On the other side of the mountains of the Serengeti, marriage can mean something completely different. Robi Matiko, 54, and Busina Samir, 26, have been married for two years, but they don’t share the same bed or wear any rings. The two women live a few kilometres north of Serengeti, near the border with Kenya. Every morning, they wake up at sunrise and dig the fields together. In the evening they cook and bathe their four children. A fifth is on the way, but Busina won’t stop digging despite her pronounced belly.

Every summer, newly married couples with an adventurous spirit head to places like Serengeti National Park in Tanzania for their honeymoon. They can sleep in luxurious tents surrounded by elephants and giraffes, and enjoy dinner as the savanna turns orange at sunset—an unforgettable way to start a “happily ever after” love story.

According to traditional laws, in Tanzania—as in many other countries in Africa and the Middle East—women are not allowed to own or inherit any kind of property. In rural areas, not owning land means not being able to eat, let alone earn any money. It means not having a home and always depending on men.

Matiko and Samir’s union might not have anything do with what you would usually picture as marriage, yet it strikes a key question about its essence. Is marriage about romantic love? Or is it about empowering and supporting each other?

This tradition has existed since ancient times in the Kuria tribe, explains village leader Mwita Wambura Nsabi, but it was rarely used. As the Kuria population grew, nyumba ntobhu became more common. “Starting in the 70s we saw an increase of nyumba ntobhu,” Nsabi says. “It is not a bad thing, because the community does not stigmatize them.”

In Tanzania, same-sex marriage is illegal and, in the last two years, homosexuality has been increasingly persecuted by the government. Matiko and Samir’s relationship, however, is not romantic or sexual in any way. Instead, they are married under the auspices of a unique Kuria tribal tradition called nyumba ntobhu (“house of women”). It allows an older widow who does not have any male descendants to marry a younger woman who does have—or will potentially have—a son. That way, the son will inherit the older woman’s land, and ensure that her lineage does not fade away.

Marriage is, for many rural Tanzanian women, the only way to find shelter. Matiko and Samir belong to the Kuria tribe, a deeply traditional community that affirms harsh patriarchal customs like female genital mutilation (FGM) and polygamy. Girls often marry as young as 13 years old , and their bride price is nine cows.

In Tanzania, women represent 51 percent of the agricultural workforce , yet only 19 percent of them are land owners. “Women are the ones who actually work on land in most cases. According to statistics, they are the ones who are really meant to be the highest producers,” Fabian adds. “The problem is not access and use—that is available. The issue comes with ownership.”

Eighty percent of Tanzanians depend on agriculture for a living. National laws stipulate that women and men have equal rights when it comes to land ownership. “But before these laws, we had our own customs,” explains Beatha Fabian, the program manager at the Land Rights Research & Resources Institute of Tanzania. “So there is a challenge in terms of implementation of these laws, because in our country, in most cases, the customs were not giving equal opportunity between men and women.”

Matiko used to have a good relationship with her husband’s family. After he died in 1998, she started feeling their pressure. They kept asking her for money to grind corn. Then they upped their demands and wanted to grab a patch of her late husband’s corn and millet fields.

But being married does not provide long-term security. Women are at risk when their husband dies. Many African tribes rule that a widow belongs to her husband’s family, and they get to decide her fate. It is common for the widow to be asked to marry another man within the family—her late husband’s brother, cousin, uncle.

In January 2007, Matiko’s brother in law hurled a stone at her during a land dispute. He broke her right leg and some ribs. “I was severely hurt and for one month I just stayed at home hoping to get better, without getting any help to go to the hospital,” Matiko explains as she rubs her right thigh. “The pain was so severe that I decided to go to a witch doctor to see if he can help me get a cure for my leg. He succeeded to fix my leg, although not properly, because I still feel the pain and I cannot run or walk for a long distance.”

She needed to escape. Matiko needed someone to take care of her. Now they have been married for two years. “Before marrying nyumba ntobhu I was living so lonely, but now I feel happy being surrounded with people at home,” Matiko says.

Samir was one of those women. Before marrying Matiko, she was married to a man as his second wife. She was forced to work without any food: “Whether you had a baby or not, you would take the child and go to the grazing field. If you don’t go, you will be beaten.”

The age-old tradition has become an unexpected lifesaver for another big problem among women of the Kuria tribe—domestic violence. The Mara region, where the Kuria tribe is the majority, has the highest spousal domestic violence rate in all of Tanzania. According to government and UN data, 78 percent of women have been sexually, physically, or psychologically abused by their husbands.

Matiko had four daughters, but they were already married. Who would take care of her now? Enter nyumba ntobhu.

“I no longer suffer,” adds Samir. The women now share the crops they harvest and use them to feed their family. Soon, they will be seven at home.

Nyumba ntobhu has provided safety and support to many Kuria women struggling in a community where women have next to no rights. But some couples are not as happy as Matiko and Samir.

Robi Ester is 35 years old and has been married to Robi Werema for almost 10 years. They live in Nyakanga, a hilly village south of Lake Victoria where corn dries quickly and harvest is often scarce. Werema does not know what year she was born. "I might be 80 or 100," she guesses. Over the period of their marriage, Ester has given birth to four children—one boy and three girls—from two different men.

In a nyumba ntobhu marriage, the younger woman is free to have sexual relationships with men. She is expected to bear children that will belong to the older woman’s family. The biological fathers of the children have no right over the kids.

Ester looks for her own male partners, and decides when to end the relationship. The father of her first two children was abusive. “He was an alcoholic and dysfunctional,” she explains. “Whenever he got back from drinking he would beat me up. I could not take it anymore. I said, ‘Let me find peace, I am tired of being beaten.’ I asked him to leave.”