Cameroon Widows Accuse Women of Enforcing Harmful Traditional Rituals

YAOUNDE, CAMEROON - Several hundred Cameroonian widows gathered in the capital, Yaounde, to observe International Widows Day by protesting traditional practices that wives are expected to undergo when they lose their husbands.

Cameroon's minister of women's empowerment and the family, Marie Therese Abena Ondoua, says traditional practices that violate the rights of widows are still practiced in parts of the country.   Fifty-eight-year-old Njoukou Yebom is from Noun, a western administrative unit in Cameroon. Yebom says he regrets that he attempted to force his late younger brother's 15-year-old wife marry him.  Yebom says that in 2018, elders in the town of Foumban where Noun is located asked him to marry his 30-year-old late brother's wife. He was told that if he refused to marry the woman, a stranger to their family would inherit his younger brother's property and leave with his only son. Yebom says he threatened to kill her if she refused.