Runaway Bride

Lydia was engaged at the age of four. Her father, a Masai warrior, accepted several cattle as a dowry and promised to deliver his daughter in marriage to a man of much prestige. After Lydia’s initiation into adulthood through a traditional circumcision ceremony, she would become the man’s sixth wife.

When she was seven, Lydia learned what that meant. She watched her older sister undergo the circumcision ritual with a small group of village girls reaching puberty. She saw the blood. She heard the screams. And seven-year-old Lydia determined the Masai life was not for her. Alone, she sneaked off into the Kenyan countryside.

She marched toward freedom—but at a price. She forsook her family, her home, her culture. She left her family disgraced. She saw no other way to escape her prescribed fate.

Today, twenty-two years later, Lydia Nkurruna, now twenty-eight, lives in suburban Minneapolis, but still fears Kenya. She tells her story seated in the office of her attorney, a short walk from the Mall of America. She wears a white sweatshirt that glitters Nike across the front. She crosses her legs, clad in blue jeans. Her smooth skin shines the color of a roasted coffee bean. “If I had not left, I’d be in the bushes now with some kids, uneducated,” she says.

It’s hard to imagine this woman with the black hair woven into skinny braids stretching halfway down her back having her head shaved, wearing a traditional wrap, living in a dung hut, raising six or seven children. That life seems so remote from this office—the laptop perched before her, the red cell phone she slips from her purse—but that would be her life today if she were to return to her native Kenya. She fears her family would hunt her down, force her to be circumcised, to accept her arranged marriage. That is, if they didn’t kill her.

Lydia was born in the Rift Valley, between Lake Victoria and Nairobi. Her family lived with other extended families in a cluster of flat-topped dung huts that housed about 100 people, one of many Masai communities scattered across the valley. Lydia shared a hut with her father, mother, two brothers and an older sister, Lucy. From the age of her betrothal, she wore a flat, beaded necklace—a sign of her engagement.

The Masai of Kenya and northern Tanzania, a population estimated at around 750,000, are one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures. They are a seminomadic people, dependent on their cattle, which provide sustenance and shelter. The Masai have survived in a closed system where community elders pass along the customs and roles prescribed to each gender and generation. Boys are circumcised between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two in a ceremony that marks them as men. An uncircumcised male is not allowed to marry. The elder women instruct the girls in a long series of socialization practices that culminates in the female circumcision ceremony at puberty—a centuries-old practice. Fidelity to the traditional customs is the Masai culture’s lifeblood.

Girls are circumcised to discourage intercourse before marriage, to excise a “hard” part  (i.e., the clitoris) associated with masculinity, and to identify those strong enough to preserve the culture. “It is supposed to be an ordeal to separate those who can carry on with the difficult life and raise the next generation,” says Asha Samad, a professor of African and women’s studies, anthropology, and human rights at City University of New York. “Only the toughest will be able to survive.”