Trip to Tarime

Hello again everyone! I’m back in Dar after my trip, which was absolutely fantastic. Well, apart from the 17-hour bus journey from Dar to Mwanza, Tanzania’s second city…

Some entrepreneur has obviously figured out that the more people are crammed onto a bus, the bigger the return on ticket sales. The aisles on the buses have been narrowed down to hip-bruising proportions, and 5 seats stuffed into one row (3 on one side of the aisle, 2 on the other). Obviously, on the way to Mwanza, I got the middle seat - next to a very friendly guy with unfeasibly wide shoulders. 5 hours into the journey I started to wonder how his mother actually managed to give birth to him – must have been by Caesarean. 7 hours in I was happily distracted by the start of a harrowing 2-hour ordeal on an unfinished section of road, during which the bus careened and bumped across the sandy path at top speed, at major risk of overturning. Every oncoming vehicle that passed sent up a huge cloud of red dust. 12 hours in I was about ready to jump out of the window as the driver put on the “Best of Westlife” CD for the third time in a row… By the time 17 hours had passed and we’d finally arrived in Mwanza, I was seriously considering never ever setting foot on a bus again!

But Mwanza is lovely – the climate by Lake Victoria is much cooler and less humid than in Dar, and the city itself is very pretty, perched on rocky outcrops by the side of the lake. However, as it is one of Africa’s fastest growing cities, growing by about 12% per year according to my (slightly outdated) guidebook, Lake Victoria has suffered: its fish stocks are overfished, and Mwanza discharges sewage directly into the lake as the city’s systems struggle to cope with the exploding population. Part of what makes Mwanza so picturesque, in fact, are the slums that have crept up the hillsides surrounding the lake, the rickety mud huts squeezed in between each other and the huge granite boulders that also dot the hills.

From Mwanza we travelled 4 hours by bus to Tarime, a town on the northern border with Kenya. This journey was slightly more bearable as part of it was spent crossing a corner of the Serengeti, complete with zebras and baboons to distract from the hard seats and rough road (and the Westlife… again…). We even got to cross over the swollen Mara river, which comes down from Kenya and sees the great annual migration of wildebeest across the Serengeti cross its shores, a fair few falling prey to the hungry crocs lying in wait.

Tarime is a relatively large market town, which heads up the district of the same name. There are actually some gold mines in Tarime district, which are operated by the Canadian mining company Barrick, but it was sadly evident that the locals don’t see much of the profit from the gold.

The main tribe in the area is the Kuriya, who are pastoral and traditionally practise both child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). The men are also notorious for their aggressiveness and short tempers – although in the time that we were there, we were met with nothing but kindness and hospitality. The fact remains that cattle are all-important, especially in marriage negotiations, where they are used to pay often an often hefty dowry or ‘bride-price’ to the girls’ family. Sadly, girls are not really viewed as a part of the family they were born into, as they will leave to join their husband’s family when they get married. The bride-price that is paid for girls is often necessary for the family’s sons to be able to marry. The harsh reality is that the young girls who are married off at a tender age rarely have any idea what married life will be like for them – essentially a life of servitude eking out an existence on the husband’s family farm and bearing children.

We were in Tarime to meet some of the girls who had been forced into child marriage, and to hear their stories. Four girls from the Girls’ Network, established by CDF as a way for former child wives to support each other, had agreed to meet us and answer our questions. What struck me most when I met Lucy, Restituta, Mgaya and Basilisa was how young they were – 17, 24, 18 and 14 respectively. But what they were about to tell me would shock me even more. It’s easy to sit in an office and read about the anonymous victims of child marriage, but actually meeting them and hearing them speak openly about their lives really brings the issues home. All of their lives had been filled with hardship, poverty and violations of their basic human rights. Yet they were all willing to hope that their society could change so that their children’s futures would be brighter than their own.

Mgaya was just 13 when she was forced by her parents to marry – they were incredibly poor and needed the bride-price of 1 cow and 1 goat that was offered for Mgaya. She had never met her husband before; one day she arrived home from school to find that she had been ‘married’ and her parents sent her off to live with her husband. Mgaya’s daily life on her husband’s farm was typical. She would rise at about 5am to go out to work the fields with her husband, then come home, clean the house and the cow-shed and do the cooking. Mgaya’s husband would beat her, and left her when she was just 3 months into her first pregnancy, at the age of 14. She ended up going home to her mother, as she just could not cope with caring for a child – she says she didn’t have a clue about motherhood. In the meantime, Mgaya’s parents had also separated, so when her husband demanded back the bride-price her mother could simply not afford to pay it back. Therefore, Mgaya is technically still married, which means that she cannot get married again (not that she wants to). Mgaya dreams of going back to school (she had to drop out when she was married) and becoming a teacher. She says she will educate her two sons to become good men who do not beat their wives.

Basilisa was also just 13 when she ran away with a man – but unlike Mgaya, she chose to do so. Basilisa blames the peer pressure that exists amongst girls in the Kuriya tribe to get married early. One day, on her way home from school, a 26-year old man offered her a lift in his car, and promised to buy her whatever she wanted if she got in. She ended up running away with him. But life with him did not turn out to be what she expected. Her mother had not yet taught her to cook, and he was so angry at this that he used to beat her. Basilisa had enough of the violence when she was 3 months pregnant (at just 13) and went home to her mother. She freely admits that she is still a child, unprepared for the responsibilities of motherhood and married life. When her baby was born, she used to forget to breast-feed her. Luckily Basilisa’s mother takes care of both her and her baby, and there is no bride-price to pay back.

All of the girls emphasised that education is the key to fighting practices such as child marriage and FGM, and to put an end to the violence against women. They particularly want more girls’ schools to be established in Tarime. At the moment, there is only one girls’ school, run by the Roman-Catholic church. The girls who attend this school do not undergo FGM because the Roman-Catholic sisters are against the practice. Also, those girls tend not to get married as early as other Kuriya girls. Even if they do not continue on to secondary school, they still do not get married straight away.

There is a general lack of schools in Tarime, even though primary school education is compulsory in Tanzania. Many children therefore make a long journey across the border into Kenya every day in order to go to school, as there are more schools there. In addition, although primary school education in theory is free for everyone Tanzania, there are some costs associated with it – for example, for uniforms and books – which in practice prevent many children from going to school, especially girls.

The next day, we drove about 30 minutes from Tarime to a village called Nyamwaga to meet Ghati, another victim of child marriage. Ghati is 18, and has 3 children by two different men. She was married off at 13 – her father had died and her uncle insisted she be married so that her bride-price could be used to settle the debts he was owed by her family. Ghati had never met her husband before, and basically entered a life of slavery, toiling on his parents’ farm and being beaten every day. One day her husband beat her so badly that she nearly lost an eye. After that, she went home to her mother. Ghati does not see her husband anymore, and he does not pay her any money to support their children. When we saw Ghati, she had just had another baby, Innocent (who was just 1 month old) with another man in the hopes that he might support her and her children, but she had not heard anything from him for several months and he has not yet met his son. Ghati’s situation is absolutely desperate – she makes a meagre living by selling bananas at the roadside but cannot even do this whilst Innocent is so young.

Nyamwaga itself is steeped in poverty, a cluster of mud huts with thatched roofs and dozens of children who should be in school running around. Although a major gold mine is located down the road, the Tanzanian government has given the concession to operate it to a Canadian company, who at best employ the locals for a pittance, and at worst displace families living around the mines without any compensation. The Kuriya do not do any goldsmithing or anything to add value to the gold that comes from the ground, and therefore do not see any of the massive profit that is later gained on it. At best, a few ‘artisanal’ (read: illegal) miners manage to sell a few lumps of the metal on the black market in Mwanza for a low price, risking the wrath of the mining company in the process.


On top of this, the Kuriya grow marijuana as a cash crop, and disputes between the different marijuana-producing areas often result in bloody clashes between different clans, with the villagers telling harrowing stories of neighbours killing neighbours in the night.

On the way back to Tarime from Nyamwaga, we drove past a long procession of people walking down the road. Rolling down the window, we asked what was going on – and it turned out to be a wedding. A bride was being escorted to her new husband’s house. She came up to the car to accept our congratulations, dressed in all her finery and her hair coiffed in an elaborate updo. From her facial expression, she might have been going to a funeral. She couldn’t have been more than 16.