South
African women married to Nigerian men have narrated the discrimination
they face for marrying men outside their country. Seeing the
disaffection their kinsmen show them after finding love in the hands of
Nigerian men, the women decided to form an association, the United
Nigerian Wives in South Africa (UNWISA) club about two years ago where
they give support and succor to each other.
42
year old Lindwela Uche who serves as the chairwoman of the group told
AFP that they saw the xenophobic attacks coming and alerted their
husbands but they did not take their warning seriously "We saw this
thing coming and that’s why we
formed this association. If only they
(the authorities) had listened to us… they would have known that there’s
a fire burning slowly and they would have seen how to tackle it.”she
said
One of the members of the association,“Lufunu Orji who
is married to a Nigerian resource consultant, Ogbonnaya Orji, says being
married to a foreigner is very challenging
"Being
married to a foreigner is very challenging. You often spend your time
defending yourself and then you defend your foreign husband for being
himself. Just before I got wed to my husband, I lost two very best
friends of mine. They thought I was out of my mind" she said
Another
member of the group who gave her name as Uche, said her 13-year-old
daughter returned from school a while ago, complaining that her teacher
had told her “not to bring that Nigerian mentality here” after she and
classmates were noisy in class.
“We need to be protected, we need our children to be protected… and our husbands to be treated with dignity,” Uche said
37
year old Thelma Okoro, says the attitude towards them “are negative
everywhere we go,”. According to her, wearing traditional Nigerian dress
on the street can attract bad comments. She spoke of how her
eight-year-old daughter gets mocked by schoolmates over her name “Ngozi”
which means “blessing” in Igbo but literally translates to “danger” in
Zulu.
