ARUSHA, Tanzania — ARUSHA, Tanzania -- One night when Neema Laizer was 14, her father announced that she had to go live with her new husband and his two wives the next day. Nobody asked the seventh-grader how she felt; it did not matter.
But Neema, sensing her life was about to end, refused to submit. With help from her courageous mother and an uncle who was a priest, she fled her family's rural compound that night. Driven over bad roads to this city near Mount Kilimanjaro, she ended up at a center that places girls in schools and keeps them safe from forced marriage.
"I wanted to study, maybe go to university and be a doctor," she said recently, days after graduating from a high school she never would have seen had she been married off four years ago.
Neema is a member of the Masai, a proud people from northern Tanzania and Kenya known worldwide for the lanky, spear-clutching male warriors in red garb. For ages, their semi-nomadic ways have centered on cattle, simple living - and deeply chauvinistic traditions.
But some Masai say it is time to end certain gender-based practices. Ritual female genital mutilation is common despite laws against it. Culturally sanctioned promiscuity raises fears that AIDS could ricochet nightmarishly through Masai communities. And girls as young as 12 are forced into polygamous marriage.
Old traditions die hard, though.
Consider genital mutilation, also called female circumcision. "A woman does not recognize herself as a woman without circumcision," said Edward Porokwa, a college-educated Masai who runs a nonprofit agency that lobbies for pastoralists such as the Masai. "A man will not marry a woman who is not circumcised."
Porokwa agrees with the government's ban of the practice, in which the clitoris is excised in pubescent girls. The challenge, he said, is to persuade Masai to make the coming-of-age rite symbolic and to keep the useful aspects, such as guidance on how to take care of one's family. Otherwise it will continue indefinitely, he predicted, law or no law.
The practice has strong defenders among Masai, including some young men. Paulo Kikondo, 23, left his family's rural home a decade ago and works in Arusha as a night watchman for $1 a day. It is the only job he can find with his second-grade education. A woman spared mutilation "is nothing," he said, and will be spurned by Masai men.
