Chapter 10: UN Attention

The office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Child Marriage was located in Geneva, in a building that housed seventeen other special mandates and smelled, on the upper floors, of old paper and recycled air and the particular institutional patience of an organization that measured progress in decades rather than quarters. The Special Rapporteur herself — Dr. Amina Osei, Ghanaian, sixty-three, twenty-two years in human rights law before accepting the mandate — had read the Mail and Guardian piece on a Sunday morning at her kitchen table in the Carouge district, where she lived alone in a flat full of books and the accumulated files of forty years of work on behalf of people the world had not yet decided to protect.

She had read it once. Then she had called her deputy.

“Get me the South African government’s current position on child marriage legislation,” she said. “And find out who is representing the girl legally.”

By Monday morning her office had drafted a formal request for information to the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, copied to the Department of Social Development and the office of the Minister of Home Affairs. The request noted that her mandate required her to monitor and report on child marriage practices globally, that the case of Amara Dube had come to her attention through credible media reporting, and that she was requesting a formal response regarding the government’s position and intended course of action within thirty days.

Thirty days was the polite version. Her deputy had also made three phone calls — to a contact in the South African Human Rights Commission, to the director of a Johannesburg-based children’s rights NGO called Equal Childhood, and to the Cape Town office of UNICEF South Africa. Each of those contacts understood, without being told directly, that thirty days meant considerably less than thirty days.

The South African government, which had been watching the media coverage with the particular anxiety of a government that understood it was about to be embarrassed internationally, received the formal request on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon the Minister of Home Affairs had convened a meeting. By Tuesday evening the Department of Social Development had opened a formal child protection inquiry into the matter of Amara Dube.

Bongani Zulu’s attorney received notification of the inquiry on Wednesday morning.

He called Bongani immediately.

Advocate Nkosi learned about the UN request through her contact at the Human Rights Commission on Tuesday afternoon, approximately four hours before the Department of Social Development’s inquiry notification arrived on her desk. She called Dr. Dlamini.