, By Tony W. Njoroge
My first teaching job straight out of college was on the other side of the mountain from my village, the second-highest mountain in Africa after Kilimanjaro. Mount Kenya separates two ethnic communities: The Samburu on the leeward side and the Gikuyu on the windward side. The land of the Samburu is endless savanna perfect for pastoralism. The windward side is characterized by heavy rainfall, dense forests and high-quality agricultural land; we are tillers of the soil.
Children on my side of the mountain grow up hearing wild tales of the people who live on the other side. How they only drink cattle blood mixed with milk, how a young man has to kill a lion to prove himself a true warrior, how they move often with their livestock chasing after the rains and the like. I found it quite fascinating. That’s why when the one-year contract teaching job arose in Samburu land, I accepted it quickly. I believe experiencing another people’s culture is the highest honor there is.
The Samburu people are a proud people who have clung to their culture despite “civilization” happening around them. They are also a very handsome people. The Samburu women in particular are quite graceful and charming.
Most of the teachers in the school, and in the entire Samburu land, came from my side of the mountain since literacy levels are very low in Samburu land. Over seventy percent of the Samburu cannot read or write while literacy levels are high at about ninety-two percent among the Gikuyu.
The year was 2015, and I quickly noticed how underdeveloped the area was as compared to the other side of the mountain where I’m from. They were decades behind. All the classrooms in the school were made of mud. A single room made of iron sheets served as the administration block and office for the teachers. We all had to cram into it. There wasn’t a library nor a laboratory and the latrine floors were a sea of urine. There was no lunch program, yet the little children would sometimes bring teachers milk in old soft-drink bottles which I found quite touching. Half the students had to cross a dangerous bridge from their villages to school, made of two long slippery tree trunks placed side by side, where brown water raced and roared at terrifying speed underneath them.
One of the students in the school was fifteen-year-old Nashipai who was in her second to last year of primary school. She was a brilliant student. I taught her class English. She wrote poems and short stories which she often handed to me for critique. Her literary deftness was many years ahead. I still remember the last poem I received from her, about the never-ending tribal clashes in Kenya. A lovely, sad, melodious poem. I still have it to this day and hold it dear. She handed it to me on a Friday; on Monday she didn’t show up to school.
I asked her classmates about her absence but they were tight-lipped. Ntoye, a close friend of Nashipai, came to me secretly during break.
“Nashipai got married on Saturday,” she said. “To an old man as his fourth wife,” she said, shaking her head. “She ran away on Friday night but her elder brothers caught up with her and beat her badly.”
I was a few weeks in the school and quite naïve about Samburu culture. I and two other teachers marched to the chief’s office not very far from the school. If it was any other girl, maybe they could have accepted it, they said. But Nashipai seemed like a girl who could light up the world someday. There’s a law against child marriage in Kenya, but it is rarely enforced. I believe the law only exists as one of the conditions to get funding from the West.
The chief listened keenly.
“But if the ceremony has already taken place and the ceremonial bull slaughtered and eaten, then there’s nothing I can do,” he said.
“She’s fifteen, chief,” we begged, “and one of our best students.”
“She’s someone’s wife now,” he said with finality.
We cycled to the nearest police post eight miles away. The police weren’t of any help either. They said they would look into it, but we knew they were going to do diddly-squat. We trudged back to school defeated. The teachers who had been in the school a long time laughed at our ignorance. They had seen it many times before, even with girls as young as eight.
Speaking to the girls of my class I realized how tradition meant everything to them. It was who they were. They couldn’t imagine not marrying a man picked for them by their fathers. Nor not getting circumcised, which they all were and is a prerequisite for marriage.
The next day in the afternoon I walked to Nashipai’s home alone, secretly directed by Ntoye. The other teachers didn’t want to get involved anymore. There were several manyattas (Samburu homesteads) encircling a huge thorn enclosure where the animals slept, for safety from wild animals. Nashipai’s mother was home with a few small children. The men were out herding.
“It wasn’t my will,” she said. “It was the men who arranged it and besides, her husband paid double the usual number of cattle for her bride price.”
I remember talking about her daughter’s potential and capabilities, and that she could get many more cattle if Nashipai could continue with her studies. She could make something of herself which would be much more beneficial than being an old man’s fourth wife, but I was basically flogging a dead horse. We ended our conversation on a sore note. She reported my meddling to the chief who came to the school the next day huffing and puffing and basically said teachers from other tribes should mind their business.
I later came to learn that the chief himself had been a guest in Nashipai’s wedding ceremony. Ntoye, Nashipai’s friend, was married off a month later. I visited the school ten years later and sadly not much had changed.
I met Nashipai again eight years later in the largest town in Samburu County. I was there for the town’s camel derby event which is hosted every August. Nashipai was selling kienyeji chicken by the roadside.
“Mwalimu,” she called at me, meaning teacher.
I was so glad to see her. I thanked the gods for our paths crossing again. I had often thought of her over the years. She looked different from how I remembered her. She was now taller than me, shabbily dressed and her honey-brown skin seemed to have lost its luster.
“You still remember me?” she asked.
“Of course I remember you, Nashipai.”
We spoke dearly for what seemed an eternity. She had a baby strapped to her back, her fourth child. I also learnt that her husband had died recently and she seemed quite beat up about it.
“He was old,” she said.
Two potential customers approached. After much haggling they left without buying any chicken.
“You still write poetry?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly.
“I still have some of your poems,” I said, “I truly treasure them.”
I saw her face beam. I asked about her chicken business.
“I rear these myself and sell them on market days,” she said.
I bought a hen from her, but she refused to take my money. I thanked her and we parted ways as I pondered the life that was stolen from her. I wished I had done more for her, fought more for her, and for all those girls that got plucked from my class to be someone’s wife while I looked the other way. The guilt and shame will haunt me to my grave.
Child marriage rates still remain alarmingly high in many communities in East Africa: 1 in 3 girls in Samburu is married before their 18th birthday. A few people from these communities are fighting day and night to see the end of the practice. One such person is Josephine Kulea who is the founder of Samburu Girls Foundation. She herself was saved from child marriage at the age of nine by a priest who took her in and paid for her education in a boarding school three hundred miles away from her village. Josephine, who is now in her early forties, studied hard till she earned a nursing degree.
Josephine’s foundation has rescued and educated over 1,100 girls. Many are now nurses, teachers, engineers etc. Elders of the tribe led by her uncles have cursed her for what they view as her attempt at killing their culture. Her foundation is now also helping vulnerable boys whose parents would rather see them herding than go to school.
I am a big advocate of maintaining our African cultures. We shouldn’t just adopt Western culture and discard our own. Let’s pick what’s good from both and do away with some outdated customs: We no longer abandon twins in forests like in the old days when we considered them unnatural and that they could bring misfortune to societies. Child marriage should be done away with completely.