Evil custom: African women with 15 children are fed to crocodiles

Buko Bugda, 45, from the Das village of the Karo tribe in the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia, is now alone. Why? Because her seven sons and eight daughters were deemed cursed by the tribal elders at birth and were all killed.

"One after another, I lost 15 children in total," she explained."I gave birth to 7 boys and 8 girls. The traditions of our tribe are very strict. I didn't follow our traditions, so they killed my children."

Bugda was not the only one who suffered this. The concept "mini", which means cursed child, is still enshrined in the Hamer and Bana tribes, with tribal elders insisting that cursed babies should be killed before they bring bad luck to the tribe.

So even as the Ethiopian government works to ban the tradition,"cursed" children continue to be killed every day, either left alone in the wild to be eaten by hyenas, fed to hungry crocodiles, or locked in a small house to starve to death.

For Bugda, this started before she got married, and her fiance failed to participate in the tribe's traditional "bull jumping" ritual. This ceremony is a rite of passage for tribal men and must be completed before they marry.

But they got married anyway, and the tribal elders announced that any child they had would be deemed illegitimate and must be killed at birth.

However, it is not just illegitimate children who are regarded as "mingi". Children with disabilities, parents who did not obtain the consent of elders when their mother was alive, or twins were regarded as "mingi". The most cruel thing is that if the teeth grow in the wrong order, they would also be regarded as "mingi".

Editor's note: Mingi means unclean and cursed. It is a traditional belief of the Karo and Hamar tribes in the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia. Illegal children, twins, whose upper teeth grow before their lower teeth, or childhood teeth are all identified as mingi, and these children will be brutally killed.

Although this tradition is cruel, tribal elders fear that if the children are not killed, bad luck will befall the tribe. "Most of the tribal superstitions in the Omo Valley are still very strong."

Only by changing the world customs network, the suffering of women like Bugda will not last. Bugda added,"I have no choice at the moment. Now I feel sad and lonely whenever I see someone giving birth or nursing. There's no one around me."