Rights

One of the Canadian arguments against flogging Bariya Magazu was that she was legally a child. At most, she was seventeen years old: possibly, she was even younger. Thus to punish her by flogging (assuming flogging might be acceptable for an adult) seemed a violation of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. This Convention, in Article 1, defines children as all persons under the age of eighteen. It further prescribes in Article 19, (1) that children shall be protected from all forms of physical violence, injury, or abuse. In 2000, eighteen was the legal age of majority in Nigeria (Constitution 1999, Article 29, 4, a). UNICEF condemned Bariya's sentence on the grounds that she was still a child, noting especially the obligation under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to protect "the dignity of the child" (UNICEF Press Release, 23 January 2001). To both Canadians and Nigerians who believe in the value of international law, such an argument is very persuasive. Nigeria ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child on 19 April 1991. There is, furthermore, an African Charter on the Rights of the Child, which defines children as human beings under eighteen years of age and which, like the other international documents mentioned above, prohibits "torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of imprisoned or detained children (African Charter 1999, Articles 2 and 17, 2, a). However, as of 19 February 2001, after Bariya Magazu's punishment, Nigeria had not ratified this African Charter.

Among some Nigerians of Bariya's own culture, the idea that she was a child at the time she became pregnant might have seemed an oxymoron. A child cannot become pregnant: only an adult woman can. The judge in Bariya's case reasoned that since she had started menstruating, she was "a full and responsible adult" (Afrol.com News, 11 January 2001). ⁶ In many Northern Nigerian societies, the traditional view was that if a girl was physically able to become pregnant, then she was by definition an adult, marriageable, and subject to all the social constraints on her sexuality prescribed by members of her community (Salomone 1983). In traditional Hausa society, parents arranged girls' marriages at thirteen or fourteen (M.G. Smith 1965). Adulthood was simultaneous with physical maturation, as it was in European society before the age of industrialization. Indeed, the Nigerian Constitution still reflects this cultural norm, noting in its Article 29, 4, (b) that "any woman who is married shall be deemed to be of full age," regardless of whether she has reached eighteen years. Thus, in her judge's eyes, Bariya Magazu was no child, whatever the view of the Canadians who tried to intervene on her behalf. She was an adult who violated her society's strictures on sexuality of her own free will.

Combined with traditional ideas connecting adulthood with physical maturation, the form of Sharia introduced into Zamfara resulted in a hardened view of gender roles. Physically mature females were expected to marry and were also expected to curb their own sexuality until they married. That Bariya did neither, according to the Zamfara court, showed that she was a deviant adult, flouting both custom and religion. It certainly did not show that she was a child in need of special protection. She redeemed herself only by submitting to the punishment prescribed by the Sharia court, thanking Allah for her punishment and agreeing that she deserved it, and then, apparently, fulfilling her role in traditional society by marrying an older man.

Had Bariya Magazu been spared punishment because of international human rights pressure, she could have become a symbol for the Islamic/African confrontation with the West. In submitting to punishment, as she appears to have done, she instead became a symbol of (some) Northern Nigerians' wishes to stick to their traditional ways. In submitting to the degradation of flogging, she reassured her own people of some likelihood of continuity in their lives.

Unfortunately, this reasoning is too simplistic. The type of Sharia law introduced into Zamfara is not "traditional," but is a consequence in part of recent Islamic proselytization. "Tradition" in Nigeria is thus in part manufactured, as it has been so many times elsewhere. Moreover, this particular interpretation of Sharia law was not introduced by democratic vote, and it may well not have reflected the views of the vast majority of Zamfara's citizens, even its Muslim citizens. Only some Nigerian Muslims agree that girls should be married at fourteen; others think it best to wait until a girl child is older, regardless of her physical maturation. Indeed Imam (1994, 133) claims that it is only Islamic fundamentalists, not all Nigerian Muslims, who "defend the right of men to marry barely pubertal girls." Whatever the traditional customs of Northern Nigeria, its inhabitants are not immune to new thinking, nor to new ideas of normative social behaviour. Likewise, to be Muslim is not necessarily to adhere to the most literal interpretation of the Quran, any more than modern Jews or Christians still believe that unmarried girls found not to be virgins should be stoned to death. Those Nigerians who disapproved of the flogging of Bariya Magazu, and who urged that their country respect both its own Constitution and international law, might have been grateful for the interventions of culturally "insensitive" Canadians.

Religion and Secularism in Nigeria

States' Rights

The case of Bariya Magazu had other implications of which the benign Canadians who tried to assist her may have been unaware. The controversy over her punishment not only reflected differences in cultural norms between the West and Nigeria. It also had the potential to spill over into domestic Nigerian politics. The conflict between universal human rights values and Zamfara's form of Sharia law is also a conflict between federal and state powers in Nigeria.

Since independence, Nigeria has been riven by a major split between Southerners and Northerners. Southerners are more likely than Northerners to be Christian, though there are many Muslims and practitioners of traditional African religions in the South. The North is more uniformly Muslim and there have been moreover, powerful Muslim emirates in the North for centuries. The Muslim elites of the North do not take kindly to being ruled by the South; there is a permanent threat of civil war should the balance of power between South and North be disturbed.

When President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Southern Yoruba and Christian, was approached by Canadian diplomats and asked to intervene in Bariya's case, he refused. His reason was that Nigeria had a Constitution which allocated powers to states, just as the American Constitution allocates powers to American states and the Canadian Constitution allocates powers to provinces. The Nigerian Constitution permits states to make laws (Article 4, 7) and establish courts (Article 6, 2). From June 2000 to January 2001 eight states in Nigeria chose to follow Sharia law (Afrol.comNews, 11 January 2001). Thus, said Obasanjo, had he chosen to override the Sharia court, he would have been acting as a dictator.

Perhaps, however, Obasanjo could have referred to the higher power of international law in order to overrule Sharia in Zamfara State. In a federal system, though, this is difficult to do. Even in Canada, a well-established liberal democracy, the federal government cannot automatically impose adherence to international human rights law on a recalcitrant province. Moreover, as noted above, Nigeria had not ratified some of the key relevant international documents at the time of Bariya Magazu's trial. More importantly, interference by Obasanjo might well have caused another round of religious rioting between Muslims and Christians.

Christian and Muslim Proselytization

Such religious rioting has been a frightening feature of political life in Northern Nigeria for at least twenty years (Kastfelt 1989; Lubeck 1985). These conflicts resumed after the democratic elections in Nigeria in February 1999. In February 2000 about 1,000 Southern, Christian Igbos were killed in the North by Muslims, sparking retaliatory killings by Igbos in the South. In May and June 2000, there were further clashes between Muslims and Christians in the northern cities of Kaduna and Kano (Ifeka, 2000). ⁷ These conflicts are a result in part of the historic ethnic and regional splits in Nigeria, a federation created by British fiat at the time of decolonization. They are also, however, a consequence of the tendency of individuals to turn to religious certainties in times of rapid social change and disorder.

As Barrington Moore, Jr. (2000, 33) has argued, "[u]nder situations of unfamiliar social disorder and emotional and intellectual disarray, there is liable to be a substantial audience for dogmatic certainty and strict social discipline." Both Islam and Christianity provide blueprints for such certainty and discipline. The new, strict strain of Islam currently sweeping Northern Nigeria seems to promise as well an end to the political corruption that has plagued Nigeria for decades. Popular faith turns to religious leaders, as opposed to discredited political leaders. The Islamic movement gives meaning to societies undergoing severe and extreme social change, and especially provides comfort for those millions of young men without any hope of gainful employment or a respected role in society. ⁸ Islamization, a system which attempts to regulate politics, economics, education, and law as well as religion, is an attractive counterweight to the disorder brought on by a history of colonialism and the present weak integration of Nigeria and other parts of the Islamic world into the global system (Turner 1991).

In this respect, Islam plays a role similar to fundamentalist Christianity in the West, or indeed to Nazism in Germany in the 1920s. It is not Islam that is at issue, but the social functions of intolerant and dogmatic ideologies in societies undergoing severe stress. That this is so in Northern Nigeria can be seen by the competing spread of Christian evangelism, which also attracted many hundreds of thousands of converts in the 1990s. Christian evangelism also "account[s] for a great deal of the religious intolerance exhibited [in Nigeria] in recent times" (Hackett 1999, 246). In times of stress, many individuals also join groups for protection. Submerging themselves in a group, they are sure other members will support them in cases of conflict (Freeman 2000). Thus, economic and social insecurity encourages religious and ethnic identification, and hostility to those belonging to other groups. Both Christians and Muslims in Northern Nigeria benefit from joining and being loyal to their respective groups, yet both lose because their fear of the other group increases their sense of unease and threat.

The Islamist movement is not entirely a response to social stress, however. Elites in Northern Nigeria manipulate popular reactions to social and economic stress to benefit their own interests. Many of those promoting Islamization, both in Nigeria and in general in the Muslim world, are very highly educated (Clarke 1982; Esposito 1999). Some of these educated individuals may genuinely believe that Islam is the best alternative to failed democratization and development. As Imam (1994, 132) suggests: "[T]he evident failure of development and modernization promises and of 'democratic' party politics have given rise to increasing pessimism and cynicism and a recourse to religion." Others manipulate Islam to maintain the Muslim Hausa elite in power (Ifeka 2000). Nor is the Islamist movement entirely indigenous. Some extremist sects in Northern Nigeria appear to have been patronized and financed by Saudi Arabians. Others appear to have been patronized and financed by Iran. Many in these more radical streams believe there should be a jihad in Nigeria until the entire country is Islamic (Abdullah 2000).⁹ These influences help explain the sudden imposition of Sharia law on entire populations, whether Muslim or not, by several Northern states after the adoption of the formally secular 1999 national Constitution.

Secularism

A court relying on a relaxed, tolerant, syncretically Africanized Islam might not have sought to flog Bariya Mugazu. Such a syncretic type of Islam, adapted to indigenous African cultures, existed in much of Northern Nigeria before the British conquest. The British, however, decided to support the power of Muslim Hausa emirs, through whom they could indirectly rule the North. The nineteenth century Hausa had been engaged in a jihad to convert all the non-Hausa ethnic groups to Islam, thus simultaneously incorporating them into Hausa culture and strengthening their loyalty to Hausa rulers. British interest in Northern stability encouraged this process of simultaneous Islamization and Hausa-ization (Salamone 1983).

Thus the current religio-political conflict in Nigeria — spilling over into the worldwide politics of resentment — is in part a result of British colonial policies. Ironically, however, Islamic activists connect the British not with support for their Muslim Hausa rule, but with the secularism that they believe attacks the very foundations of Sharia law. Nigeria's Constitution specifies in its Article 10 that the country is a secular state. "The Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion." Sharia has long been recognized in Nigeria as the appropriate personal law (regulating matters to do with marriage and family) for Muslims, but it had never before 2000 also been criminal law, nor before 2000 had either the federal or state governments ever imposed it on non-Muslims.

To many Islamic activists, the secular basis of the Nigerian state is yet more evidence of cultural imperialism. Secularism, to them, is a "Christian" belief. The Constitution represents imposed British law, hence Christian law, hence secularism (Imam 1994). Alternately, some Muslim activists who understand that British law is based on Roman law, see it as imposed paganism (Kenny 1996). Rather than a secular state, then, some Muslims advocate a "pluralistic confessional state" (ibid., 348). They object to the imposition of a secular legal system "on a people who are by no means secular" (H.E. Smith 1988, 327), arguing instead that for Muslims, religious freedom is the freedom not to separate mosque from state (Birai 1993).

To Canadians, such objections to secularism might seem very strange. Although in 1991 84 percent of Canadians identified themselves as Christians, most Canadians were familiar with the idea of a secular state and believed that no religious laws should be imposed by the state to regulate adult consensual sexual behaviour. That their belief in this basic principle of liberal democratic rule might be interpreted as Christian imperialism would strike many of the Canadians who wrote to defend Bariya Magazu as odd. They might well defend the universal, secular law of human rights against charges both of Western, and of Christian-secularist, imperialism.

Who Should Act?

Was Bariya Magazu's punishment the proper business of well-meaning Canadians whose hearts were touched by her story? This question introduces the final parable of Bariya's sad tale, the need to consider who ought to act to overturn the punishments undergone by women who transgress the norms of Muslim societies in Nigeria.

Nigerian Feminism

The days are long gone when Western feminists sought to preach their message of liberation to women from other societies, without seeking to ascertain those women's own opinions, desires, and needs. Nowadays, sophisticated international feminists seek to be culturally sensitive, and to listen to and learn from feminists from other parts of the world (e.g. Bulbeck 1998). This task is made easier by the entry into the international community of large numbers of highly articulate, educated women from the Islamic world and from Africa itself.

In Nigeria there are both secular and Muslim women's groups. FOMWAN, the Federation of Muslim Women's Associations in Nigeria, was formed in 1985. Its goal, according to Abdullah (2000, 108) is to "liberat[e] Muslims within the parameters of Muslim law," taking the position that it is culture and tradition, not the precepts of Islam, that subordinate women (ibid.). Educated Hausa Muslim women were also involved in establishing the more radical WIN (Women in Nigeria) (Dauda 1992; Imam 1994). WIN originally based its platform on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Shettima 1995). It has urged that women be taught about the rights they enjoy in their own religions. It has also sought the rationalization of legal systems in Nigeria, so that laws that discriminate against women — religious or otherwise — are eliminated, and so that laws that violate the federal Constitution are invalidated (Shettima 1995).

That these women's associations exist in Nigeria might suggest that there is no need for foreigners to interest themselves in local Nigerian violations of women's international human rights. A Canadian feminist concerned about Bariya Magazu might well defer to Nigerian feminists, on the assumption that the closer the Nigerian critics of Bariya's punishment were to the cultural norms of Nigerian Islamic society, and the more they could show respect for their elders, for traditional authorities, and for Sharia judges, the better. Indeed, this is one of the aspects of the case of Bariya Magazu. A Nigerian women's group, BAOBAB¹⁰, did try to intervene. BAOBAB tried to argue that the flogging to which Bariya had been sentenced violated Islamic law. What Islam mandates is not uniformly agreed on throughout the Muslim world; there are more and less liberal strains of Islam. According to BAOBAB, in so far as Bariya was convicted upon insufficient evidence, there not being four witnesses to the actual act of fornication (zina), she should not have been found guilty.

To rely on one's own culture, religion, and law in the first instance in making the case for human rights, seems a more sensible strategy than referring to more abstract international principles. As An-Na'im (2000) suggests, it is better to stress the synergy and interdependence between human rights and religion than to assume they are separate, incompatible aspects of human thought.¹¹ Even when ratified by one's own government, human rights principles may seem very remote from those who are subjected to them. Canada itself has a culture of protection of women's human rights which is, at most, thirty years old. Prior to 1970, laws protecting women's human rights were rare, while discrimination against women both in the public and the private spheres was the norm. Many Canadians forget how recently the principle of equality of men and women was introduced into their own society, as they also forget how recent is the toleration of sexual activities outside marriage. Had Canadians, in 1960 or even 1970, been subjected to an international regime of women's rights that violated their own legal, religious, and cultural predispositions, they might well have been resentful of that regime. This is the position in which many Nigerians now find themselves. It might therefore, be considered best for Nigerians to take up causes such as Bariya Magazu's, leaving outsiders only in a supporting role.

Nonetheless, there are times when religions do clash with principles of international human rights, regardless of how liberally their texts may be interpreted. Most Canadians would be very unhappy were their human rights to depend on the proper interpretation of Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious texts. The principle of secularism removes them from the rule of priests. Moghissi (1996, 8) notes "[to privilege] voices of religion is to have lower moral expectations [for] the 'simpler societies'. … [G]iving up on the necessity of universally recognized standards of social and political life would be disastrous to the most oppressed, most brutalized and marginalized individuals, that is women living under Islamic rules" (emphasis in original). Foreigners' interests in cases such as that of Bariya Magazu may assist those in Muslim societies who wish to entirely reject religious strictures on women's and human rights.

The International Feminist Movement

Thus, reliance on indigenous feminism does not mean that the international feminist and human rights movements had no role to play in the case of Bariya Magazu. Since the early 1980s indigenous African feminism has interacted with the international feminist movement. Indeed, feminism has been part of the "leap-frogging" of international human rights norms both chronologically and geographically, so that even the remotest parts of the world are now touched by the idea that women, like men, are human beings and should have rights (Howard-Hassmann, 2005). The 1993 United Nations' Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women is an example of the emerging "thick" universal cultural consensus on women's rights. This consensus is based in evolving cultural norms, affected by the efforts and ideas of indigenous feminists everywhere. It is no longer dependent merely on the "thin" universality of international human rights law. The Declaration was a consequence of pressure from the international feminist movement, a movement that was made possible by the fact the term "violence against women" resonated strongly with women from all parts of the globe (Keck and Sikkink 1998).

African women and men can think independently about gender roles in their own societies. They are not so embroiled either in their own cultures or in their own religions as to be unquestioning of them. Just as many Western women and men have long objected to aspects of their cultures that subordinate women, so also do Africans. The mistreatment of women — in forced childhood marriages, in polygynous marriages, in violent domestic arrangements — motivates many African human rights activists, men as well as women.¹²

The international feminist movement suggests that one's gender status may be more important than one's ethno-religious status and that the sisterhood of women may override the brotherhood of common religious membership. This notion is hotly debated, and much reference is still made to the alleged whiteness of the second wave feminist movement, despite thirty-five years of its evolution. Whatever its origins, international feminism, like the international human rights movement, provides support as well as example to indigenous feminist activities, in Nigeria as elsewhere.

The Canadian Government

Responding to Canadian citizens' concerns about Bariya Magazu, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) eventually took up her case. On 29 December 2000 a spokesperson for the Department reported that the Canadian High Commission had delivered a rebuke to the Nigerian government. The rebuke noted that "cruel and unusual punishments involving mutilation and excessive pain violate international standards of human[e] treatment" (The Globe and Mail, 29 December 2000). On 10 January 2001 John Manley, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke up during an informal media "scrum." "[T]he Nigerian case is … an appalling case," he said, "and I think Canadians are quite disturbed by it … . We've made a number of interventions … with the Nigerian government. … We've been asking Nigeria to respect their own commitments to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … " (CNW Scrum, 9 January 2001). For a Minister of Foreign Affairs to address himself to an individual legal case in another country is very unusual: Manley's intervention reflected the depth of Canadian interest in Bariya Magazu.

Individual Canadian citizens attempting to influence human rights issues elsewhere sometimes bear the psychological burden of neo-colonialism. This burden arises even though Canada never had colonies of its own. From the point of view of some Africans, all whites (the vast majority of Canadians are white) are "Europeans" and, as such, among those who benefited from colonialism in Africa. Europeans' wealth is evident in everyday transactions between them and Africans on that continent, as well as in media representations of North American life. From this point of view, Canada compounds the history of exploitation of Africa by saying, in effect, "now that we have colonized and exploited you, we want you to be just like us in a social and moral sense. Unless you adopt our values and ways of life, you are morally inferior people." Indeed, this objective is implicit in some of DFAIT's statements. In 1995, DFAIT stated quite openly that one of its aims was "to share our [Canadian] values and culture."¹³

When Canadian officials speak about international human rights, they frequently refer to "our" (Canadian) values. This practice is unfortunate, resembling the constant American preaching about the United States' role as a beacon of freedom, which many in the rest of the world find offensive. Rather than refer to "Canadian" values, it would be advisable to refer to the universal nature of human rights, including women's rights, as John Manley did in his off-the-cuff remarks. Since Nigeria has signed and ratified both the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (on 13 June 1985) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canada can remind Nigeria of its obligations under international law without implying that Canada is a better, or more advanced, civilization.

A Final Word: The Legitimacy of the International Human Rights Movement

The case of Bariya Magazu recalls the case in India of Shah Bano, a Muslim woman divorced by her husband, who under Islamic law as interpreted in India owed her no support after the divorce. Indian feminists rallied around Shah Bano and pressed for the uniform Indian Civil Code to be applied to her, so that she could have financial support. They won the battle but lost the war. Many Indian Muslims interpreted the secular women's movement to be a movement of chauvinist Hindu women, determined to impose Hindu, not secular, law on their community. Shah Bano herself was sufficiently persuaded by this argument that she eventually renounced the support the courts had awarded her (Kumar 1994; Menon, 2000).

Similarly, had it resulted in President Obasanjo's agreement to overturn the Bariya Magazu decision, Canadian interest might well have provoked increased Christian-Muslim tensions in Nigeria. In so doing it might have resulted in further de-stabilization of the already fragile Nigerian Federation, just as the Shah Bano case intensified communal politics in India. By making the case into an international issue, the The Globe and Mail, its readers, and eventually the Canadian government obliged President Obasanjo to take a stand. Had he taken any course of action other than the one he did, women's rights might have been even worse served, as the strict new Islam of the North entrenched itself even further, or as local, inter-communal violence worsened.

This is the hard reality of human rights in the age of the politics of resentment. "New" values such as women's rights are seen as incursions of foreign values. Although motivated only by compassion for the victims of human rights abuses, foreigners who try to protect those rights are seen as cultural imperialists, introducing decadent values and undermining local moral codes. In so far as women are the last-ditch "carriers" of culture — those who can respect, or be obliged to respect, religious and cultural norms when the society itself is collapsing — foreigners who preach new rights for women are seen as wanting deliberately to undermine local societies. What Canadians saw as benign, universalistic acts to protect Bariya Magazu were interpreted as a conspiracy against the culture and laws of the state of Zamfara.

Nonetheless, Canadian interest and "interference" perhaps mitigated Bariya Magazu's plight. Above, I suggested that Bariya might have been flogged so much earlier than announced because of resentment of international, non-Muslim interest. But other instances of floggings, and one amputation, in Zamfara State ("Court ordered torture," 23 January 2001) suggest that the extreme punishment Bariya suffered might have been imposed, whatever the circumstances. In fact, it might be that the eighty lashes for false reporting of a rape were revoked precisely because of outside pressures.

Moreover, subsequent cases of imposition of strict Islamic law in Northern Nigeria have received much press attention, and Nigerian feminists and lawyers have moved quickly to protect women's rights under both Islamic and secular law. In 2002, for example, on the grounds of insufficient evidence under Islamic law, Safiya Husseini of Sokoto State was acquitted of the charge of adultery on the very day she was sentenced to be stoned to death (USA Today, 26 March 2002). Husseini's case had attracted the attention of the New York Times, which featured her photo and an article about her in its Sunday Magazine section, demonstrating the power of both the North American and international feminist movement to bring to the world's attention matters that a scant twenty years earlier would have gone unnoticed (New York Times Magazine, 27 January 2002). Nigeria's Attorney-General, Kanu Agabi, intervened in the Husseini case, bringing to the attention of the Sokoto authorities the hundreds of letters of protest he was receiving daily (The Globe and Mail, 26 March 2002). The case also attracted outrage elsewhere in Africa, with a Ugandan newspaper, New Vision, calling for mercy for Safiya Husseini (6 December 2001).

None of the above analysis means, therefore, that Canadians or other Westerners, or indeed liberal, secular, or non-Muslim Africans interested in human rights, should stop doing what they are doing. Owens Wiwa, brother of the hanged Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and a resident of Toronto, gave it as his view that Canadian diplomatic intervention would assist indigenous human rights groups: "it will surely start the process of getting human-rights groups in Nigeria and internationally to pay more attention to what's happening," he was quoted as saying (The Globe and Mail, 29 December 2000). Social values do change, in Northern Nigeria as anywhere else. Values change in part because individuals encounter ideas. Whether literate or not, whether living in freedom or living in fear, individuals have the capacity to think. And individuals who suffer take heart from knowing that others care about them, even others far away who they have never met.

Bariya Magazu herself may not have been able to express her pain and humiliation at being flogged, or may have been sufficiently intimidated not to express it. Or, she may have accepted the punishment as in some manner just, despite her early protestations that she had been raped. But perhaps she did draw heart from knowing that some people in faraway Canada worried about her, so much so that representatives of their government spoke to representatives of her government. At the time of writing of this article in September 2002, yet another Nigerian woman, this time in Katsina State, had been sentenced to death by stoning as punishment for adultery. But this time, the Federal government intervened to assist Amina Lawal, Kanu Agabi stating unequivocally the government's opposition to the sentence. It seemed likely that the case would go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria (Hamilton Spectator, 23 August 2002; BBC News, 23 August 2002). International pressure on the Nigerian government, in support of Nigerian women and Nigerian women's groups, helped to oblige the Federal government to act, regardless of the risk of offending patriarchal state governments using Islam in their own interests.

Acknowledgement

This article is based on a talk delivered at the University of Toronto Law School, Human Rights Day Forum, 15 March 2001. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research funds, and to Anthony Lombardo for his research assistance. Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, Carol Dauda, Susan Dicklitch, and Ann Elizabeth Mayer all commented on an earlier draft, and I owe them all my sincere thanks.

Works Cited

Notes

1. Details of the Bariya Magazu case are taken from two Afrol.comNews articles "Nigerian girl appeals agains Shari'a pre-marital sex ruling," 11 January 2001 (Available: www.afrol.com/News2001/nig001_sharia_girl.htm ; accessed 12 July 2005) and "UNICEF condemns flogging of Nigerian girl," 23 January 2001 (Available: www.afrol.com/html/News2001/nig003_bariya_unicef.htm ; accessed 13 July 2005); as well as an article in the Laos press by A. Imam, titled "The whipping of Bariya Ibrahim" Tempo, 8 February 2001 and another in the Canadian press by S. Nolen "Nigerians try to halt girl's flogging" The Globe and Mail 10 January 2001 along with the 23 January 2001 Amnesty International Canada update "Court ordered torture."

2. Nolen's remark read to the Human Rights Day Forum, University of Toronto Law School, 16 March 2001.

3. Nevertheless, they might have reacted that twenty strokes was twenty strokes too many.

4. Within the British Commonwealth, representatives of one State to another State are known as High Commissioners rather than as Ambassadors.

5. On status honour see (Weber 1946).

6. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, the noted expert on human rights in Islam, confirms that under Islamic law, men and women become adults with full criminal responsibility at puberty. Personal communication, 6 September 2002.

7. For a list of such clashes from 1980 to 1995, see (Kenny 1996, 358-60).

8. The estimated rate of unemployment in Nigeria in 1997 was 30 percent (US Department of State 1997).

9. Several authors ((Abdullah 2000); Birai 1993; Imam 1994; H.E. Smith 1988) refer to Saudi and Iranian financing of Islamic movements in Northern Nigeria, though none cites concrete evidence, documentary or otherwise.

10. BAOBAB is not an acronym. The organization is named after the baobab tree, which is characterized by tenacity and is a source of nourishment, medication, and shelter (Toronto Star, 14 January 2001).

11. A point also made by (Hassan 1996, 365-6).

12. I base this statement in part on interviews I conducted with sixteen African human rights activists in June 2002.

13. Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. 1995. "Notes for an Address by the Honourable Andre Ouellet, Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the Occasion of the Tabling in the House of Commons of the Government's Foreign Policy Statement," Ottawa, 7 February.

Contents

Glossary Terms

• imperialism
• women's rights
• community
• democracy
• international human rights law
• colonialism
• belonging

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