Pimping pain while talking tradition

Is there a way to avoid pain and ugliness while talking tradition? A lot of things are done in the name of tradition that are just plain hurtful. Many a time I am stumped how to process claims about tradition such as in the story about beading.

I caught this story on beading (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/05/11/kenya.children.beading/) on CNN this morning, but the Daily News, a leading newspaper in Kenya, reported of a similar story over a year ago about then four-year-old girl called Itoms (http://allafrica.com/stories/201001270906.html). The reporters said she was on the run "first from her own parents, who want her circumcised before marrying her off for 10 cattle, and from Samburu morans (Maasai warriors), who for a beaded necklace called saen, are free to have sex with a girl barely out of her diapers." Apparently, in Samburu tradition, kids as young as Itoms are "old enough to fetch bride-price" for their fathers. Itoms "had already been booked for sex and eventual marriage to a 27-year-old moran, in a common ritual called Aisho saen (wearing a necklace)."

So is there a way to avoid the ugliness that passes under the cover of tradition? How can parents willingly do harm to their offspring? Are all such claims about tradition to dismissed as false consciousness or simply irrational forms of thought?



It doesn't seem possible to evade the awfulness. Of course there a plenty other things labelled tradition whose real purpose is to make young girls and all females fear men, the young to cower before adults, the poor to blame themselves for their wretchedness. We don't have to go to a village in Kenya to learn about that.

I am aware that you don't need to rope in tradition to rob, rape, disfigure, shoot or enslave. It is more often the case that those who claim tradition to push misery don't have guns or money or other more modern instruments to induce fear. Though some of them are dressed in expensive suits while others cover under animal skins, all of them are really pimps of power, modern or traditional.