South Sudan bride prices, cattle rustling rising

Emmanuel Gambiri said an educated wife in his cattle-herding Mundari tribe in South Sudan costs 50 cows, 60 goats and 30,000 Sudanese pounds ($12,000) in cash.

At that price, some men who otherwise can’t afford a bride turn to stealing livestock in order to buy a wife and gain status, said Gambiri, citing a friend who is now a cattle rustler. A surge in “bride price” has fueled cattle raids in which more than 2,000 people are killed each year.

In his village of Terekeka, in the state of Central Equatoria, Gambiri recalls a time when wives cost as little as 12 cows, and tribal chiefs wielded enough power to call the parents and set an affordable bride price.

Today, he says, it’s a different story.

Even as South Sudan celebrated its independence July 9, a two-decade civil war has left scars. The war eroded traditional authority and farming practices, leaving a generation of young men who have grown up either in the army, militias or refugee camps.

“These boys now don’t know how to cultivate. All they know how to manage well is an AK-47,” said Gambiri, 37, a program manager for a nonprofit organization, in an interview.

In rural communities, where livestock is the measure of wealth, the ripple effects of the surge in bride prices pose one of the biggest social and economic challenges for the world’s newest nation. About half of South Sudan’s 8 million people live on less than $1 a day and 85 percent of the adult population is illiterate, according to the United Nations.

Valuable commodity

South Sudan has only 40 miles of paved road, compared with almost 100,000 miles in the north. Amid such poor infrastructure, cattle are the most valuable commodity, supplying dairy and beef.

“In such an economy your stock market is just that: livestock,” said Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “There is little to exchange except that one currency on the hoof.”

With about 20 breeds, South Sudan has a cattle population of 11.7 million, as well as 12.4 million goats and 12.1 million sheep, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. That ranks South Sudan as having the sixth-largest livestock herd in Africa, with an asset value estimated at the equivalent of $2.6 billion.

In the countryside, a cow can fetch between $150 and $190. In the capital of Juba, cows cost between $375 and $560) a head, and bride price is between 150 cows and 400 cows.

Since the end of the civil war, in which almost 2 million people died, thousands of men have returned home looking for wives. Greater competition has triggered a bidding war.

Bride prices up

Bride prices have surged 44 percent since 2005, when a U.S.-brokered peace accord came into force, and currently half of the male population in rural areas can’t afford a bride, according to an unpublished U.N. report obtained by Bloomberg News.

Frustrated by the prohibitive cost of getting married, some aspiring grooms go into debt. Others join armed gangs of as many as 50 men that plot raids. Two-thirds of respondents said men had to raid livestock to pay the bride price, according to the U.N.-Norwegian People’s Aid study that interviewed 1,284 men and 1,392 women between January and March last year in five of 10 state capitals.

The study found that today’s cattle raiders are poor, uneducated youths who were born in the shadow of the armed conflict between the Muslim north and the south, where traditional religions and Christianity predominate.

Costly, deadly

About 350,000 cattle are stolen a year, costing farmers 200 million Sudanese pounds in lost revenue, according to a 2010 study carried out by SNV, a nonprofit organization, for the Ministry of Animal Resources and Fisheries. In 2009, about 2,500 people were killed in cattle raids, the study estimated.

At least 100,000 marriages take place each year at an average of 30 head of cattle, generating demand for 3 million head of cattle, the report estimated.

The casualties from cattle raids are often owners who put up resistance or villagers caught in the line of fire, leading to a cycle of reprisals and tribal violence.

Natural disasters such as drought or famine can also trigger cattle theft.

David Gressly, acting principal deputy special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for South Sudan, said he is aware of “no evidence” that criminality is caused by young men’s desire get married.

The driving factors for bride prices, on the rise since the late 1990s, have to do with the financial resources of the prospective groom’s family, the educational level of the young woman, the size of the prospective bride’s family or the political connections of the young man, Gressly said in response to e-mailed questions.

This article appeared on page D – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle