Jew World Order

Older children with teeth mingi are normally pushed off high cliffs by the
elders, or thrown in the river to drown or be eaten by crocodiles. The
practice is illegal and clandestine. No one involved is keeping count, but
the usual estimate is that 300 children are being killed a year.

Lale Labuko, one of the first Karas to get an education, is working to end the
infanticide through his organisation Omo
Child. Here in Jinka, on a thinly stretched budget of donor money, he
runs two warm, loving shelter homes for rescued mingi children.

In total, he has 30 children under his care, and the baby girl born yesterday
was supposed to be the 31st. During the pregnancy, her parents agreed to
give the baby to Omo Child. But at the last moment the mother changed her
mind and hewed to tradition. She walked out into the bush with her mother,
gave birth under a thorn tree, and left the baby there to die.

One of Labuko’s supporters in the village, a tough young warrior called Silbo
Shanko, went out and found the baby still alive. Shanko is now looking after
her, keeping away the villagers who think she should be killed, and waiting
for Labuko to send a rescue party.

Sitting in the passenger seat, I make the calculations. Dus village is eight
hours away. By the time a rescue vehicle can get there, assuming that
nothing goes wrong on bad roads at night in a region of simmering tribal
conflict and banditry, this baby girl will have spent the first 40 hours of
her life without any nourishment.

Labuko says she can make it, that newborn babies are tougher than you might
expect, but he’s driving across town as fast as he can, scattering goats,
chickens and pedestrians, and raising a cloud of ochre dust.

To the modern Western mind, the idea of parents deliberately killing
their own children – abandoning them to die of starvation, exposure or
predation, or throwing them in rivers – sounds almost unimaginably cruel and
heartless. We tend to forget that infanticide by these methods was
commonplace in Europe and America until the late 19th century, and that
England was particularly notorious for it. Effective contraception and legal
abortion curbed the practice in the West, although it does still occur on a
small scale.

Scholars of infanticide have found it so widespread in human history, across
all cultures and continents, that they have deemed it normal human
behaviour. The killing of newborn girls is still rife in China, India,
Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, even as cheap sonograms and abortions
are taking over as a way to get rid of unwanted daughters. In Africa,
mothers without access to contraception or abortion will sometimes kill
babies they don’t want, or can’t afford, but only in a few remote areas on
the continent are people systematically killing babies for magical reasons,
in the belief that they carry an evil curse.

Nowhere in Africa is more remote than the valley of the lower Omo river in the
far south-west of Ethiopia. Isolated by mountains to the north, swamps to
the west and deserts to the south, the lower Omo is the world’s last great
tribal stronghold. Untouched by colonialism, largely ungoverned and only
tenuously connected to the rest of Ethiopia, the valley is a vast elongated
basin occupied by 16 tribes, totalling some 220,000 people.

They live by herding cattle and goats, planting crops after the river floods
its banks, and conducting violent raids on each others’ livestock. Many wear
animal skins and adorn themselves with mud, paint, goat fat, ostrich
feathers, lip plates, elaborate hairstyles, piercings and scarification
patterns. In the West, we used to call them the most primitive tribes in
Africa. Now we say they are the most culturally intact, although that is
changing rapidly.

Labuko grew up naked in a hut of grass and sticks near the Omo river. He
learnt to herd cattle and goats like any other Kara boy, to hunt with spears
and bows-and-arrows, and paint his body for dances and ceremonies. He was an
exceptionally fast runner and killed his first oryx (a type of antelope)
with a knife. When he was nine years old, for reasons that Labuko still
doesn’t fully understand, his traditionalist father attracted the scorn and
ridicule of his peers by sending him to a boarding school run by Swedish
missionaries. With a small group of other Kara boys, Labuko walked barefoot
to the school across 65 miles of bush, lighting fires at night to keep away
the lions and hyenas, and making detours to skirt the territory of enemy
tribes.

At school he saw Western clothes, books, pens and paper for the first time.
The missionaries gave him one pair of shorts and a shirt, and introduced him
to the Bible and Christianity. He learnt to read and write in Amharic, the
national language of Ethiopia, and later in English. There were boys from
other Omo tribes at the school and he learnt their languages too. At night
they slept on straw mats in a pestilential dormitory.

‘Life in our villages was hard, but we suffered more at school,’ Labuko says.
‘Bed bugs bit us while we slept. Biting insects were always on us. Everyone
had sores. Often we had no food and I became very thin. When the term was
finished, I would walk the 100km back to my village. I made that walk four,
sometimes six times a year. The heat was the worst part. You couldn’t walk
at midday because the rocks were too hot for bare feet, even though our feet
were very tough.’

When he was 15, back in the village visiting his family, he saw the elders
grabbing a two-year-old girl away from her mother. The mother tried
desperately to hold on to her daughter but the men were too strong. They ran
towards the river with the screaming infant, as the mother sobbed and wailed
and Labuko looked on in horror.

‘I asked my mother what was happening and she explained all about mingi,’ he
says. ‘The girl was “teeth mingi”. This is why the elders have to kill her.
Then she told me that I had two older sisters who were mingi. My parents
were married but they didn’t have permission for children, so they put them
– my sisters – out in the bush to die.’

That was when Labuko decided that he would fight against the belief in mingi
and save children from being killed. Even now his eyes well up with tears
when he talks about the sisters he never met, ‘My parents call me the
first-born, but I was not.’

At the shelter home in Jinka, Labuko loads up a four-wheel-drive
vehicle with nappies, baby formula, blankets, spare tyres and cans of extra
petrol, while excited toddlers and older child­ren swarm around him –
children who would all be dead were it not for Labuko. One of his nannies
gets into the back seat, a gentle unflappable woman in her thirties called
Tshanshe Ayele. A driver takes the keys, and Labuko’s friend and colleague
Ariyo Dore, another educated Kara, gets into the passenger seat. Before they
leave, Labuko calls Dus village again. The baby girl is still alive, but no
one – not even her protector, Shanko, who thinks mingi is nonsense – will
give her any milk or formula.

‘Only water,’ Dore says. ‘If someone feeds her, they will not be able to live
in the village. No one will talk to them. No one will eat or drink sorghum
beer with them. They cannot come into the ceremony house. They will be
outcasts.’

The vehicle leaves Jinka and speeds away through scrubby hills, gradually
leaving behind the Ethiopia of bicycles, mobile phones and Western clothing,
and entering the tribal lands of the lower Omo basin. Near the small town of
Dimeka, men and women of the Hamer tribe are walking along the dusty
roadside. Most of the men are shirtless, wearing beaded headbands and
necklaces and a rectangle of cloth tied around their hips. Every one of them
carries a small, carved wooden stool that doubles as a pillow at night, a
snuff pouch, a long knife and an AK-47. The guns come from South Sudan to
the west and Somalia to the east; some date from the collapse of the
Mengistu regime in Ethiopia in 1991, when demobilised soldiers and police
came here to trade their weapons for cattle. For as long as anyone can
remember, the Omo tribes have conducted murderous raids and reprisals
against each other, especially in times of scarce grazing, but they used to
be armed with spears and bows. With every­one carrying AK-47s, the death
toll from these conflicts has risen dramatically.

Just a few days ago, Dassenech tribesmen killed 25 Turkanas coming north from
the Kenyan border with their cattle. A few days before that, the Kara raided
their enemies the Nyangatom, killing a man and making off with 800 goats.
Now everyone is waiting for the Nyangatom to come across the river and
strike back. Part of Labuko and Dore’s work with Omo Child is to host peace
talks between the tribes, but the raiding and revenge is deeply entrenched,
and getting worse as the climate changes and droughts become more frequent.

The Hamer women, powerfully muscled and shining from the goat fat they rub
into their skin, stride along topless in goatskin skirts. They wear heavy
metal collars, and their hair hangs down in a bowl-cut of braids worked with
ochre mud and goat fat. The Hamer are one of the three tribes that kill
mingi children and they also have a way of aborting mingi pregnancies, by
reaching up inside the woman and crushing the foetus’s head.

Outsiders who hear about mingi infanticide often assume it is a primitive form
of population control, but there is no evidence to support this view. All
the tribes in the valley, whether they practise infanticide or not, are
increasing their numbers at the same rapid rate. The Kara have grown from
1,000 to 5,000 in Labuko’s lifetime, and the Hamer are the most numerous of
all, with 57,000 people. For the tribes that believe in mingi – the Kara,
Hamer and Bena – killing these children is a way to keep their
populations increasing, by averting the famines and plagues that they think
would come if they let the cursed children live.

The slanting sun illuminates a landscape of thorn scrub and acacia trees,
stick and grass huts, teenage goatherds with long thin legs and AK-47s
decorated with feathers and monkey fur, and then a tour bus full of European
tourists, who have come down a long hard road from Addis Ababa to photograph
the wild tribes. Some Hamer and Kara villages are now charging tourists to
photograph their sacred bull-jump ceremonies, in which young men run naked
across the backs of bulls, and young women demand to be whipped until the
blood runs down their backs. The resulting scars are a source of pride among
the women, and also an insurance policy for the future: the man who puts the
scars on her back is obliged to look after her if her husband should die.

Labuko and Dore hope that the rescued mingi children will return to their
birth villages as teenagers and go through the initiation ritual of the bull
jump. Otherwise, they won’t be able to marry within the tribe, or be
considered members of the tribe. At present, the idea of mingi children
bull-jumping is anathema to the tribal elders, but this is a time of big
changes in the lower Omo, and the old certainties are crumbling away. More
and more young people are going to school, learning about the outside world
and rejecting the belief in mingi. Better roads are bringing in more
tourists, modern goods are appearing in the markets, television is arriving,
and the Ethiopian government, with Chinese money and Italian engineers, is
building a gigantic dam on the Omo river to generate hydro-electric power.
The seasonal floods, on which the tribes have always depended to grow crops
and bring up grazing for their livestock, are expected to come to an end in
the next year or two.

Meanwhile a newborn baby girl weakens on the lap of a warrior in Dus village.
Night has fallen and the road has turned into an interbraided confusion of
narrow sandy tracks meandering through dense thorn scrub. Dore is navigating
and it’s one fork in the road after another. He gets out at one point, looks
around in the moonlight, overrules the driver, and prevents a plunge into a
deep chasm. If Dore can keep making the right decisions, Dus village is two
hours away.

Lale Labuko feels singled out by fate or God to guide his people
through this time, to bridge them between two worlds. Even as a schoolboy he
would bring back news, stories and information to the village, and people
would gather round him to hear it. At the age of 10 he astonished the
village by explaining that he had seen something called a film. It was a
story come to life in moving pictures on a wall and it concerned the feats
of a great warrior called Rambo.

Now Labuko has flown halfway round the world on aero­planes. He has seen snow
and ocean, the great cities of Germany and America, the Grand Canyon, and
the Lakers play basketball in Los Angeles. Soon he will speak at Harvard
University about his life and work. He handles these cultural transitions
with a rare grace and poise, and an air of wise benevolence that one
associates with a much older man.

After the missionary school, he went to a government school and then into
business as a roving ammunition trader. He bought bullets for AK-47s at a
good price from the Dassenech in the south, and sold them at a profit to the
Kara and Hamer, using his languages and his missionary school connections.
There was always a ready market. AK-47s have become such an integral part of
tribal life that a young man can’t get married without one. The going price
for a bride is 30 bulls, an AK-47 and a clip of 30 bullets, paid upfront to
her family.

Then he worked as a guide for an abusive Dutch­man (now deceased) who ran
photographic safaris among the tribes from a camp on the Omo river. All
through these years, Labuko was wondering how he could stop the mingi
infanticide. Kara society, like most tribal society, is extremely
conservative. It venerates elders, ancestors and tradition, and is deeply
suspicious of change. The elders told him, and will tell you today, that the
Kara had already tried letting mingi children live. The result was drought,
famine, starvation and disease. Only when they started killing mingi
children again did it start to rain and life returned to normal.

‘The first thing was to work on the elders,’ Labuko says. ‘I requested a
meeting in the ceremony hut, and I asked all the young educated people to
come with me. I explained that we wanted to stop this harmful practice. I
said, “There is no need to kill these mingi children. Let us simply remove
them from the tribe, and the curse will leave with them.” I don’t believe
the curse is real, but when you are travelling a long way, it is best to
start slowly.’

The response was anger and complete rejection. Labuko’s parents were furious
that he would suggest such a heretical idea, and also worried that he would
be cursed or banished. Over the next four months, using reasoned persuasion,
Labuko managed to change his father’s mind. His father being a respected
man, this led to more converts as he went family to family through the
village. Labuko made his case again in the ceremony hut, and some elders
reluctantly agreed to let him remove some mingi children and see what
happened.

The next obstacle was the government, whose official position was that mingi
infanticide was no longer practised in Ethiopia, so nothing needed to be
done. Labuko persuaded them otherwise and formed a good working partnership.
He secured his first funding from a German church group and is now funded by
a California-based non-profit organisation. His responsibilities are
endless. Apart from the two shelter homes he runs and his 30 rescued
children, he has two daughters of his own to bring up. He is also continuing
his education and spending as much time as possible in the long, slow,
ongoing process of tribal politics.

I’ve seen him in action, sitting on a tiny stool in a hut full of elders, or
under a shade tree, everyone drinking coffee from calabash gourds, and
spraying out the first mouthful as a blessing. Labuko is good-humoured and
persistent, and employs every ounce of his charm. He gets frustrated
sometimes but never angry or disrespectful – this would be almost
unthinkable for him, because he loves and reveres the elders, and knows that
his education is the only real difference between them.

‘In the long run, education will defeat mingi,’ he says. ‘So I ask
families to put at least one child in school. Education will also solve our
conflicts, our medical problems, and help us deal with all these changes we
cannot avoid. In 20 years, this mingi will be over. But now they are killing
children, many children, so I never rest. I just work and work.’

Dus village comes into view: conical huts, a line of people wrapped in
cloth and skins, a few T-shirts, many goats. Silbo Shanko sits on the edge
of the village and cradles the baby in a way that suggests that no one
should even think about trying to get to her.

No one challenges the nanny as she gets out of the vehicle and walks with
calm, relaxed determination towards the baby. No one says a word as she gets
out a plastic basin, fills it with water, and takes the baby from Shanko.
The baby cries as she washes off dried blood, and continues to cry when
Shanko takes her back. The nanny mixes up a bottle of formula and water. The
faces in the crowd look sombre, awed, and the only sound is the baby crying.
The nanny takes her back, lowers the teat of the bottle, and the crying
stops instantly as the baby feeds for the first time.

Swaddled in a blanket, cradled into the nanny’s chest, she sleeps for the
whole eight hours back to Jinka, where the staff welcome her ecstatically as
a beautiful Kara girl and Labuko gives her the name of Jessica. She begins
the life of an orphan whose parents are still alive and tried to kill her.
She will get her vaccinations and grow up near a hospital. She will go to a
functioning school. In many ways, her curse may turn out to be a blessing.

Back in Dus, the elders are not happy about any of this. Three days after the
rescue, they gather in the shade of a big spreading acacia tree, and sit on
their tiny stools with feathered plumes, clay skullcaps and tonsured scalps,
scars notched across their chests for every enemy killed. The rains have
failed, the crops have failed, and some strange new disease is killing
children all over the village (measles). How can they ignore the fact that
all this has coincided with letting mingi children live? There are calls to
start killing them again, delivered in passionate oratory.

The council is all men, but the following day I sit down with Labuko and an
old woman called Muko. She wears a tattered goatskin skirt and nothing else.
Behind her flows the murky brown Omo river, with crocodiles hanging
motionless in the current. She sits on a log and stares at the ground as she
talks. In her life she has given birth to 16 children, but the first 12 were
born before she and her husband were married. They wanted to get married but
he couldn’t amass the necessary goats and cattle for the bride price. So she
put those 12 babies out in the bush to die.

‘For a mother it is painful to kill her children,’ she says, ‘but I was more
concerned about the community and my family.’ Then she looks up and stares
right at Labuko: ‘I did the right thing. You will see. More curses and death
will come because of these children you are rescuing. Is that what you want
for your people?’

Then her shoulders crumple forward and she looks back at the ground. ‘This is
a time for the young people,’ she says. ‘Let them decide. I am finished now.’

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