Pandemic brings new pain to African widows Husband’s death often can result in ostracism

UMUIDA, Nigeria — As Anayo Mbah went into labor with her sixth child, her husband battled COVID-19 in another hospital across town. Jonas, a young motorcycle taxi driver, had been placed on oxygen after he started coughing up blood.

Jonas would never meet his daughter, Chinaza. Hours after the birth, Mbah’s sister-in-law called to say he was gone. Staff at the hospital in Nigeria soon asked Mbah and her newborn to leave. No one had come to pay her bill.

Anayo began the rites of widowhood at the home where she lived with her in-laws: Her head was shaved, and she was dressed in white clothing. But just weeks into the mourning period that traditionally lasts six months, her late husband’s relatives stopped providing food, then confronted her directly.

“They told me that it was better for me to find my own way,” Mbah, now 29, said. “They said even if I have to go and remarry, that I should do so. That the earlier I leave the house, the better for me and my children.”

She left on foot for her mother’s home with only a plastic bag of belongings for Chinaza and her other children.

Across Africa, widowhood has long befallen great numbers of women — particularly in the continent’s least developed countries where medical facilities are scarce. Many widows are young, having married men decades older. And in some countries, men frequently have more than one wife, leaving several widows behind when they die.

Now, the pandemic has created an even larger population of widows on the continent, with African men more likely to die of the virus than women, and it has exacerbated the issues they face. Women such as Mbah say the pandemic has taken more than their husbands: In their widowhood, it’s cost them their extended families, their homes and their futures.

Once widowed, women are often mistreated and disinherited. Laws prohibit many from acquiring land or give them only a fraction of their spouse’s wealth. In-laws can claim custody of children. Other in-laws disown the children and refuse to help, even if they’re the family’s only source of money and food. And young widows have no adult children to support them in impoverished communities with few jobs.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, some 70 percent of confirmed COVID-19 deaths have been men, according to data tracked by the Sex, Gender and COVID-19 Project. Similarly, more than 70 percent of deaths in Chad, Malawi, Somalia and Congo have been men, according to figures from the project. Other countries likely show similar trends but lack the resources to gather detailed figures.

Experts say some of the widows left behind have nothing while others are pressured to remarry brothersin-law or be cut off. Widows can start experiencing mistreatment by their in-laws before their husbands are even buried.

“Some are treated as outcasts, accused of being responsible for the death of their husband,” said Egodi Blessing Igwe, of Womenaid Collective, which has aided thousands of widows with legal services and family mediation.

In Congo, Vanessa Emedy Kamana had known her husband for a decade before he proposed marriage.

When he died, relatives came to the family home where Kamana had just begun her period of mourning.

She feared her husband’s family would seek custody of her son, Jamel, whom Kamana had adopted and given his surname. Ultimately the relatives did not, because the boy — now 6 — wasn’t his biological child. They did, however, move swiftly to amass financial assets.

She and her son now live in a smaller home her mother kept as a rental property. It’s painful, Kamana said, when her late husband’s relatives insist they’ve lost more than she did: “No one will be able to replace him.”