A Tradition No Longer: Rethinking Female Circumcision in Africa

Article by Louisa Kasdon
World & I
November-December 2005

A Samburu circumcision celebration in Laikipia plateau in northern Kenya. Source: Louisa Kasdon

Community-wide stands against the dangerous practice of female genital mutilation are growing across much of Africa, thanks to the innovative grassroots efforts of an NGO in Senegal.

I am a die-hard feminist. My two twenty-plus daughters are die-hard feminists. But we are also the kind of feminists who worry about whether certain pants make us look too broad from behind, who search for the ideal hair conditioner, and who openly enjoy flirting. Those qualifiers aside, my view of female circumcision as practiced in many African countries is summed up by our Western acronym: FGM, female genital mutilation. Last year, I had a chance to understand that the custom is far more complex culturally and socially than I had imagined.

The three of us were in Kenya on vacation, and by chance, we were invited to a feast celebrating the clitoral circumcision of two preteen girls. Our Samburu guides had invited us to come as their guests to a "big celebration." When we arrived, the entire village— and everyone from neighboring villages— was dressed up and dancing, singing, and jumping, all wearing their traditional red cloaks and elaborate beaded jewelry. Men were dancing with men, each one competing to see who could jump higher. Women joined the dance, whispering to each other about us, while little kids chased and threw things at each other. It was just like home.

Through the elaborate celebration, I came to see that the circumcision rite for a village girl is deeply tied to her place in her tribe, that to forgo the cutting would deprive her of the one moment when the entire village celebrates her existence. For a young Samburu girl, refusing to be circumcised would be like giving up her birthday, her first communion, her bat mitzvah, and her graduation party. That's a lot to ask from a twelve-year-old girl in a remote African village.

The girls being honored don't even get to attend the party in their behalf. Nor are they up to dancing after the procedure. In this village, the cutting is witnessed only by female family members and is performed by one designated specialist who covers a cluster of villages.

We were taken to meet one of the young girls in her house—a dark hut made out of cow dung smoothed to the texture of stucco. The girl was lying quietly on her bed. Her father wanted us to meet her; her mother, a woman of indeterminable age with an infant bound to her chest, was less welcoming. We felt awkward meeting this sweet child, only hours after her circumcision. But she smiled and said nothing. Her father assured us that she would be fine in two weeks and ready to be married. Our male Samburu friends concurred. Women recover quickly from circumcision, they said; for a man, it takes months for the pain to go away. As feminists, we found this male perspective both amusing and discouraging.

But here's the interesting part. I bought it. I could see that in a social structure where boys are not allowed to have sex until they are circumcised in their late teens (a ritual that marks the transition from child to young warrior),female circumcision was, if not justified, at least a reasonably equitable burden. When I asked the male Samburu what would happen if a girl refused to be circumcised, they were shocked and firm: "No one would marry her. No one is allowed to have sex with an uncircumcised girl. No matter how old she might be, to us she's still a child."

Tostan participants are often mothers. As with traditional beliefs, information on health and human rights can be passed from one generation to the next. Source: Louisa Kasdon

In a culture where men routinely have two wives and are not allowed to marry until they have proved themselves as hunters, female circumcision functions as a delineator of sexual maturity—a physical definition that all respect. In the communities that practice it, FGM is seen as no more violent than our custom of subjecting our children to dental drilling or braces to make sure they will have beautiful smiles as adults. African mothers and fathers aren't so different. As responsible parents, they practice FGM for the good of the girls, to enhance their marriage prospects.

Though I came to understand how FGM/C (the abbreviation used by the World Health Organization [WHO] and UNICEF) fits in to the fabric of village society, it's impossible to accept the lifelong pain and physical damage it inflicts on so many African women and girls. Few villages track the number of young girls and infants who suffer serious infections directly after the procedure as a result of the unsterilized knives, blades, and shards of glass that are used to cut away all or part of their external genitalia.

Neither are there reliable records on the incidence of hemorrhage or death in the days and weeks following the rite, nor on the incidence of problems during childbirth, or with sexual dysfunction, bladder and bowel control, and premature death. The statistics that are available are grim. UNICEF estimates that between 100 and 140 million girls and women now alive in at least twenty-eight African countries, and two countries in the Middle East, have undergone FGM/C. WHO estimates that an additional 2 million girls are at risk each year.

No one seems to know exactly how or why the practice of FGM/C began. Some say that it coursed down through Africa from Egypt, mimicking the royal controls used to assure the chastity and fidelity of the pharaoh's women. In fact, today the most extreme forms of FGM/C are referred to as "pharaonic" procedures. Others postulate that FGM/C is a holdover from traditional animist beliefs, or find justification in the verses of the Qur'an. But at its core, the practice of cutting women is simply a social custom, a tradition handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, with dire social consequences for the marriageability of any female who forgoes it. Through the efforts of a small, minimally funded NGO founded by a six-foot-tall white woman from Illinois, a reassessment of this painful and physically hazardous African custom is under way.

A ‘breakthrough' in Senegal

Molly Melching first came to Senegal as a college student seeking an international experience. In the process she found her home and her life's mission. After a stint in the Peace Corps and graduate school, Melching returned to Senegal in the early 1980s and founded a community empowerment program, or CEP, called Tostan, the word for "breakthrough" in Wolof, the national language of Senegal. Tostan is a grassroots program promoting wide-ranging social change at the village level by putting the community at the center of its own development agenda.

Melching's original mission was to boost literacy levels, improve hygiene, and provide education about basic human rights. But one of Tostan's most remarkable achievements has been to encourage more than 1,700 villages, constituting 32 percent of Senegal's total population, to make public declarations abandoning FGM/C and child marriage. The Tostan approach has been so successful that WHO and UNICEF have both named it as a model program for other nations that seek to end the practice of FGM/C, and have encouraged the organization to expand broadly across Africa.

Melching explains that public abandonment of FGM/C was not on her agenda when she began to bring her education program to the villages. "It was a taboo, and not for me to discuss," she remembers. "Whether I approved of the practice or not, it was their tradition and their custom, and I had to show respect." Melching had spent several years formulating a village-based educational program that would use traditional Senegalese methods of communication—meetings, dance, poetry, and song—to assist villagers in setting an agenda for positive social change.

"In 1997, I was presenting a module on children's health to the mothers in a village outside of Thiès, and the women stopped me," Melching says, remembering her early experiences in Senegal. "Yes, they wanted to know how to take better care of their children, but they also wanted to know something about their own bodies. They had all these problems—pain, bleeding, incontinence, and great difficulty delivering their first child. It had never occurred to them that there was a link between their health issues as women and a procedure routinely done when they were girls. They were shocked when I explained that the practice of FGM/C was directly related to many of their gynecological difficulties."

Tostan participants use visual aids in a presentation focusing on health, marriage, gender equality, and religious freedom. "Before the Tostan program, I didn't know that women had human rights," said one member. "I didn't know that I had rights." Source: Louisa Kasdon

A custom, not a religious code

Melching says that when the women began to understand that FGM/C was a social custom

specific to their culture, they wanted to know why and how the custom had developed. The women, with Melching and the local facilitator in tow, began to make some inquiries. They spoke with the village elders—all men—who referred them to the local imam. The imam was puzzled. He had to do some research, too. He had assumed that Islamic religious law mandated FGM/C, but he could find no verse in the Qur'an specifically requiring the practice. It was custom, he agreed, and not religious code, but a very difficult custom to change.

The discussion about FGM/C deepened in Tostan's first set of villages. Women realized that an individual decision not to circumcise their daughters put their own children at a risk. No one would marry an uncut girl, and her future life in the village would be as an outcast. But if they all decided together to abandon FGM/C, then no one's child would face discrimination.

In Senegal, villagers traditionally intermarry with people from nearby villages rather than those from their village of origin. So the women concluded that if their village abandoned FGM/C, they would also have to convince their neighbors to travel the same path. And so it went. As one village made a public declaration against FGM/C, the people brought the message to their kin in the neighboring village, with public declarations facilitated by Tostan's in-village staff.

There was soul-searching too. Once the mothers understood the physical complications of FGM/C, they were full of regret for having allowed their precious children to be cut. Melching had to reassure mothers that she knew they had circumcised their daughters "not because they were bad mothers, but because they were good mothers who loved their daughters and wanted to secure the best possible future for their girls." She also had to answer a question posed by Senegal's senior imam, who questioned whether women in the United States would give up FGM/C, too. Embedded in his own culture, the imam had assumed that FGM/C was a worldwide practice and was astonished to learn that it was a phenomenon primarily associated with African Muslims.

Representatives from 118 villages gather for a celebration in Oulampane to pledge an end to FGM/C and announce their commitment to promoting peace and human rights. Since 1997, more than 1,500 villages in Senegal have joined in public declarations to abandon female genital cutting. Source: Lisa Kasdon

Toward social transformation

In 1996, Professor Gerry Mackie at Oxford University began to publish a series of articles on social convention theory that compared the process of abandoning FGM/C to the social transformation process that had ended the practice of foot binding in China. The practice had been entrenched for generations, although derided by missionaries and other foreign critics. But foot binding, like FGM/C, was a social custom linked to a girl's prospects of making a good marriage, and thus boosting the social standing of her parents. As China became open to the outside world, the Chinese discovered that they were alone in the practice. Quickly, traveling at the speed of news bulletins on hemlines, foot binding became "unfashionable." Behavioral shift within the group, as predicted by game theory, is predicated not only on what the rational actor wants to do, but on how he or she thinks others will behave. For a time, even though crippling little girls' feet became less fashionable, only the most forward-thinking families would risk their "natural" big footed daughter's rejection on the marriage market.

As Mackie chronicled, effecting a social custom change of magnitude requires a critical mass of individuals—a tipping point. Change doesn't happen all at once. Some are the vanguard, others are the rear guard, cautious traditionalists who wait to see if the "new" is simply a flash in the pan, a shortterm whim of fashion. Lasting change in social convention comes when traditionalists, or holdouts, see that sticking with the old means being left behind. It is the moment where a family knows that times and mores have irretrievably changed, and that the potential bridegrooms begin to bypass girls with the delicate doll-sized feet. In his research, Mackie traced the development of village societies in China, where either a majority of villagers or a core group of the most influential citizens would form a pledge association to forswear the practice. It is important to note that the Chinese called their new associations "Natural Foot Clubs," accentuating the positive rather than excoriating the practice.

Neither Mackie nor Melching had ever met, corresponded, or read the other's work. He was a theorist and she was in the field. But Mackie had heard about FGM/C and had been thinking that a similar kind of pledge association could bring FGM/C in Africa to an end.

In December 2004, representatives of more than 100,000 villagers in southeast Senegal, with guests from Guinea and Mali, met in Sinthiou Malème to publicly declare their abandonment of female genital cutting and forced marriage. "FGM was a dangerous object lying on the ground," said one Guinean religious leader quoted in a Tostan report. "We wanted to pick it up and deal with it but did not know how. The Sinthiou Malème declaration has shown us how to pick it up properly and remove it from our community, without hurting anyone." Source: Lisa Kasdon

Reaching a critical mass

In 1998, Mackie learned that some villages in Senegal had invented, or discovered, the pledge technique, and that the pledge had succeeded in the village of Malicounda, with nearby villages making their own pledge after short periods of deliberation. He also learned that the pledge idea was spreading, just as his theory had predicted. When Mackie came to Senegal to meet Melching, he was dazzled by Tostan's results. They had produced exactly the kind of social change he had predicted based on his research on foot binding in China—and with the same kind of speed. Mackie's predictions proved to be dead-on.

The first public declarations abandoning FGM/C took place in 1997 in Malicounda Bambara and Nguerine Bambara in the Thiès region, after Tostan presented its basic education program and women's health module. In 1998, twenty-nine villages in the regions of Thiès and Kolda followed suit, publicly abandoned FGM/C. In 1998, on her second visit to Tostan, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, this time with President Bill Clinton, met with leaders of the emerging movement.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that it would take hundreds of years to end the practice of FGM/C in Africa. But the prevalence of FGM/C in Senegal, over 90 percent in practicing groups in 1997, was reduced by 30 percent in 2005. Rather than taking hundreds of years, say officials within the international NGO community, an end to FGM/C may come in less than a ten-year horizon.

Tostan's village-centered model for social change, energized by the process of public declarations for abandonment of FGM/C, is enabling a social transformation to occur at warp speed. In 2000, Tostan's program was exported outside of Senegal to Mali and Sudan. Twenty-six villages in the Kolda and Tambacounda regions took the pledge to abandon FGM/C. In 2001, Tostan worked with 23 communities in Burkina Faso. Daily requests come in to Tostan's offices in Senegal from counties and communities all over Africa requesting assistance in ending FGM/C. In 2003, Tostan began its first longterm project outside of Senegal: a three-year initiative in Guinea through the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A young woman making a declaration in Sinthiou Malème, Senegal. Source: Lisa Kasdon

The first public declarations abandoning FGM/C outside of Senegal were held in Burkina Faso. The next set is scheduled for January 2006 in Guinea. The international development community has duly recognized Tostan's results. A 2003 Population Council study concluded, "The program has led to important changes, not only in FGM/C, but also in hygiene, human rights, and health. Expansion of the program to other villages of Senegal and within the African region should be encouraged." In 2003, WHO selected Tostan's program as a best practice for social transformation. Tostan has twice been chosen as a finalist for the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, and executive director Molly Melching recently won the Anna Lindh award for Tostan's work in the field of human rights.

In 2006, UNICEF, as part of its goal to protect children, will declare an initiative to end FGM/C on the scale of its campaign to wipe out smallpox. UNICEF has chosen Tostan as the model program and has asked the tiny NGO to develop a plan to roll out its grassroots education model from one end of Africa to the other.

"My passion is to protect little girls," says Maria Gabriella DeVita, the director of the Gender and Harmful Practices Section at UNICEF. "We believe that Tostan's work is exemplary and is a model for many of the areas of Africa where FGM/C is practiced."