Tanzanian Sukuma girls are sold for cows, to boost a family’s financial position at the expense of a girl’s schooling and wellbeing

Tanzania, July 12: When a girl disappears, her parents, rather than calling the police, they will seek the man out not to rescue their child, but to negotiate the dowry – or bride price – in cattle. For daughters are sadly seen as a short-term investment for poor, rural households – cash cows that can boost a family’s financial position at the expense of a girl’s schooling and wellbeing.

So common are the practices of abduction, rape and forced marriage of girls in northern Tanzania that a single word is used to encapsulate them all: Kupura. It is a word used by people from the Sukuma tribe to describe the snatching of girls in broad daylight as they walk to school; a three-syllabled euphemism that downplays their long-term physical and sexual abuse, according to a report by aljazeera.com.

And yet here in the region of Shinyanga, the practice of kupura is validated by the oft-recited motto of Sukuma men: alcohol, meat and vagina.

“This slogan is in their blood and a way of life,” says Revocatus Itendelebanya. “These are the three things they feel entitled to as men.”

The legal and gender officer for local  the  NGO Agape  says this sense of entitlement, in what is a perennially patriarchal society, also explains why passers-by don’t intervene when they witness an abduction.

“When a Sukuma man is attracted to a girl he will start asking people where she lives, and what her routine is,” explains Itendelebanya.

“Once he finds out these details he might wait for her near the borehole – or whatever he thinks is the best place to get that girl – and then grab her.”

Kupura is so prevalent in the region that when a girl disappears, her parents will suspect what has happened. But rather than calling the police, they will seek the man out not to rescue their child, but to negotiate the dowry – or bride price – in cattle.

Cash cows

Such is the value placed on a girl’s head that Itendelebanya says parents will take their daughters to a witch-doctor if they are not attracting any suitors.

The ensuing samba ritual involves cutting cruciform nicks into the girl’s chest and hands with a razor to not only help cleanse her of her bad luck, but to make her more attractive to older men.

And if ever there was a poster child to highlight the pernicious effects of child marriage, it’s Grace Masanja.

“Bitterness still fills my heart when I look at them,” she says, pointing at the cows grazing at the rear of her family’s compound. For Grace they are a daily reminder of how she was treated like cattle, a commodity to be bought and sold.

“But given what I went through, I sometimes wish I had been born a cow,” she whispers.

Her father had bartered a dozen cattle for his daughter but, despite daily beatings with sticks and her father’s belt, she still refused to marry the older man.

But a deal had been made; a dowry had been paid.

And so it was that Grace was abducted on motorbike by her betrothed early one morning – all with the complicity of her father.

That night, and every day for the next 11 months, she was raped and beaten.

She was only 12 years old.

“That day felt like the end of everything,” Grace recalls, glancing again at the cattle.

A country of contradictions

When it comes to child marriage, Tanzania was until very recently a country of contradictions.

The 1971 Marriage Act set the minimum age of marriage for girls at 15 with parental consent – but a girl of 14 could wed where judicial approval was given.

And while the 2009 Child Act did not expressly outlaw child marriage, it did define a child as a person under the age of 18, stating that a parent should “protect the child from neglect, discrimination, violence, abuse, exposure to physical and moral hazards and oppression”.

Picking up the pieces

Only through death has Grace Masanja clawed back something resembling a life.

After physically and sexually abusing her for 11 months, her husband was killed in a motorbike accident.

Grace, now 13 years old, was filled not with joy, but sorrow.

The man who had raped and beaten her for the better part of a year was dead – but she now has a child to take care of, and no income.

Grace and her child Mathias are at her family’s home, where she and her father live out an uneasy truce.

After hearing an announcement on the radio, she applied to enrol on one of Agape’s vocational skills courses. Each year, the organisation provides dozens of girls with an opportunity to learn a trade so that they can become breadwinners in their own right.

The majority of the girls opt for tailoring classes, but others want to take the courses in welding and electrical engineering – professions that challenge the patriarchal and gendered stereotypes so ingrained in Tanzania’s communities.

It is also hoped that the lure of this additional income will lessen the short-term appeal of a dowry to parents.

Grace’s father, Kurwa Masanja, says that he now regrets what he did to his daughter.

“It was Sukuma tradition that forced me to have Grace married when she finished primary school,” says Kurwa. “When she came back I apologised, and I hope now that we can slowly become father and daughter again.”

“I cannot repeat this mistake because when Grace came back, she told us what had happened to her.”

But Grace has her doubts, and fears for her four-year-old sister Birha.

“My father has only six of the cows left from my dowry,” she says. “He sold the others to build a second home.”

“What do you think he will do when the others have gone, and he is poor again?”