The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (23 page)

T
hroughout the late 1970s and 1980s anti-FGM activism was the preserve of a disparate group of women working in small numbers in their own countries. The most well-known American opponent was Fran Hosken, a flamboyant Vienna-born polymath whose obituary described her as a “journalist, photographer, painter, author, urban planner, furniture and jewelry designer, entrepreneur, social activist, and world traveler.”
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For many years her self-published reports were a singular source of Western information about the practice, though even allies could find her overheated rhetoric counterproductive.

“The problem was, she was so emphatic and so strident that she didn’t appreciate that her attitude and her language was, I would say, insulting to the Africans,” recalled Joan Dunlop. “It was as though they didn’t understand what this problem was, and they needed to be told what to do about this problem.... I felt Fran Hosken did more damage than she did good, frankly.”

At around the same time in England Efua Dorkenoo was waging her solitary crusade. A nurse and midwife from Ghana, Dorkenoo was moved to action after seeing the effects of circumcision on the African immigrants she treated. A founder of FORWARD, one of the world’s premier anti-FGM organizations, her activism eventually led Britain in 1985 to pass a law criminalizing female circumcision, though the law was initially poorly enforced and she continually faced resistance from white liberals cowed by multiculturalism. “She did monumental work,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, an international NGO that fights human rights abuses against women.

Meanwhile, a small, brave group of African women soldiered forward in their own countries. “You had tiny, tiny groups that sometimes consisted of one person who was really risking her life out there to talk about the issue,” said Bien-Aimé. “The way they did it was really breaking the taboo, because very often it was part of a secret society, and the girls didn’t even know they were going to get cut until the knife was between their legs.”

Such activism is dangerous now, and it was even more so then, when the women trying to change things lacked international allies. They were threatened with violence, the rape of their daughters, and the burning of their buildings. No one was enlisting the media or human rights movement on their behalf. “This is pre-Internet, preglobalization of information,” said Bien-Aimé.

Since then the creation of the international women’s movement has vastly amplified the voices and influence of such dissidents. More than any other region in the world, in Africa the politics of sex and gender are bound up with the institutions of global governance, which are themselves under pressure from the women’s movement to intervene against discrimination. Humanitarian activist and Harvard fellow Alex de Waal has described how African activists, unable to access or influence their own governments, have been able to work through international NGOs to impact local policy. “Africa’s new democracies are characterized by the diffusion of power and influence throughout international institutions and the increased permeability of these institutions to activism by elite civil society,” he wrote.
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He was talking about AIDS activists, but his analysis is equally true for feminists: “Blocked from direct routes of access, African activists meet with their Western counterparts, who have access to policy makers in Washington and Brussels, who in turn squeeze African governments.”
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U
ntil the 1990s few in the West were willing to pressure African governments to do anything about female circumcision. When Patricia Schroeder, a pioneering Democratic congresswoman, first got involved with the issue, “You couldn’t get Amnesty International, you couldn’t get anybody interested,” she said. “It was interesting, because if you were doing something to people because of their religion or their race, everybody went off with a twelve-alarm fire, but if it was done to women it was cultural, and you should leave it alone.” She pushed the State Department to try and influence countries where the United States was providing foreign aid, and to include female circumcision in its human rights assessment, but she had no luck until the election of Bill Clinton.

The Clinton administration took women’s human rights far more seriously than any previous White House, but that wasn’t the only reason that female circumcision suddenly became a part of American foreign policy. Starting around the time Clinton was elected, a series of high-profile events catapulted the previously obscure, taboo issue onto both the American and international stage like never before.

First, in 1992, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker published
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, a novel about an African woman named Tashi who, spared circumcision as a child, later chose to undergo it as a gesture of anticolonial authenticity, a mistake that plunges her into agony and madness, her sexuality destroyed and her soul nearly annihilated.

When the novel came out, said Bien-Aimé, people suddenly started talking about female circumcision in their living rooms, although both journalists and human rights campaigners still shied away. (Equality Now was formed the same year to address the sexual abuses that big human rights organizations refused to touch—female circumcision as well as rape, honor killing, and sex trafficking.) In 1993, Walker collaborated with the British documentarian Pratibha Parmar on a nonfiction book and hourlong documentary about female genital mutilation, both titled
Warrior Marks
.

The next year millions of people, including many world leaders, would tune in to CNN and see a horrifying clitoridectomy performed by a barber in a Cairo slum. The UN population conference had just begun and the world’s attention was on Egypt when the CNN broadcast aired. It began by introducing Nagla, a smiling ten-year-old in a flowered skirt. “She’s excited to be the center of attention, fearful of what might happen next,” said a voiceover by Gayle Young, CNN’s Cairo bureau chief. “This morning she’ll be circumcised.” The tape cut to the barber polishing what looked like a razor or a small scissors, and Young explained that he circumcised thousands of girls each year. “He doesn’t bother to wash his hands,” she said.

Nagla leaned against her father, her legs spread wide, as her family looked on. A female relative ululated. The barber bent in and cut her quickly and, as he did, she started shaking and wailing. “Shame on you, it’s finished, so you can get up and go play,” he told her. She kept screaming, shocked by the pain: “Daddy, daddy, there is a sin upon all of you!”

Afterward the barber explained his trade to the camera. “It’s a tradition, a cleansing,” he said. “Some girls come to me with a big clitoris, which creates friction, so that that girl gets hot and excited, she’s boiling.”

It ended with Nagla in bed, looking ill and agonized. “I want you to know, Dad, that I didn’t want to be circumcised and you did it to me,” she said. “Don’t be a brat,” her grandmother retorted.

The CNN piece shook the conference. “My memory of it was that the Americans were stunned, they had no idea,” said Joan Dunlop. “I’m talking now about people on the U.S. delegation who were not close to these topics. It opened the eyes of the West.” A group of American officials met with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Congresswoman Constance A. Morella, a Maryland Republican, confronted him about female circumcision. “I said that [the law] must be enforced, ... that I’d seen the CNN film,” she told the
Washington Post
. “[Mubarak] said it’s hard to get rid of the practice, but he said he didn’t think it was happening anymore in Egypt.”
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Mubarak was either dishonest or woefully misinformed: Female circumcision was and remains almost universal in his country, practiced by Muslims and Coptic Christians alike. Regardless, the government was deeply embarrassed. Police detained the freelance producer who had arranged the filming “under a law making it a crime to disseminate information damaging Egypt’s image,” the Associated Press reported, and arrested the girl’s father, the barber who performed the circumcision, a plumber who assisted him, and a florist who introduced the CNN producer to the family.
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The uproar set off a wave of defensive nationalism in Egypt. A radio journalist called the broadcast “a crime against Egypt at a time when the whole world was looking toward Cairo,” and a publicity-loving Egyptian lawyer filed a lawsuit against the network, claiming it had defamed the nation by showing its citizens as “backward, barbaric people.”
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A prominent Islamic cleric, Sheikh Gad el-Haqq, issued a fatwa calling on all families to circumcise their girls.
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“Swept up in the international uproar but still immersed in a national culture that generally supported [female genital cutting], the Egyptian government floundered,” wrote political scientist Elizabeth Heger Boyle.
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Unable to pass a ban through Parliament, Mubarak tried to do it administratively, forbidding female circumcision in public hospitals. But Sheikh Gad el-Haqq’s outrage over the restriction led to an absurd compromise in which circumcision would only be performed in hospitals one day a week, a limitation that in the end was mostly ignored.
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T
wo months after the Cairo conference a seventeen-year-old girl from Togo arrived at Newark airport, told a customs officer that her passport was fake, and asked for asylum, saying that if she was sent back to Togo she’d be forced to undergo genital mutilation. Fauziya Kassindja was the fifth daughter of a prosperous, liberal-minded Muslim man who opposed his tribe’s practice of excision. When he died, under tribal law, control of both his property and his children passed to his siblings instead of to his wife. Her father’s sister moved into her house, evicting her mother, and her father’s brother became her legal guardian. The two of them arranged her marriage to a man who was almost three decades older and who had three wives already, and her fiancé insisted that she be excised.

“I was terrified because I had known girls who had died from having it done,” Kassindja wrote later. “My mother’s own sister had died from it, and I’d heard my parents speak of the event with horror.”
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So, with the help of her mother and oldest sister, Kassindja ran away, first to Germany, and then, with the help of a Nigerian she met there, to the United States. “I’d seen a lot of news reports at school about how America was always helping the needy, feeding hungry children, sending aid to refugees,” she wrote. “My teachers at school had said it was a great country. They said people believed in justice in America. If I went there and I told them what had happened to me, surely they’d sympathize.”
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Instead, she was imprisoned—for a time in maximum security—for over a year. She was shackled, held in isolation, subjected to arbitrary strip searches, and even teargassed. Not until the
New York Times
wrote about her, leading to a barrage of publicity, did embarrassed officials release her, pending resolution of her case. It came soon after. On June 13, 1996, in a precedent-setting ruling, the Board of Immigration Appeals granted her asylum. It was the first time that female genital mutilation was recognized as a form of persecution.

As the atmosphere around the issue shifted, Democrats were able to move forward with anti-female circumcision legislation. Schroeder succeeded in getting a ban on female circumcision passed in the United States, over the objections, oddly enough, of both Orthodox Jews and left-wing feminists. “Some of the Orthodox Jewish community really got all over us and didn’t want us pursuing the issue, because they were afraid it would go into male circumcision,” she recalled. “I had a lot of rabbis and others hollering, ‘Please just be quiet about this.’ Then we had some very progressive women’s groups saying, You should stay out of this, this is their culture, we’re being cultural imperialists. For which my response was ‘This is plain child abuse. You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”

Working with Democratic senator Harry Reid, Schroeder also spearheaded a law mandating that countries work to eliminate the practice or face cuts in foreign aid.
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At around the same time USAID started funding groups like the Population Council to work on eradication efforts abroad.

Some African leaders were enraged by the interference. In a 1999 speech marking the end of Ramadan, Gambian president Yahya Jammeh accused the West of spending millions to undermine African culture and Islamic values. “FGM is part of our culture, and we should not allow anyone to dictate to us how we should conduct ourselves,” he said. Then he issued a veiled threat to anti-FGM campaigners, saying, “There is no guarantee that after delivering their speeches they will return to their homes.”
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Nevertheless, most African countries did move against female circumcision, either through laws or bureaucratic directives.
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The pressure came from both inside and outside, as African feminists leveraged international institutions to force their own countries to act.

I
n July 2003 the heads of government of the African Union countries approved one of the world’s most progressive treaties on women’s rights, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, often referred to as the Maputo Protocol, after the city in Mozambique where it was negotiated. Though little noticed in the United States (or among the vast majority of African women), the Maputo Protocol was a major achievement for African feminists, who were the driving force behind it. It essentially amended the African Charter, a human rights treaty that because of its stress on protecting traditional cultures had sometimes been interpreted to condone customary and religious laws that discriminate against women. According to the African Charter, “The promotion and protection of morals and traditional values recognized by the community shall be the duty of the State,” which arguably could be read as a defense of practices like female circumcision.
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