Dear MIMsters: I Do Not Understand Why My Husband Married Me?

I don’t understand. Why did my husband marry me?

I got married to a man based in South Africa without really getting to know him, apart from the fact that he had a daughter with a woman he was no longer in a relationship with.

A week after the traditional wedding, he started beating me. I hid it from my people but his family knew. This went on until he travelled back to SA after two months. I got pregnant and moved to join him in SA after my NYSC.

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He allows his daughter disregard me, like telling me to leave the living room because his 6-year-old daughter wants to watch TV. He leaves the house without a word to see his daughter’s mother and keeps extra-marital affairs. I once confronted him and that day, he nearly killed me. He left the house, leaving me and my then three month old son for two days.

He calls me all sorts of worthless names, accuses me of hindering the prosperity of his business since he married me, and now feeds me once a day. I use my baby’s soap to bath because I have no money to buy mine. My hair is done once in 5 months and I stay in the house for 24 hours.

He threatens to call the immigration on me because I have no papers for my stay, get me locked up for months and send my two sons down to his mother.

I told my parents about it and my father called him. However, he shouted on him and warned him to mind his business. Now, if I cry to my parents, they just say they will keep praying for him to change, but he only keeps getting worse every day.

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I have begged him to forgive me if I did something wrong, though I can’t remember doing anything to him, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. I’m now leaving in hell as he keeps late nights, beats and starves me. I am so miserable and don’t know what to do.

I remember when I went to have my second son, he told me to make sure I died, so I could generate money for him from sympathizers and he could send my baby home. Yet, he knew I went into premature labour because of his frequent beatings. I was bleeding profusely and that was all he could say as he took me to the hospital. And what was my crime? I had mistakenly spoiled a rubber from one of his car’s doors while trying to close it. That door had been giving him problems long before that, but he blamed it all on me. I had a Caesarean delivery a week after that beating.

Shortly after I returned from the hospital, I was sweeping and cleaning the house. I saw his daughter’s pair of slippers on the floor and used the broom to shift it a little in order to be able to sweep where it was (I couldn’t bend so low to pick it because of the pains from my CS). He saw me and pounced on me. He beat me severely despite my stitches while his daughter shouted at him to stop. Yet, he continued, calling me a witch and asking why I am still alive.

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Things have been the same. I have been enduring it all for two years now. I am still in South Africa with him, living like a prisoner, sometimes without any food to eat.  I have no hope and don’t know what to do in this strange land with my two sons.

What scares me even more is that he told me yesterday that I have not seen anything yet. Why did he marry me? What do I do?