CHAPTER 16

Zalika
My husband came home from his Uganda trip and I shipped out for divorce court in Niger.
The Times assigned a photographer—Laura Boushnak, who was a mom about my age—to travel
with me to report on the Islamic court. It was so nice to be with someone else with sensible shoes,
comfortable pants and that familiar look of exhaustion on her un-made-up face.
Almost every beat I had ever covered involved the legal system in some way. I knew my way around
criminal courts and civil law and even cases at The Hague. But I had no experience with an Islamic
court.
We wound through the unpaved back streets of the city of Maradi, a regional agriculture hub that
sits on a flat sandy plane near the southern border with Nigeria. The car turned down a narrow road
made even more narrow by cars parked on both sides. A flock of sheep crossed in front of our vehicle,
and Laura and I hopped out.
We pushed back a tattered yellow curtain that was strung across an otherwise bare doorway and
entered a room with dirt-smudged blue walls. Dust-covered books were scattered everywhere, in
heaps on top of a desk, lined up on high shelves and piled on a side table.
Most were in Arabic. Faded portraits of a dozen male religious leaders, some with long
beards and elaborate turbans, hung on the walls. I sat down on a couch and a cloud of dust
rose up around me.
A barefoot man with 1980s-style aviator-shaped eyeglasses and a gray goatee entered
and sat on the floor. It was the judge—or kadi, as he was called.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“You handle divorce cases, right?”
“Yes, divorce, property disputes, theft—people come to me for everything.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve noticed more divorce cases lately?”
His eyes widened.
“Yes, the rate of divorce has really gone up. For the past two years I have seen a drastic
increase in divorce—especially women coming to me to ask for divorce.”
It was exactly what I had hoped to hear. My story might just fall into place.
“So,” I asked, “why do you think more women are coming to you to break up their
marriages?”
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “There are a few reasons.”
The judge explained his chief theory: Men were still almost always the breadwinners of
families in the farming community. Traditionally after harvest time, they locked up their stores
of grain—they didn’t trust their wives to be capable enough to manage the rations—and took
off until planting time to look for work across the border in Nigeria, a more prosperous country
than Niger.
But years of war with Boko Haram had crushed Nigeria’s economy and work there had
dried up. A recession in Nigeria had hurt Niger, too. Anyone who did business across the
border, from farmers to money changers, were struggling. Wives wanted to work to help
make ends meet. A wife suggesting she get a job was enough to enrage some husbands in
this patriarchal society. The men would be ashamed if other people thought they couldn’t
provide for their families. But the women needed to feed their children. Some left their
brooding husbands and sought a divorce.
“I want to be clear,” the kadi said. “Many women ask me for divorce, but I don’t always
grant it.”
Here comes the patriarchy, I thought.
“I’m trying to slow things down,” he explained. “There are so many. Young women are
aware of their rights. They don’t want to suffer anymore. There is a solution to their problems
and they can find it with me.”
The kadi wasn’t refusing to grant women divorces. He just wasn’t granting divorces willy-
nilly. He saw his role as marriage counselor as well as judge.
“We men are mean, that is true,” the kadi said. “When a husband can’t provide, he has to
let his wife work.
“Islam grants women rights and they know their rights,” the kadi continued. “If someone
thinks her rights are violated by a situation, I’ll support her.”
Out in the middle of Nowheresville, Niger, where tweens get married off and have babies,
where genital cutting is shunned but sometimes still practiced, where some parents still won’t
let their girls go to school because they worry they’ll get knocked up on the walk home, I had
managed to find a feminist Islamic court judge in the kadi of the Sultan of the Kingdom of
Maradi. And he wielded quite a bit of power. The police sent plaintiffs to him instead of to the
municipal legal system. He took up cases that local judges had flubbed. He was on call 24
hours a day, seven days a week. He was, it turned out, one of the main arbitrators of disputes
for hundreds of miles around, with a jurisdiction of three million people.
“There are many reasons women are asking for divorce,” the kadi went on.
“Can you give me some examples?” I asked.
“Why don’t you see for yourself,” he said. “Follow me.”
Laura and I trailed the kadi outside. In the time we had been
talking, a big crowd had collected on the sidewalk. There were more than 100 men—all of
them spectators there for the show.
The men parted when the barefoot kadi approached, to let him through, and he plopped
down on the sidewalk atop a double-layered sheepskin rug—his official judicial bench. His
calloused feet poked from his gown. He made space for me to scoot in near him and called
the first name on his handwritten list.
The first plaintiff arrived. It was a woman in a pink hijab who squeezed between all the men
to sit cross-legged in front of the kadi. A man entered from the other side of the crowd and
sat down not far from her.
The woman, Aishatou, launched in, as though she was picking up from an interrupted
conversation. I guess she was just cutting to the chase.
“I got pregnant and I wanted my boyfriend to marry me. He wanted me to get an abortion
then he changed his mind and decided we should have the baby and he would help me take
care of everything.
“But now,” she continued, “I had the baby and he hasn’t done anything. He doesn’t even
come around.”
Aishatou explained she had taken her boyfriend to municipal court, where the judge
ordered him to pay child support. Since then he had made only one payment. She hoped the
kadi could talk some sense into him.
The kadi looked at the couple sitting across from him.
“It’s impossible to have a baby without two people having sex. What you have both done
is immoral,” the kadi said. “This baby did not choose to come into this life. You created this
child and this child has rights.”
 “I’m not the only woman who has a man who won’t pay up,” Aishatou said.
“Listen,” her boyfriend pleaded. “I was a truck driver but I lost my job. I’m unemployed. I live
with my parents.”
“You recognize this child is yours, and so you need to help out,” the kadi said.
He ordered him to return with proof he had made his child support payment.
I sat alongside the kadi for the rest of the day, listening to him settle marital problems and divorce
cases.
One was a woman who came before the kadi to complain that her husband had gone away to find
work after harvest, and two years later he still hadn’t come back. She wanted out of the marriage.
Another woman told him she had stormed out of her house, angry at her husband, only to return a
few days later to find another woman’s belongings in the home.
Yet another woman, her husband sitting alongside her, said she wanted a divorce because he had
left her home alone, penniless, for three days.
“He locked me in the house and didn’t even leave me money for breakfast. I’m a human being. I
need to eat.”
“I bring her food,” her husband shot back. “She just doesn’t want to cook.”
“Let us decide together what to do,” the kadi said, ordering them to cool off and return the next day
for another hearing.
Abortion. Deadbeat dads. Cheating husbands. This court began to resemble a courtroom anywhere
in America. The kadi was Niger’s own Judge Judy. Like the horde of men who had gathered to watch
the show, I was transfixed.
Day after day, in hearings over more than a week, I listened as women came to the judge to air their
complaints about boyfriends and husbands. Not all of them were seeking a divorce—not all of them
were even married. But they all had problems with men in their lives that transcended religion,
geography and demographics.
I was taken by the case of one young woman, Zalika, a 17-year-old who wore a tiny diamond stud in
her nose. She had been training to be a tailor when she was invited to a wedding. Weddings were
notorious pickup scenes of matchmaking and come-ons. At the wedding, a friend
introduced Zalika to a wide-faced man named Noura. He was single and looking for love.
Zalika didn’t find him that attractive. It wasn’t that he had bad features. He was tall enough,
and his thick arms seemed strong. But she had a crush on a man who had left to find work in
the capital, a 12-hour drive away. It had been months since she’d heard from him. Prodded
on by her friend, she agreed to give Noura a chance.
Noura wooed her with his knowledge of the Koran, an appealing quality in this heavily
Muslim area. He was sweet and gentle with Zalika’s elderly mother and seemed to fit in with
her family. He was a tailor, just like she wanted to be, and promised to show her the tricks of
the trade.
She talked to Noura for hours, about their families and their dreams, about anything. He
doted on her, bringing her new scarves and spices—little presents that she treasured. Soon
they were married.
Zalika had been living in her family’s compound in the middle of the city. It was a bustling
mud complex made up of her entire extended family—sisters, aunts, cousins who spanned
the generations. Scrawny old women sprawled out to sleep away the heat of the day on
plastic mats stretched across the dirt in the central common area. Bits of hay swirled in the
chalky air. Kittens and rabbits scampered in and out of the rooms and chickens pecked in the
dust. Zalika and her sisters, who were all close in age, spent their days washing dishes and
clothing. They plucked chicken feathers by moonlight; there was no electricity in that part of
town. They gossiped and listened to religious shows, or whatever else was on their little
battery-powered radios, the main source of entertainment for families. Zalika kept her red
radio tucked in the folds of her gown, clenching it to her leg as she walked through the com-
pound.
Noura lived by himself in a small apartment on the edge of town. After the wedding, Zalika
moved in. When he left for work, Zalika was alone for the rest of the day. She sat inside
counting the hours until he returned home. Zalika told her husband she’d like to continue
taking tailoring classes at a sewing center in town. Noura saw that as a waste of money. He
could teach her what she needed to know, he said. He placated her by buying her a part of
the body of a sewing machine—he couldn’t afford to buy the whole thing but promised to
buy the other pieces as soon as he earned more money.
Bored and lonely, Zalika stewed at home, staring at the piece of the black sewing machine
in the corner and watching neighbor women walk out the door every day to meet up with
friends. Maybe she could get a job, she suggested to Noura. It would curb her boredom and
help out with their finances. He refused, disgusted at the idea of his wife out wandering the
streets alone as she went to and from work.
One morning Zalika woke up with a cold. She sent Noura out for medicine. He didn’t come
back until the end of the day; he had forgotten the medicine. He didn’t react when she pointed
out his mistake. How could he be so uncaring about his own wife?
This wasn’t how their relationship had been in the beginning. Recently, when they walked
down the street together, she noticed sometimes he stared at other women.
Zalika felt like she had contributed to the household. She lined Noura’s barren cupboards
with cooking pots and a plastic water kettle she brought from her mother’s home. She even
brought a couple bags of rice. He seemed ungrateful.
Zalika turned to what seemed like her only friend, her little red pocket radio. She started listening
again to her radio shows. One was a soap opera–like serial broadcast called Light in Darkness spon-
sored by the government and UNICEF. Aimed at helping women know their rights, the show featured
characters tackling domestic abuse and health issues. One story line followed a woman unhappy with
her husband. “Men just don’t care about women,” the wife on the show liked to complain.

Zalika could relate. She wanted more out of her marriage.

Soon, however, Zalika became pregnant. When she went into labor, she traveled to the
local clinic and called her husband. He didn’t answer. The phone rang and rang. Nothing.
Finally, she got through and told him where she was. He didn’t show up.
Tradition in Maradi dictated that Zalika move back in with her mother for a few weeks while
she adjusted to nursing the baby. Zalika arrived home from the hospital to find her husband
had already packed her bags. Everything was there, she noticed, except for the sewing
machine part.
At the family compound, she was back in the company of other women, including her
mother, who was a sympathetic ear for all Zalika’s complaints about her husband.
“He doesn’t treat you right,” her mother told her. “You need to stand up to him.”
Her mother didn’t advocate for divorce though. She had been married when she was 14,
to a stranger twice her age. Of course couples had spats, she told Zalika. She couldn’t
understand the fuss. She herself had stuck with her husband for five decades until he died,
and was appalled that young women these days don’t do the same.
Zalika detailed her situation to the kadi in a series of court hearings over several days. She
knew she would have to move back into her family compound, and that she might have to
give up custody rights when the boy was older. But she couldn’t take it anymore. Noura sat
silently across from her. One day after the hearing, I spotted him with his head down, leaning
against a car.
 Noura viewed Zalika’s complaints as ridiculous. She had blown up at him once when she
asked for yams and he brought her potatoes. Yams were too expensive, he had explained.
She got angry when he gave his brother a bit of money to buy medicine for his sick children
yet didn’t have enough money for her. Didn’t she understand that times were hard?
The wartime economy had worsened in recent years and Noura’s tailoring business had started
to dry up. He had to lower his prices so much that it was impractical to stay in operation. He was
earning less than half the salary that he used to make. His brother offered him a salesclerk job at his
small grocery store that stocked rice and pasta. It didn’t pay much but at least it was a job.
Noura couldn’t afford the lifestyle he had when he first met his wife, and Zalika couldn’t understand
this.
“I’m sick of coming here,” he said, looking up at the kadi’s sidewalk, where hearings were still
under way. All the days in court had worn him down. Noura had made up his mind to give Zalika the
divorce she wanted.
The next day, the couple sealed the deal with a thumbprint stamped in ink on a divorce decree.
Zalika was thrilled.

Excerpted from In Pursuit of Disobedient Women by Dionne Searcey. Copyright © 2020 by Dionne
Searcey. Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of
this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission from the publisher.