So the British High Commission is clapping its hands in delight as Sierra Leone puts a child marriage case on trial. A landmark prosecution, they call it. Very good.
Very progressive. But before we join the standing ovation, let us consider the uncomfortable historical parallels. The British Empire, remember, spent centuries exporting its legal and moral codes to the four corners of the globe, often with a smugness that bordered on the obscene.
We abolished the slave trade, we suppressed suttee, we civilised the savage. And now? Now we praise a post-colonial African state for finally prosecuting what any sensible society ought to have outlawed decades ago.
Bravo. But is this justice or is this the old imperial reflex dressed in the language of human rights? The victim in this case is a girl, presumably poor, presumably ignorant of her rights.
The defendant is a man who, by local custom, might have considered his actions entirely normal. That is the tragedy. That is the horror.
And that is precisely why the British High Commission’s welcome rings rather hollow. Where were the commissioners when the British judiciary was busily enforcing laws that permitted the marriage of 12-year-old girls in England until 1929? Where was the outrage when the Church of England solemnised child brides in the colonies?
History has a nasty habit of returning as farce. The real question is whether this prosecution signals a genuine shift in Sierra Leonean society or merely a performative gesture for international consumption. The Commonwealth is an uneasy club.
It binds together nations with shared bloodshed and shared language, but not shared histories of suffering. Britain lectures, Sierra Leone listens. Britain applauds, Sierra Leone pretends to be grateful.
Meanwhile, the child at the centre of this drama remains a symbol. I do not doubt the sincerity of the prosecutors. I do doubt the wisdom of celebrating a single case as though it rights centuries of wrongs.
Until the legal age of marriage is enforced with the same vigour as this trial, until the poverty that forces families into such transactions is addressed, until the patriarchy that enables these abuses is dismantled, this is merely a headline. A nice one for the High Commission’s annual report, but a headline nonetheless. And that is the thing about Commonwealth justice: it is often about making the coloniser feel better about the past.
The child remains married, in effect, to a system that treats her as property. One trial does not a revolution make.
