Marriage: High Risks of Girls to Price Tag – ‘indirect selling’ of another human being to another
By Mamer Deng Jur, Australia
April 7, 2015 (SSB) —- Opening idea. Last month one of my mate and his beautiful girlfriend did what was forgotten for sometimes – Engagement party.
Some years back, engagements were everything to all the newly arrived South Sudanese in Australia. Every mature adult would want badly to throw in an engagement party, including myself.
But serious financial crisis and the deadly uprising of casual sex among the opposite sex discouraged such intuition among many people.
Then for that reason, engagements had become very seriously ill, like a person suffering from unknown disease. For example, HIV or AIDS, when it first strikes in small town of Kasansero, in Uganda. These people of this town (Kasansero) knew nothing about the AIDS.
So they named it as ‘slim’ because of the shocking weight loss most sufferers experienced before dying. This disease for some reasons was said by ‘many people that it was luck of education’.
My community was growing backward in every calendar year, instead of growing forward, because education is not going through them, even when they are seriously learning.
Currently, if I am not wrong, for God sake, I believe that only 40% of people in my community know what they are doing, but rest of the people are spoiled by war/spoiled by civilisation; THIS IS VERY SAD, Indeed.
On 11th January 2015, I disembarked at Perth International Airport coming from Doha. When I turned on my cell phone, I got a text message from my mate that; I was invited to his engagement party, which was going to take place on 25th January 2015. I told myself, what! Is he kidding? Because engagements were not new ‘labels’ any more. I rang him in the morning to confirm the story, but it was true. Shit ‘was going down’!
Marriage is our life and an important element of our existence. Society exists because of marriage practices in every single community.
Price tag and love don’t stand on one platform.
Today it is pretty upsetting that human beings are up for sell, nowadays our girls, worth $130,000, before discount. But I am really sure; no human being is a property to be possessed. You and I can own a property, and treat it as we wish.
But you can’t do that to another ‘human being’. To be realistic, what comes with the package of $130,000? Someone could argue both quality and quantity. Quality would refer to that property you are purchasing, and quantity would referred to the amounts of money you would pay for that property.
Dressed civilised, but minds are still illiterate
Our fathers and uncles clung to old methods of doing things. Many of them have exempted themselves from factories, and they are very happy to be constant on welfare.
So it is very easy for them to say any amount they wish to say, because they don’t work. But if it happens that they work, then they would understand that standing for 12 hours plus is not a piece of cake. Then no one would make a mistake to say his daughter worth $130,000.
Most respected and least respected people in my community will lose hearing in the factories, and some will be adding weight, due to computer work. They are working very hard to meet the closest amount amount to $130,000, to marry their sisters, in order to support the community and its cultural values.
Culture
I know it is a culture thing, Mr.D robs Mr. M to pay off Mr. J, who would be better off? Mr.D? Mr.M? or J?
But consequently, many girls don’t deserve $130,000 because many of them are jerkies filled with ‘undercover’ things.
- Excessive drinking of alcohol of all sorts – indeed such behaviour is against Dinka culture and it has zero tolerance in Dinka perspective.
- Night club attendees
- Smoking of shisha and cigarette- it also has a zero tolerance
- Unfaithfulness to their husbands/boyfriends.
- Many of them are lazy.
- Community is full of young single mothers.
All the ‘above’ undercover things may led to economical stresses and socially instability to any man in the community who was born to change his community. However, 30% of our girls deserve ‘good men’ and do deserve 130,000. A person of greatest values, and personalities can’t be exchanged for money value or precious rare stone ‘diamond’. They worth more than a diamond.
Furthermore, our marriage values and cultures had been badly influenced by our neighbours’ countries, when we were settled as ‘refugees’.
Mixed cultures
We, South Sudanese living today in Australia, were refugees, in Egypt, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. These countries had their own cultures, which have had influences on our cultures in one-way or another. But it would have had been well if we had one combined culture in Australia regarding marriage.
I will illustrate this point of view, by giving an example of Julius Nyerere. When Nyerere was a Prime Minister of Tanzania, he had a belief that in a nation made up of hundreds of different ethnic groups and coming from backgrounds as distinctive as Tanganyika and Zanzibar, then multiple political parties would destabilise the new nation.
So what he did, he had to move to suppress oppositions in all forms, not just the parties but culture themselves, and he tremendously introduced a policy that banned all language except his native Kiswahili.
Everything was nationalised, private businesses were destroyed, and Nyerere implemented a policy of ‘Ujamaa’ a little cousin to communism ideologies.
By applying Nyereres’ idea to my opinion, I think we, as a community, needs to have a policy regarding marriage issues in order to unit us as one.
Conclusion
Therefore it can be concluded that, our current marriage arrangements in the West need more justification to be done to them. I hope one day, my daughter will be a free woman in her own right, to do anything she likes, or loves and marries a man of her choice. I believe that, there would be no day, I would stand before everyone and demand that my daughter worth $130,000 dollars.
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