Why the Kara Tribe Formally Ended Its Child Sacrifice Practice
On July 14, I reported that elders of Ethiopia’s Kara tribe
formally renounced the practice of Mingi, or child sacrifice.
What motivates a tribe to overturn a belief system that has been
in place for generations? According to John Rowe—the president
of Omo Child, a youth shelter for Mingi children—the answer is
simple: demographics. “The Kara look around them and see the
Nyangatom, the Hamer, the Dassanach, and other much larger
tribes and realize they need to increase their numbers,” Rowe
told me by cell phone from Omo region’s largest town, Arba
Minch. As I wrote in my piece, "Customs of the Omo," the Kara
(also transliterated as Karo) who number about 2,000, and the
Nyangatom, who number about 30,000, live on opposite banks of
the Omo River. Families, whose only modern possession is the
AK47, engage in tit for tat blood feuds over men killed during
cattle raids. In a subsistence economy based on herding and
flood agriculture, cattle raiding is