Tales of a child bride:
'My father sold me for
12 cows'
When she was 12, Grace was
abducted and then raped and
beaten every day for 11 months.
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.
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."
Itendelebanya, the legal and gender
officer for the local 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
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.
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.
Grace was abducted after she refused
to marry the older man to whom her
father sold her.
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.
"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".
This contradictory legal Venn
diagram was further obfuscated by
the Local Customary Law of 1963,
which allowed Tanzania's many
ethnic groups to adhere to their
customs and traditions.
The Tanzanian government had long
made noises about a constitutional
review process to address these
conflicting laws, but last year's
presidential election campaign, in
addition to a lack of consensus in
community surveys, had served to
stall any political momentum on the
issue.
Only in July 2016 did the government
finally ban child marriage outright -
but will it actually make a difference?
Female genital mutilation was
outlawed in Tanzania in 1998, and
yet a 2010 government survey found
that in remote parts of the Mara
region, more than 40 percent of girls
and women had been cut.
While it is true that Tanzania does
not rank among the countries with
the highest rates of child marriage,
with four out of 10 girls being
married before their 18th birthdays,
it seems to be a problem that is not
going away.
And this national average masks
more disturbing regional trends in
the vast East African country.
In the Shinyanga region, more than
59 percent of girls like Grace - some
of them as young as nine - are forced
into child marriages.
Police corruption
Itendelebanya believes that the actual
figure is concealed by the remoteness
of many rural communities, as well
as widespread reports of corrupt
police and court officials burying
cases in return for bribes by family
members.
The legal and gender officer says
there have been cases of police being
paid to ignore some early marriages
in villages, to lose crucial evidence,
and to even help forge the
incriminating birth certificates of
child brides.
"Police entertain corruption because
they benefit from it," claims
Itendelebanya. "And police see NGOs
like Agape as preventing the flow of
money into their pockets."
But Superintendent Pili Simon
Misungwi, who heads the gender desk
at the Shinyanga district police
station, dismisses any claims of
wrongdoing by her staff.
In 2008, the Tanzanian government
requested that every police station
have such a specialist unit, with
trained personnel who could handle
cases of gender-based violence and
child abuse across the country.
"I can't deny that corruption does
exist because it's mostly done in
private," she says. "But I also can't
say that 100 percent of all cases are
delayed because of corruption."
"For example, the poverty-stricken
parents of a victim may accept
financial compensation from the
perpetrator's family, which would
lead to the adjournment of a case."
Misungwi says it's also not
uncommon for a child bride's parents
to scupper investigations.
"A girl's parents may be offered two,
three or five cows by the husband's
family to derail the case," she says.
"And because life is hard for l,..
people, they often take the money.
"The police may think the family is
cooperating with them, but then
when the time comes to testify they
tell us the girl is sick, in another
village, or even dead."
Misungwi stresses that her officers
were hired because of their high
moral standing, and then provided
with the necessary training.
"And we provide people with a
confidential environment where they
can have a one-on-one conversation
in private rooms where others cannot
listen," she adds.
But what the superintendent says,
and what actually happens in her
absence, appear to be two different
things.
Before Misungwi arrives at the
station, a young mother sits in the
main office as she tells a police
officer about the regular sexual
assaults she endures at the hands of
her husband - the private rooms sit
empty.
The officer takes no notes, his
attention not on the mother, but on
the Nigerian soap opera blasting from
the television set in the corner of the
room.
Other staff members sit nearby,
staring into space, periodically
checking their phones for text
messages.
Meanwhile incidents related to child
marriage have doubled over the past
two years.
When staff compile a list of these they
do not use the Swahili terms, instead
opting for the English equivalents, to
mitigate the shocking nature of the
crimes.
Kubaka is replaced with rape,
kulawiti is replaced with sodomy,
kumpa mimba mwanafunzi is
replaced with child pregnancy.
And Misungwi says it is the lack of
police resources, rather than
corruption, that has contributed to
the prevalence of child marriage in
the region.
"When the government is giving
budgets to ministries like Home
Affairs, they don't have a separate
pot of money for the police gender
desk," she says.
As a result, her unit has to rely on
using one of the station's three
vehicles to reach remote villages
where child marriages have been
reported to them - but these are often
already being used for routine police
business.
"And the witnesses may live very far
in the villages and can't afford to
come to town to do a follow-up
interview," says Misungwi. "As a
result we often can't reach a
conclusion on a case."
The curious case of Agnes Dotto
"There can be no secrets in the
villages." So says Paulo Kuyi, who is
fighting the ground war against child
marriage in the nearby town of
Muchambi.
The 53-year-old activist acts as a
primitive early warning system for
the NGO Agape, which in turn tips off
the local police force.
Last September, it was the sudden
appearance of 16 cows in a family's
compound that triggered alarm bells
for Kuyi. And he knew the poor
family had a 13-year-old daughter,
Agnes Dotto.
"When a dowry has been paid a feast
is arranged before the wedding,"
Kuyi explains. "The family now has
cows coming into their clan and they
want to celebrate and invite other
villagers."
Ten days later, thanks to Kuyi's
regular updates by phone, police and
Agape staff raided the wedding
ceremony.
The husband-to-be was arrested and
taken to the local police station in
Maganzo, where he should have
remained until his case went to trial.
The next day the man walked free;
neither he nor Agnes has been seen
since.
Kuyi says that he saw a Maganzo
police officer leaving a late-night
meeting with village leaders.
"These leaders were paid by Agnes'
parents to help arrange the
marriage," he claims. "It was because
of that complicity they paid a police
officer to release the perpetrator."
These are the "meanders" - as
Itendelebanya euphemistically calls
them - that child marriage cases take
on their way to the courts.
Three months on, the police tell the
legal officer that they are no closer to
finding Agnes or the man.
Assistant Superintendent Meshack
Sumuni says the village leaders and
the girl's parents have refused to
cooperate.
"And we don't have the resources to
be more proactive in our
investigations," he says. "The
Tanzanian government provides no
specific budget for gender-desk
teams, which means we often rely on
NGOs for assistance."
The lack of police resources is felt
even more keenly here than in
Shinyanga.
Roads are regularly washed out in the
rainy season, the unit has no
dedicated car pool of its own, and
their office is bereft of furniture or
computer equipment and has a
leaking roof, which in the past has
led to important legal documents
being damaged.
"So the gender desk staff feel like they
have been given this role as a
punishment," says Sumuni. "So this in
turn affects their motivation to chase
down reports of child marriage and
related cases of abuse."
Back in the village, where there can
be no secrets, it is common
knowledge that Kuyi is the one
reporting cases of child marriage to
the police.
Resentful of the potential loss of
income that marrying off their
daughters can generate, villagers
have threatened to lock the activist in
his hut and burn it down.
Kuyi says that he doesn't care; he is
an old man and he has nothing left to
fear.
But what worries him are what
advances in technology mean for
future child marriages going
undetected by him.
He has heard rumours that a dowry
has already been paid for Agnes'
sister - but by mobile money transfer,
and not cattle.
This shift from the traditional,
physical form of payment means Kuyi
can no longer be visually tipped off
about an impending marriage.
"Many other activists are now
reluctant to report cases to the
police," Kuyi says. "They've been
intimidated by death threats, or
demoralised when they see only a few
cases actually go to court."
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, 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.
After 11 months of committing daily
rapes and beatings, Grace's husband
died in a motorbike accident.
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.
Grace is now taking vocational
classes.
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?".
This research was conducted with the
support of the 'International
Development Reporting
Fellowship' (http://www.akfc.ca/eet-involved/reporting-fellowship), a
joint programme of the Aga Khan
Foundation Canada and the Canadian
Association of Journalists.
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