RIGHTS-AFRICA: Women Launch Campaign against Genital Mutilation

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ricardo Grassi

ROME, Mar 10 2001 (IPS) - Female genital mutilation is a barbarous custom, according to the beliefs of most Westerners, but many African Muslims charge that the women who have been working for the last 15 years to eradicate the practice from 28 countries of the continent have betrayed their culture.

“I can’t blame my mother or my grandmother for having mutilated me. They thought they were doing it for my own good,” said Fatou Waggeh, of Gambia, this week at an international conference against female genital mutilation, held in the Italian capital.

This “circumcision,” practiced in some Islamic cultures consists of cutting out, usually without anaesthesia, the clitoris, labia and vulva of the woman, leaving an orifice for the menstrual flow and urine to pass through, and, supposedly, “to augment male pleasure.”

This type of genital mutilation is known as infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision, and is typical of Muslim populations in the Horn of Africa.

The Association of Italian Women for Development (AIDOS) organised the conference in Rome, which was presided by European Parliament Deputy Emma Bonino, and served to launch a campaign for the United Nations General Assembly to take up the matter of female genital mutilation during its 2002 sessions.

Of Muslim women in Gambia, 70 percent have been mutilated. The World Health Organisation (WHO) calculates that 100 to 130 million women throughout Africa have been subjected to the practice, and two million girls and adolescents are mutilated each year.

“There have been billions of women if one takes into account that it is an extremely old practice, mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century before Christ,” pointed out Nerina Boschiero, professor of International Law at the University of Verona, in Italy.

“I was a victim at 15,” said Waggeh. “That same day I began to help others and I forgot about my own feelings.” Now she is the director of the Banjul Foundation for Women’s Health Research.

A different story was heard from Kady Koita, of Senegal, the youngest of the African activists taking part in this week’s conference.

“They circumcised me at age seven, along with other girls. We stood in line and each one went in. They hadn’t told me it would happen that day, but I knew it would happen, and it didn’t turn out to be traumatic,” Koita told IPS.

“Later, when at age 20 I began to reflect, I felt an immense hate. They had cut off part of my body, and I had already done the same to two of my three daughters. I had to get rid of the hate. Hate poisons you and prevents you from doing something positive, for yourself and for others. And no one and nothing can ever give me back my mutilated sex,” she stated.

Koita, who lives in France, is head of the European Network to Prevent Female Genital Mutilation.

“Society does not exist in a vacuum; it is based on a culture that defines ways of life and gives meaning to identity. An African woman is expected not to argue, not even with her husband,” Waggeh explained.

“A family will dedicate its income from an entire year to the circumcision ceremony, which transforms a girl into a woman. Everyone believes this – the elders prepare you for that day.

“Others think about religious reasons, but the Koran doesn’t say anything about it. An uncircumcised woman is marginalized and will never marry. So how can she refuse?” she said, underscoring the challenges each African Muslim woman faces.

The midwives who perform the operation are powerful and greatly feared. “We weren’t allowed to see their faces and we were told that they were crocodiles,” Waggeh now laughs.

Men, though they are unaware of it, are behind the origins of the practice, which gives them power. They initially refuse to take about the question, and the people are fearful of losing their culture, she pointed out.

“Culture is dynamic and one has to know how to find the space. We can’t move a mountain, but we must find the road to get around it, to find a way to tell the elders that they are wrong,” Waggeh said.

“We must not put up with violence in marriage or the discrimination that men make us suffer, but to do so we have to find a way to make ourselves understood,” commented Koita, who uses videos of the mutilation operations as a weapon in her battle against the practice.

When men see the video, “they cover their faces, they are horrified and can’t believe it. They inevitably think about their daughters. Some are ashamed. They have no idea about this because only women participate in the ceremony,” explained the activist.

“Men don’t even know what the female sex is like, they have never seen it, either whole or mutilated, because Muslim couples never remove their clothes,” said Koita.

“Most women don’t know themselves either,” pointed out Waggeh. “They don’t look at themselves, they don’t know how they are made, why they menstruate, what the clitoris does, how the sexes interact. So we organised health classes, and it is exciting to see how women discover what is happening with their bodies.”

As for women the women who perform the female genital mutilations, the activists recognise they must provide them with alternatives for training and power within the community.

“We toured the whole continent and interviewed 200 circumcisers. When they agreed, we gave them the role of health promoters. They put aside their knives and razor blades and we teach them a trade that responds to their economic needs, or we obtain a small fund in order to initiate some sort of activity. That is how we were able to create the Association of Former Circumcisers,” Waggeh reported.

They also discussed the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, with religious and political leaders of the towns and villages. In many cases they were able to win over these “elders” to their cause, and now they are involved in efforts to explain to the public the perversity of the practice.

“There is a great deal of ignorance. That is what our action is about, that is our battle,” Waggeh said.

But they are waging it carefully, trying to avoid leaving a hole in a community’s culture because the “circumcision” has largely served as a rite of initiation.

“We maintain the ceremony, the celebration, but without mutilations, and we are seeing, happily, that this is what is occurring, more and more,” she said.

At the conference, there was a moment when all ears turned to Leila Sheik, executive director of the Association of Women Journalists in Tanzania, who said: “I have not been mutilated. I am from a town near Zanzibar where they have even written poems dedicated to the beauty of the clitoris.”