Reminder: this subreddit is meant to be a place free of excessive cynicism, negativity and bitterness. Toxic attitudes are not welcome here.

All Negative comments will be removed and will possibly result in a ban.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

A true warrior .

Southern Africa, not South Africa. Malawi is above Zim.

She did good

Thank you for being accurate, title was bothering me.

a leader that’s FOR THE PEOPLE, i know that’s right

Good for her.. some states should follow this common sense 😬

Theresa Kachindamoto is an incredible woman. On top of ending child marriages, she’s been working to get all those kids back in school. I remember when I first read about her push to end child marriages, and I’m very glad to read about how she pushed to make sure they did actually end, and pushed to make sure people couldn’t carry on the practice unofficially. She and the people under her have annulled over 3,500 child marriages. What an amazing woman.

🙏🏽 A blessing.

No one should get married before the age of 30

[deleted]

I will never understand why this was even a thing. Those are not men they are pedophiles.

We should make this world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having kids

So all it took was one woman in charge? Sheesh

Good for her.

Wait, I thought Malawi was a republic

If only we could end it here in America too, we could start to call our country almost civilized.

https://www.unchainedatlast.org/laws-to-end-child-marriage/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States

[deleted]

From what I understand, many countries in Africa have a kind of mishmash government, where traditional chiefs still maintain some level of power over their own people, but laws and foreign policy are decided by whatever formal government is in place.

Of course, I only know this from Googling whether Nigeria even has a prince, so I am by no means an expert...

Most pedophiles are men

Malawi is nowhere near South Africa. Africa is a continent. South Africa is a country.

r/confidentlyincorrect

Malawi is in EAST AFRICA

East Africa. Malawi is in EAST AFRICA

r/confidentlyincorrect

Malawi is a south-east African country, some do consider it southern Africa

I wonder why it took until a female leader to do this...

Weird title. The author is based in Kenya, so I'd say this is just a quirk of multilingualism rather than an artefact of ignorance.

For native English speakers, Malawi is considered part of East Africa.

What a spectacular person.

Did she stand up and object during the wedding

And I always kind of wondered why that was honestly. Like what differs between men and women that makes pedophilia more prevalent amongst males.

I read that as female chef at first

How many US states have legalized child marriage still?

Malawi has the overarching government but most people only have interaction with people in their tribe. More specifically in their Traditional Authority (TA), kind of like a collection of villages.

There's a chief in charge of a village (maybe 30 households).

A Traditional Authority in charge of several cheifs (several hundreds to thousands of housholds).

A paramount chief who is charge of a whole tribe (several thousands to millions depending on the tribe).

That's the tribal structure which almost kinda acts parallel to the republic of Malawi. For the republic government there are Districts (kind of like states/provinces), and then the national government (parliament, president, and supreme court)

In the less populated parts of the country people tend to interact more with tribal chiefs than the main government. This might have change since the Chewa tribe lost the presidency but idk.

Source: https://www.equalitynow.org/learn_more_child_marriage_us/

First: nice! Malawi is awesome. They, like lots of places, have post colonial, modernism, and urbanization problems but they are generally preserving things they do right that western countries get wrong.

>most people only have interaction with people in their tribe.

A large percentage of the population live in Lilongwe and Blantyre-Limbe. Tribes are not well delineated in those urban areas. I was just talking with some friends there about the cultural changes coming from so many children born in cross tribal marriages.

Also, I don't understand how she could be the "first" woman chief. Yao and Sena are matrilineal and tend to prefer women as chiefs. I was just in Zomba where the "Village" (or neighborhood) chiefs are women.

Deconstructing the title, it's two separate ideas - first female chief AND child marriage ending in SA - with a weak comma splice there.

If it was the same correct sentence it'd properly have a trailing delimiter after the subordinate clause. Because elementary school exists.

r/usdefaultism

I'd kinda like to know the official answer to this too. I thought it may be because puberty hits girls a bit quicker (sometimes). Like early menstrual cycles and breast development. Men get a deeper voice and facial hair among other traits later than girls.

So out of 50 states, only 6 make child marriage illegal. Goddamned depressing.

u/q203 breaks down the misinformed headline:

There are a bunch of issues with the headline and introductory section of this article.

1. ⁠Malawi and South Africa are different countries. This is about Malawi, a country in Southern Africa.
2. ⁠The name of the district is Dedza (not Dzedza). This wouldn’t be as big of a mistake if it was only done once but it’s repeated multiple times.
3. ⁠Theresa Kachindamoto is not “the first female chief” in Malawi, as the headline implies. There are multiple female chiefs in Malawi. She is unique in that she’s Ngoni, and she’s a female paramount chief of the Ngoni in Dedza. But even the use of the word ‘first’ here would be debatable. The legendary first paramount chief/high priestess of the Dedza area, Makewana, was a woman. Her name literally means ‘mother of the children.’ Kachindamoto clarifies that she is the first female Ngoni chief in Dedza in the article (not all of Malawi), but the headline distorts this.
4. ⁠The headline implies Kachindamoto single-handedly ended child marriage in Malawi. The Malawian parliament ended child marriage 7 years ago. Her achievements are still notable for enforcing this in her area, but she didn’t single-handedly take initiative to do this. She mentions Joyce Banda in the article, who is recognized as a driving force behind the change. Child marriage also still occurs, even if not in her particular area. They are working to end it, but the headline makes it seem as if it’s been totally eradicated.

I don’t mean to discount her achievements. Her firsthand account is great. The headline just irks me due to how inaccurately it portrays Malawi.

There is a funny skit involving a British Nigerian ignoring a Nigerian prince email:Nigerian Prince Emails With Good News: Famalam

Did this news website really say South Africa instead of southern Africa? Fucking incompetent fucktards.

This is the case in most western countries. 18 without parental consent or 16 with parental consent

What!!!

Judging by the amount of men on tik tok talking about their first time being with an older woman, I'm starting to think there are way more female pedophiles than people realize. It just isn't reported because men are supposed to like it.

Thanks for the clarification. I was confused.

Yep. There are tons of female middle school/ high school teachers who have inappropriate relations with their students.

This gives me hope that someday we can end child marriage in the United States.

Malawi and south africa are 2 different countries

Malawi is in southern Africa

Malawi is a country it’s not South Africa which is also a country.

My apologies for not taking the opportunity to correct OP's title. I was excited by the sentiment and general news about what she did and shared it before really thinking much further. Thanks for posting the correction here!

This needs to be a r/todayilearned for a lot of us!

Thank you for this thorough breakdown.y overall lack of awareness about a lot happening in Africa compounded with my enthusiasm for the potential good news turned into a hasty share that kept OP's original title even though I had an inkling that there wasn't something right about the geographic notes. The rest of the context you raised is important for many of us to see and note too as a lot of us lack the cultural education to properly interrogate claims like what's in the headline not to mention interrogate our own understanding of other cultures and their definition of roles and governance like chiefhood as it can differ greatly from nation to nation and tribe to tribe. Thanks again!

So I talked to a social worker about this, it’s child abuse where I live, so while “legal” it’s not legal.

It's like society can improve drastically with women's leadership or something. Huh. Who woulda a thunk? ^^\s

Yes women are human. Yes it's not "the solution". But there sure is a decent track record of them fostering change.

[removed]

According to the wiki article on the subject, 96% of child brides are 16 or 17 whilst only 4% of adult spouses are over 29. Whilst it is an issue, the majority of child marriages are between people of similar ages and don’t always reflect abuse.

Also, some child brides are used as anchors for others overseas. Families from places like India and Pakistan, where up to a fourth of their marriages involved an underage spouse at the time of wedding, used immigration loopholes to obtain visas at the expense of the child.

https://www.tahirih.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/REPORT-Tahirih-Survey-on-Forced-Marriage-in-Immigrant-Communities-in-the-United-States.pdf

Same here and wondered why a chef had that much power.

The default "don't marry children"? Yes?

IIRC you can't change the title when you crosspost - but I might be wrong.

No

Hopefully this will happen in the United States soon.

❤️❤️❤️

You can. It's a required field, but it fills in the original title by default, so you can edit it or not.

[removed]

I've never once heard Malawi referred to as East African. They're a part of SADC, not EAC. Weird.

Progress

I think even taking that into account there are still more men.

Edit: this paper here goes into detail about it. Estimated ratio 10:1 male to female although this is most likely underrepresenting female pedophiles. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/psychopathology-and-personality-traits-pedophiles

Tell us how you really feel.

Great news expressed in a horribly written article.

The write is terrible at this job, so many inconsistencies in the article

She’s a chief in a region of Malawi. This is very common in Sub Saharan Africa

Article is wrong too anyway

Southeastern africa. Not South Africa. Malawi is a country. South Africa is also a country. Africa is a continent.

If you Google it literally says it's in EAST Africa.

The West treats Africa like it's a small village, not a continent of a billion people. Malawi, South Africa. What a joke.

Nobody in Malawi considers it East Africa.

If you check Wikipedia it literally says SOUTHEAST Africa.

The CIA World Fact Book says SOUTHERN Africa.

The Malawi Department of Tourism says SOUTHEAST Africa.

I tried checking the Malawi Government's own site but couldn't access it for whatever reason.

Neither the official Malawi Twitter or Facebook pages seem to say anything about it.

So in short: It might not necessarily be Southern Africa, but it sure doesn't seem to be Eastern.

Based as all hell

[removed]

Just the fact a child can marry is bad enough to me.

Malawi or South Africa? Pick one

What says EAST Africa? Which site, show me. Certainly none of these https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Malawi

Indeed, I considered making the comment that many of us (in the US) believe that Africa I’d a village of mud huts.

Traditionally, and even mentioned in this terribly written article, prepubescent child marriage as was popular in that area is more about managing abject poverty then anything else.

Very different from what you see in the west with the laws being more that there is an avenue to marriage for teens that end up becoming parents.

Banning it typically either results in it going underground, by a different name, or those that would have been married off ending up in an even worse situation unless there is a significant effort to offset the cost to families with daughters.

Hopefully they have accounted for this sufficiently add the bad article is just bad.

Yeah it's kind of our fault for naming our country as directions instead of an actual name!

True on all points. Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba are very different from the rest of the country.

I moved to Australia and when one person found out I was South African they asked if I knew such and such in Kenya…. Also when they find out my mother was born in Zimbabwe ( Rhodesia in those days) I get the response “…….. but your not black”

that was a lot of polite words to not directly address the multiple fallacies in your post

i’m sorry but that breakdown shows that this post is misleading and false - that’s not very uplifting

I didn't like how native practices are painted as "archaic" in the article while, by contrast, western ideas are considered new and better. The story represents a good change in the culture, but I wish there was more nuance in how people talk about African cultures

Don't just delete this comment delete your entire account

Hey everyone, /u/Feesuat69 (the guy I'm responding to) supports child marriage!

Now if only that was the norm

It should also be pointed out that Theresa Kachindamoto has worked for almost 20 years to achieve this (since shortly after she first became Inkosi, paramount chief, in 2003). Which includes a lot of working with sub-chiefs (there are like...50 of them?) and numerous headmen (of villages and groups of villages), and on occasion putting her foot down (including temporarily dismissing some sub-chiefs when they defied her).

South-Eastern Africa. Not Southern. Southern is South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

I crossposted it from someone else. Yes the reality of misinformation and ignorance isn't very uplifting. The factual account from the woman that it was rooted in however remains so and I think it's worth keeping the comments above to at least educate others about the reality especially since the reality is better than what was initially shared and there's an opportunity for many of us to learn from that.

Even if not, automatically discounting 50 percent of candidates means you're going to get shit results

I both expect that's true and wonder if it's not. Our cultural reaction to female pedophiles is often not as intense, and we have a long history of ignoring and misrepresenting women's sexuality.

I wouldn't be surprised if, of female pedophiles, far fewer actually act on it though. Men in our culture sure seem to have a hard time with empathy and are taught to push their feelings down, whereas women generally have empathy drilled into them from day one, and (very sadly) most have had to live through firsthand what it feels like to be the target of unwanted sexual advances.

"This is total bullshit" - 50 year old men in Malawi

Malawi, South Africa?

No, because it's a bullshit headline. She isn't the first woman. Still accomplishing good things though.

This is good but how long till a dude takes over and starts it up again?

There have been times when I tried to explain to other Americans that parts of Africa are culturally aligned with the Middle East, and the looks on their faces. Dear lord, I’ve seen it when I say Egypt is located in Africa.

Obviously this isn’t everyone, and in my experience it’s not even the majority (take that with a cup of salt, the US is huge), but it really makes you want to slam your face into a tree when you run into someone that’s a walking stereotype of what people from other countries think of Americans.

Now do Kentucky and Tennessee.

Whatever the errors. She ended child marriage and is getting her children educated. She's a wonderful woman who's doing wonderful things. We need more like her in this world

Lots of us who have seen a map for 10 seconds would have caught it.

I get where you're coming from, but child marriage still happens in the US. It is still legal in most states (many states have explicitly turned down bills that would ban child marriage), and the majority of these marriages are underage girls married to adult men. And I would absolutely consider this archaic whether it's in the US or Malawi. It is sick no matter where it's happening.

Well Malawi is in south Africa, not South Africa.

Thank you for making that distinction, I wish Colonialism didn't have such a large footprint on so much of the information in this article and the way many of us wound up reading the situation.

The author who wrote and titled the article seems to be from Kenya, perhaps there's a geographic bias in description where Malawi would be noted as South in Africa to Kenya but with added ambiguity due to the existence of South Africa as a nation?

Reading some of the other comments about her chief status, I'm wondering if "first chief" might be a reference to being like head woman chief, rather than the first of all time too. I'd be curious to know what the names for leadership roles in her original language are and what they imply.

I mean, respect to the chefs out there. Doesn't it take a ... chef to feed a village or some other idiom like that anyhow?

Haha 😂

I think it's south of Kenya where the author of the article and headline was from and some biases or loose translation assumptions carried over based on what I gathered from reading and the comments here? It seems likely this might be an early career article on a website that isn't exactly focused on news editing but translation.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, her bio says she's from Kenya. Which is, you know, in Africa. So she certainly doesn't represent "The West" here, and it's quite possible English isn't her first language.

Many languages don't really have a distinction between "South X" and "Southern X". And in English we do use "West Africa", "East Africa", and "North Africa" to refer to entire regions with multiple countries. So it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that "South Africa" refers to the whole region.

South America is a continent, South Asia is a region, South Africa is a country, and South Australia is a state. That's not necessarily easy to keep straight.

Luckily all of Africa is a desert so there's no trees to slam your head into. (/s if that's required for some reason)

Wow what a genius these basic observations you thoguht of in five seconds never occurred to any of the professional researchers who have looked into this

Malawi is in southeastern africa, as in around the southeastern area of the continent of Africa. It has nothing to do with the country of South Africa.

Yes, I'm wondering also if she referred to it as South due to her own geographic bias where Malawi would in general be South of Kenya.

I mean.... is no one allowed to engage in a conversation / wonder about the world?

You certainly didn't cite any sources... not sure why you're being salty about me not citing sources. Perhaps you could?

You’re probably not sure about that because that’s not what happened. Try reading again

Okay. Putting it differently: I'm not sure why you're angry with me. You made a four-word, unsupported comment, to which I responded speculatively. You then got angry at me for apparently disagreeing with the scientific consensus, which you never referenced.

I don't know what I did to deserve that, but I'm done talking with you. Have a nice day.

[removed]