Agony of young girls married off in remote villages of Tiaty

When she was taken for female genital cutting (FGC) nearly four decades ago, she knew she would soon be made a wife.

She was barely 11 years old. But in the Pokot community where she comes from, female circumcision is part of a traditional ceremony that marks a girl’s transition to womanhood. Young girls are forced into arranged marriages in exchange for dowry in the form of livestock. 

Men get over 50 cows as bride price for a circumcised girl and fewer than that for an uncircumcised one. This prompts them to hold to retrogressive practice as a way of increasing their livestock.

True to her fears, when they were dancing with hundreds of other initiates who had also faced the knife at the remote Silale in Tiaty East to mark their bravery and celebration of the two months being in seclusion, she was whisked away from the crowd by some young men who were armed with spears.

Defilement

Cheptano Lenasiwa, now 45, was taken to Korosi, tens of kilometres away from her home to a 65-year-old man’s homestead, where her father had secretly received 30 cows as her bride price.

At only 11 years, a naïve girl who was two years shy of teenage and not sexually mature, she became the old man’s sixth wife. She had no choice because the dowry had been paid.

“I was supposed to be enjoying my childhood life, playing with my peers and going to school like other children in the country, but that was not the case in this other side of the world where at a tender age, before even displaying the signs of puberty like breast development, I had already been turned into a wife to a man older than my own father,” says Ms Lenasiwa amid sobs.

“In our community, even our mothers were married off when young and being a girl here, your fate is just sealed because you know that you will face the same predicaments. At 12, I was already a mother, with little skills on how to raise a child, leave alone behaving as someone’s wife and performing daily chores.”

Violence

When she landed in the new homestead, she was given rules and regulations to follow from then on. Despite her young age, she was already a "ripe woman" because of the FGC and as a wife was not expected to play or talk with her unmarried age mates.

Before she got accustomed to the new lifestyle, the mother of nine says, she was beaten up several times by her husband and sometimes by her co-wives for sneaking out to play with some of her peers, who had yet to be married off.

“When I gave birth, at home of course, no one trained me in how to breastfeed and handle the baby. To worsen the situation, despite having hundreds of livestock, my husband never gave me money to buy clothes for the newborn as it is the norm in other areas. I was forced to tear my skirt and improvise it,” she narrates.

Ms Lenasiwa’s woes was aggravated because she gave birth during a dry spell when all the livestock in the area and other adjacent villages had been driven to the neighbouring Samburu and Turkana counties in search of water and pasture.

Sometimes she was forced to sleep on an empty stomach or take one meal a day if she was lucky, depriving the young baby of enough breast milk. Sometimes she would resort to feeding the baby on black tea as life became unbearable.

“With the young baby on my back, I was required to herd my husband’s few remaining goats in the fields and in the evening I go back home with a container of water, which is fetched tens of kilometres away, the empty stomach notwithstanding,” says Ms Lenasiwa.

Health facilities are more than 20km apart and expectant women in the remote villages are attended to by traditional birth attendants.

Those in the far-flung villages bear the brunt of maternal health problems. Despite the myriad challenges of raising children, they are not permitted by their men to use any form of birth control.

Women have no voice

In this patriarchal society, women do not have a voice to challenge anything and are not even allowed to speak at a public gathering, locally referred as kokwo. They attend but sit on the periphery of the venue.

“I could not dare go for any form of birth control because I would be beaten or even sent back to my parents’ house, which could also attract more severe punishment. In our community, a woman should not stay ‘idle’. You should either be breastfeeding or pregnant, as a deterrent measure to minimise extra-marital affairs, they say,” says Lenasiwa.

"I raised my nine children with so much difficulty. When my firstborn daughter was barely 12 years, the predicaments that befell me also happened to her after my aging husband secretly married her off to an old man in exchange for 10 cows. Sadly, the dowry is not shared to women; men accumulate them to marry more wives.”

Through the challenges she faced, she defied the cultural norms and opted to enrol her remaining children in school.

Rescue mission

Despite catering for their schooling single-handedly, the move attracted punishment as she was severely beaten by her husband for going against the norms⁠—girls being married off and boys turned into herdsmen.

As she sat under a tree at a private boarding school in Marigat town, Baringo South, the multiple scars she sustained from the beating after taking the children to school were evident. The school is more than 50km away. One of her daughters had been rescued by a community-based organisation from early marriage and registered there. She was lucky to have been among the 12 boys and girls supported by the CBO.

“The children were not spared either, because most of the time he could storm the school and beat up the children while in class and force them out,” she explains.

Widespread suffering

The problems are not unique to Ms Lenasiwa as thousands women from this region undergo similar ordeals. High illiteracy levels worsen the situation and so they remain enslaved by archaic cultural practices.

Statistics from the National Council for Population and Development (NCPD) carried out in 2019 indicate that more than 75 per cent in Tiaty East and 77 per cent of children in Tiaty West have never been to school.

Chepotoka Manamuk from Loyeya in Tiaty East also faced the same challenges after being married off to an old man at a young age. Her aging husband died of depression after their hundreds of livestock were stolen in a raid staged by the neighbouring community, leaving her to solely cater for her nine children.

“Men in this area have accumulated a lot of livestock by auctioning our young girls to old men who give more dowry than young men, yet the animals are not helping them because either they are wiped out by drought or during raids, subjecting us to more suffering because we are the one’s providing for these children,” she says.

 “When your baby is six months old, you are ripe to carry another pregnancy. Women are respected and adored if they have many children, who are seen as a symbol of wealth. They will start questioning if you stay for more than a year without getting pregnant and that will warrant thorough beating for suspicion of being on contraceptives.”

Early weaning

A spot check by Nation.Africa revealed that at one month, most children are weaned and start relying on cow milk and porridge before they reach the recommended six months. Most mothers lack knowledge of child growth and development.

Dorothy Chebet, Elimu Kwanza Initiative director, raised concern that men in the remote villages of Tiaty trade their young girls to old men instead of taking them to school to secure their future.

“We have rescued six girls and six boys from the remote villages who had been turned into wives and other herders at a very young age. It is sad that illiterate men in those areas have denied their children the right to education and instead see them as a source of wealth. Because there are no rescue centres, we resorted to taking the rescued minors to a boarding facility for their safety,” says Ms Chebet.

As a human rights activist, she also called for serious punishment to be meted out to parents who subject young girls to FGC and forced marriages for their own selfish gain.

She also raised the alarm over rising cases of sexual and gender-based violence in the region, and called on the county assembly to pass the proposed SGBV Bill that seeks to have localised policies and a legal framework that would mitigate the offences.

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