Wife beating before marriage - a terrifying Ethiopian Hamer tribe ritual

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People have been taught from childhood that women are the weaker sex. Women need to be protected, loved, and pampered. Therefore, no self-respecting man would hit a woman. That might seem true until you learn about this Ethiopian Hamer tribe tradition.


The world has many strange customs that originated hundreds of years ago and still exist today, one of them is this tribe`s tradition that almost every woman in the tribe must experience. The strangest thing is that the women themselves want to participate in this terrifying tradition, even though they have to endure quite a lot of pain...

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First, it should be mentioned that polygamy prevails in the Hamer tribe. Women in this tribe are needed only to bear children. When a wife can no longer fulfill this function, the husband marries the next wife. The previous wife does not see the new wife as a competitor, but as a liberator from the duty of childbearing.
Before the wedding, the man must go through an initiation process. Several cows are lined up in a row, and the groom must run across their backs. When this run is repeated seven times, the man will have proven to the whole tribe that he is strong and agile enough.
Before the cow run, the groom must mark his wife. He leaves deep beating marks on the body of his future wife, and the wife must do it willingly. It is believed that the more pain the woman endures, the happier their future marriage will be.
An interesting fact is that women can only marry when at least one of their brothers has reached maturity. If there are no sons in the family, which is very rare, then the women remain single for life.
Men beat women with all their strength and stop only when the women have fallen to the ground from immense pain. After this procedure, women recover for a long time with various clay compresses.
Similar rituals exist in other tribes. For people in our latitudes, these tribes are incomprehensible.
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