Tarime Wakes Up From Land of Corpses

Tanzania Daily News (Dar es Salaam)

Lawi Joel

20 May 2011

Tarime, Tanzania’s northern district once notorious for violence, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and rustling, is changing for the better.

The gradual and dramatic development is taking the district from a dark, bloody time that left behind a sickening track of corpses. The people attribute the new-found peace to the Tarime Special Zonal Police.

The new awakening in Tarime, a district endowed with abundant natural resources, is affecting, among others, a traditional form of violence on women-FGM. A relentless onslaught by human rights activists on circumcision of women and a growing awareness about its harm is slowly, but surely, turning the community away from the ritual.

For a woman of the Kurya community, one of the chief ethnic people in the district, the practice of circumcision is a rite of passage and a female member who avoids it, becomes a pariah. A woman is therefore considered unfit for marriage if she is not circumcised and is excommunicated.

But education has enlightened the present-day generation and many are beginning to see FGM as a backward practice. Still, the elders, who are a strong link between the past and the future of the district’s youth, remain a stumbling block in the younger generation’s effort to pull themselves out of ghostly past of the mutilating custom.

Grandmothers and mothers still inspire their girls to go through the rites as a means to achieve perfection of womanhood. That demand leaves girls with little room, or none at all, to wriggle through. But education is having effect and parents are developing a negative stance towards the ceremony.

“When my daughter passed her STD VII examinations and was waiting to begin her secondary school education, she asked me to allow her to go for circumcision,” says Mwita Marwa (45), a businessman in the provincial headquarters of Tarime.

Mwita politely told his daughter to go and begin her Form One education first. Later, during the long year-end vacation, she would have the ritual performed if she thought it was necessary. “When she returned home for the long vacation I asked her if she was ready to undergo the ritual because all preparations had been made.

She said no. She had changed her mind. I knew she had learnt its harm,” Mwita explains. Another town’s resident says the tradition would be on the way to its sure death but for the authorities’ forceful move to stamp it out.

Measures by reformists of the practice to scare out of it the people have subjected them to a big fight with diehard traditionalists. When police in December 2010 arrested two circumcisers, according to one police officer in the district, members of the community marched to the police station and demanded their release.

“If you want the world to be too small a place and bitter, force the people to stop the practice or arrest the circumciser, – the Ngariba,” another member of the community, one George says. Last year traditional circumcision for the youth in the district began December 2 through to December 30. One of the arrested circumcisers was imprisoned and the other fined and let free.

A more peaceful way for change is education. Proponents of change criticize the law prohibiting circumcision, saying it only focuses on the circumciser and not the victim. If the girls were targeted and punished, they would resist the practice for fear of being penalized, some argue. Elimination of circumcision of women would incidentally end the deaths that sometimes do take place.

The fight against FGM notwithstanding, days of open violence are beginning to disappear as clan fights sparked by cattle rustling decrease. The tranquil is reassuring and nights are becoming more restful. Notably, the consequent peace has rendered Tarime habitable. “Clannish fights are history today,” says Deputy RPC Tarime/Rorya-Special Zone Mr Sebastian Zakaria.

The Senior Superintendent of Police adds; “We sat with elders through community police and discussed the matter.” Education is not only freeing girls from age-old and brutal traditions. Boys too are affected by it and are steering away from such vices as cattle rustling, hitherto an act of bravado.

“Cattle rustling is gone,” Zakaria told the ‘Daily news on Saturday’ recently. He, however, says that theft of one or two cows still goes on. “But a raid that swept away a whole herd is a thing of the past.” A resident, Osumba Mwitha supportively observes that even theft of one or two animals has become too risky for the thieves.

“If you are found with livestock that is not yours, it is your end,” he says. A couple of people who spoke to ‘Daily News on Saturday’ said the once deadly streets of Tarime after sunset have also become safe in the dark. Civil institutions in the district are also lending a hand in training the youth to be good citizens.

Nyamwaga Catholic Church is mentioned as one of the institutions that cooperate with the local authorities to mould the youth into productive citizens. “The youth should go to school to avoid being cattle thieves,” says Mr Zakaria. But not all youths who go to school make it to either secondary school or the university.

Fortunately though, the advent of the cheaper Chinese motorcycles has created for them a lucrative job opportunity, a development that is on the contrary giving the district police some headache. The boys do not wear a helmet and when they have an accident, there is a new count of dead bodies.

One of the traffic mistakes they make is not riding with their headlamp on as required to make them visible in their flight. “Riding with my light on makes people think I am carrying a dead body,” says Zephania Buroria, one of the motorcyclists in the town. The traffic police are, however, relentless about giving the youth traffic education.

But change is slow because there are always new motorcyclists and not all of them respond to a call to attend a seminar for traffic awareness. “In 2009 we called them to turn up at Tarime Municipal Hall but only a few of them turned up,” says Ernest Oyoo, officer-in-charge Traffic Tarime/Rorya (TTR).

Mr Zakaria says the educational programmes they give the motorists have produced positive results. “Accidents are few because of that education,” he says. These developments plus the government efforts in the district to exterminate cultivation of cannabis, now a big, illegal commercial crop of the district, is giving Tarime level-minded and productive youths, burying in the mist of times the district’s bloody days of corpses.

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