Excerpt from “Blink”, an essay on adultery published in Fourth Genre.
Kaduna, Nigeria. Amina knew the man at the door. Yahay was a distant cousin of her first
husband. Their twelve year marriage had fallen apart two years ago. The children lived with
him. She had married a second time; it lasted only ten months. Amina was back in her village,
living with her mother, step-father, his son and the son’s wife. Their three room home was
crowded. Like the rest of the village, they had no electricity or plumbing. She was old, almost
twenty eight, well past marriageable age. But Yahay had been paying attention to her. He had
begun to speak of marriage. Their families were against the match, but Amina and Yahay
continued to meet each other.
Yahay came to the door of her stepfather’s house. He had a motorbike with him that
morning. He wanted to take her to meet his parents.
A few miles outside of the village, he pulled over to the side of the road. They were deep
in the bush. He told her the bike had broken down; they needed to get off so he could fix it.
He began to work on the bike. Then he told her that he was hot. Like most men in
Kaduna, he wore three layers of clothing. He took off his outer robe.
He was still hot, he told her. He took off a second layer.
She thought of screaming when he forced her to the ground. But they were miles away
from anything, what would be the point?
When Amina discovered that she was pregnant, her stepfather went to the Kaduna village
council. He told them the name of the father. Yahay was brought before the council; he admitted
that Amina was carrying his child. The matter was settled as such matters had always been
settled, by the village chief, within the community. Yahay promised to redeem Amina by
marrying her and promised to support his child. A few weeks after Amina’s baby was born the
fundamentalist police force showed up at her stepfather’s house.
“Come with us,” they told Amina. They took her to the Shari’a courthouse in Bakori, a
neighboring town. Amina had never seen a courtroom or a judge before. Terrified, she held her
daughter tightly.
The judge asked her if she was married. She said no. The judge asked her if she had given
birth to a child. She was holding the evidence. She said yes. The judge told her that she was
guilty of having a child out of wedlock. He asked her the name of the father of her child. She
told him. He asked her if she was guilty of zina, adultery. Amina’s native language was Hausa,
the laws of the court were in Arabic. She didn’t understand the meaning of the charge. She had
no lawyer, no one to advise her. The judge charged her with zina as well.
When Yahay’s three closest friends heard that Amina had been charged with zina, they
advised him to deny his involvement with her. Unless there were four male witnesses to the act
of intercourse, he could go free. If he confessed, he would be sentenced to death. When he was
brought before the Shari’a court in Bakori, he swore on the Qur’an that he never seduced Amina.
He was acquitted. Amina would stand trial for the crime alone. Six weeks later the judge
returned a verdict. In accordance with the Nigerian Shari’a Penal Codes, she was sentenced to be
stoned to death. The judge told her to go back to her step-father’s house to wait for her sentence
to be carried out.
The Shari’a, the body of regulations which established zina as a crime punishable by
stoning, was formalized in the seventh century. The laws outlined lesser protocols for devout
life: dress, prayer, an fasting. The original regulations were derived from the Qur’an and the
Hadith, the description of the words and actions of the prophet Mohammed. In the Shari’a,
stoning is described as a deterrent punishment, one that its seventh century creators hoped would
keep men and women from straying from the sacred bond of marriage. But as one woman on
trial in Nigeria pointed out, the law was designed for transparent, close-knit communities living
in tents in the desert. Not for a state court system of an impoverished, post-colonial nation
crippled by turmoil and corruption. In Nigeria, the constitution and the federal, secular judicial
system remains dominant over the twelve northern states that have adopted the Shari’a court
system, federal politicians wishing to wish their states favor are hesitant to overturn the verdicts
of court system. The hastily modernized, archaic penal codes are full of gaps and holes; they do
not provide sufficient descriptions of the original intentions or applications of deterrent
punishments such as stoning. In the seventh century, four witnesses to the act of adultery might
have been easily procured and the couple would have stood trial together. In Kastina state,
Amina’s home, where the Shari’a Penal Codes were authorized in 1999, the primary evidence in
zina trial was pregnancy, the body’s tattling of extramarital intercourse. And the primary target
of the law had become poor, unwed mothers.
Prior to her arrest, Amina, like most inhabitants of the rural villages of Nigeria, didn’t
know that the Shari’a court system existed, or that zina was a crime punishable by death. Amina
was illiterate. She had never read a newspaper or owned a television or a radio. Though Amina
had hundreds of lines of the Qur’an committed to memory for the purpose of prayer, they had not
educated her about stoning as a form of execution because there is no mention of stoning in the
Qur’an. Nor is there any protocol in the Hadith for how a stoning should be carried out.
If the state authorities of Nigeria followed the precedent set by the Shari’a courts in other
nations, and if Amina was found guilty, the authorities would tie her in a white sheet, dig a
narrow hole in the ground, and bury her up to her neck. Her bagged upper body would look like
a white sack of potatoes tied off at the top. Her three older children and her infant daughter
would be brought to watch. Officials and men from her village would stand around her in a
circle. They would pick up fist-sized pieces of rock: stones that they had brought with them or
that the officials had supplied for the occasion. Her death would have to be both agonizing and
public. They would make an example of her. On the official’s call the circle of men would
begin to hurl rocks at her head. She would go blind. Her skull would crack open. Blood would
soak the ripped sheet. But they would keep stoning her, until there was nothing left to break.
***