RIGHTS-KENYA: Ending the Nightmare Passage to Womanhood

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Judith Achieng'

MERU, Kenya, Jan 4 1998 (IPS) - The nightmare of female circumcision has haunted hundreds of teenage girls during the August-to- December school vacation, but many at last were able to choose to an alternative rite of passage to womanhood.

Some 65 girls became women last month without having to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in a simple ceremony organised by a local women’s group in Tharaka, a remote village some 200 kilometres from here.

“I am happy I didn’t have to go through the nightmare,” says 19-year-old Ruth Mukiri, whose batch of graduants was the fourth to have done the ‘alternative rites of passage’ in Tharaka since August 1996. Thus far, a total of some 400 girls have graduated into womanhood in this way.

Among the Meru, an ethnic group living on the slopes of Mount Kenya, about 300 kms north of Nairobi, circumcision – which involves cutting off part of the female genitalia – for centuries has been a deep-rooted and compulsory rite for most local girls.

During such ceremonies, the girl undergoes the knife in front of her mother’s hut after which she is kept in seclusion until the wound heals, then all relatives are called to celebrate, according to Aniceta Keriga, area representative of ‘Maendeleo Ya Wanawake’ an umbrella of Kenyan women’s groups.

The umbrella has been campaigning against FGM which, doctors say, can result in complications during childbirth, and infections such as tetanus and sexually transmitted diseases including the dreaded HIV/AIDS.

Some girls take long to heal while others die after bleeding excessively during the circumcision, according to a nurse in a local dispensary here. “We have been treating one particular case for the last three years,” she says.

According to medical records, at least 50 percent of women in Kenya have been circumcised.

The idea of an alternative rite of passage for girls first came from a group of 20 Tharaka women who had been enlightened on the ills of the practice in 1995. “They came to us for help because they did not want their daughters to be circumcised,” says Keriga.

Since then, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as the Nairobi-based Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health (Path), have been training women’s groups to educate the community on FGM.

“The most important thing to me is that the initiative against FGM has come from members of the community,” says Sam Radeny who works for Path. “They have seen it as a problem and are attempting to solve it.”

The alternative rite of passage is similar to the traditional one except that it does not involve FGM, according to Radeny. “During our seclusion perion of five days, we teach the girls all they would be taught traditionally after which we call the community to celebrate,” he says.

Jane Meme of Save the Children – Canada, an international organisation funding the anti-FGM drive here, explains that feasting and dancing have to be included as part of the ceremony to show other members of the Meru community that the only wrong thing about their ceremonies is FGM.

“Most of them do not object as long as there is plenty of food during the ceremony,” she says.

Since the alternative was introduced in Tharaka, the FGM rate there has gone down to 70 percent, according to various sources. Before then at least 95 percent of girls in the area were circumcised.

Keriga and her group say the FGM rate would have been much lower were it not for the fact that their efforts have met with resistance from people who view the alternative rites as a threat to their culture. “They go from door to door with disparaging rumours about us,” she explains. “Some of them say we inject the girls with contraceptives while some have gone as far as calling us devil worshippers.”

Such rumours are meant to prevent girls like 12-year-old Jacinta Kawai from attending the alternative rite of passage. “Many people tried to persuade my father to refuse to let me go,” she says.

Naturally, people who earn their living from FGM are dead set against Keriga’s group.

“They should not be allowed to go on like this,” says 65-year- old Mariama Kirote who claims that before the “evil” group descended on her village, she could make as much as 30,000 shillings (500 U.S. dollars) in one circumcision season.

The cost of circumcising one girl in Tharaka, where the average monthly income of households is less than 10 U.S. dollars is about 17 US dollars in addition to two goats, other food and traditional beer for the circumcisers.

Maendeleo Ya Wanawake and Path say people like Kirote still oppose them despite assurances that they would be absorbed into the project. “They cannot accept to join the group because they earn a lot more than we have offered them,” says Radeny.

Kenya, like many other African countries, has no law explicitly prohibiting FGM although it is a signatory to the United Nations Human Rights Convention which brands it a violation of the rights of girls.

In 1990, Kenya’s government announced that it had officially banned FGM, but the country’s male-dominated parliament passed no law prohibiting it. In fact in May 1997, a motion seeking to outlaw FGM was defeated in the house.