they can enter into as young as fifteen. One anthropologist, Itaru Ohta, who has conducted fieldwork among the Turkana since the 1970s, reported that when he once “gave papers and pencils to Turkana children to draw what they wanted, most of the girls made pictures of the front aprons of married women, which are different from those of unmarried women”.















The Turkana are one of the few groups in this part of the world who do not practise circumcision; as Juxon Barton observed, in this and in many other cultural customs, they have more in common with the Karamojong and Dodoth people of Uganda to the West. For s, rites of passage generally involve learning how to hunt and for girls the most important transition is marriage, a contract









