The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (24 page)

In contrast, the Maputo Protocol puts the individual rights of women first. It obliges states to “ensure that the right to health of women, including sexual and reproductive health, is respected and promoted,” and it requires the prohibition, “through legislative measures backed by sanctions, of all forms of female genital mutilation.” Child marriage and forced marriage must also be outlawed. And the protocol called for governments to legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the life and health of the mother, making it the first international treaty that affirms abortion rights.

The protocol went into effect in 2005, after Togo became the fifteenth country to ratify it. “On FGM, it’s as progressive as one can get. It condemns the practice. It is not ambiguous,” said Charles Ngwena, a constitutional law professor at the University of the Free State in South Africa. “The expectation is that states are going to do everything that they should do in order to eradicate the practice.” Officially, at least, female circumcision is now recognized as a human rights violation at the highest level of African law, even as it remains a cherished rite among many African people.

Gambia, which had initially registered reservations to the protocol, ratified it fully in April 2006. “Now that we know the serious consequences of our practice, it would amount not only to sheer folly and indifference to refuse to change, it may also amount to a high degree of callousness to allow adults to continue to inflict on helpless innocent babies and children such dreadful pains instead of the love, affection, and protection they ask for,” Gambia’s secretary of state argued at the National Assembly. “The cultural beliefs of the past may not be good anymore, because we now know that they are not too good for our health and well-being.”
³⁸

F
uambai Ahmadu watched the emergence of the elite anti-FGM consensus with anger and incredulity. “Alice Walker is one of my favorite writers, so I was very excited to read
Possessing the Secret of Joy,
” she recalled. She expected to identify with it, since there are, at least on the surface, powerful parallels between the novel’s story and her own. After all, Tashi, Walker’s narrator, seemed to be seeking what Ahmadu says she found by undergoing excision. “The operation she’d had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible,” Walker wrote. “Completely woman. Completely African.”
³⁹

Instead, Ahmadu was shocked by the dissonance between Walker’s brutal tale and memories of her own circumcision. “I remember I was on a flight from Washington to London, and I read it and I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. Indeed, her reaction to the book did much to inspire her current career. “This is what sparked my interest in learning more about the meanings of [circumcision], because I had read
Possessing the Secret of Joy
and
Warrior Marks,
and I saw that [they] conflicted in every way possible with what I had experienced and what I had seen,” said Ahmadu.

Most glaringly, Ahmadu felt that Walker and other anticircumcision activists distorted the impact of circumcision on women’s sexuality. One of her key arguments is that circumcised women can still enjoy sex—her own excision, she said, hasn’t affected her ability to orgasm at all. Some excised women, she suggested, have internalized the West’s message about female genital cutting, and thus blame their lack of a clitoris for frustrations and ailments that may have other causes. Indeed, she posited that anti-FGM campaigns, rather than circumcision itself, was causing some African women to feel that they’d been damaged irrevocably.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ahmadu wrote in a 2007 essay, her Sierra Leonean aunts, cousins, and friends “seemed as obsessed with dating, boyfriends and sex as many ‘normal,’ ‘liberated’ American women of the same age group.” She recalled going to nightclubs with her cousins and hearing tales of their sexual adventures. Excision never came up in these conversations, “most likely because circumcision was not seen as relevant to enjoyment (or lack of enjoyment) of sex.” She continued, “Should I now doubt the experiences of these circumcised Sierra Leoneans, now that I ‘know’ all about the ‘harmfulness’ of excision and the supposed diminishment of women’s sexual enjoyment?”
⁴⁰

Fortunately, wrote Ahmadu, “my Sierra Leonean agemates and I came of age at the tail end of an epoch of general ignorance about these African traditional practices in the West—a pre-
Warrior Marks
era that was about to witness the worldwide ‘outing’ of ‘FGM’ in Africa.” Since then, she wrote, “[t]here has been no shortage of anti-FGM campaign materials, magazine articles, news specials, talk shows, hospital centers, social welfare offices and so on seeking to edify circumcised African women and girls regarding the harsh but necessary ‘truth’ that we are sexually ‘mutilated.’ Once celebrated and feared in their traditional African communities as the custodians of ‘matriarchal’ power, female circumcisers have been shamed, tried, imprisoned, and forced to accept and apologize for their supposed collusion in ‘patriarchal’ crimes against their own gender.”
⁴¹

A
hmadu’s family comes from the Kono ethnic group, which lives in northeastern Sierra Leone. For the Kono, circumcision is at the center of girls’ initiation into Bondo, a powerful female secret society (initiation into the male counterpart, Poro, also involves circumcision). “Bondo promulgates feminine interests: peace (through marriage alliances), sexual conduct, fertility and reproduction,” Ahmadu wrote in a fascinating essay, “Rites and Wrongs: An Insider/Outsider Reflects on Power and Excision,” which is part anthropological scholarship, part memoir.
⁴²
Politically, wrote Ahmadu, “the separate male and female leaders of Bondo and Poro, called
soko
and
pamansu,
respectively, are all powerful.”
⁴³
Their power transcends the village level to shape national politics. “There is nobody who can dream of sitting in office in Freetown that does not have the approval of the Bondo hierarchy,” she told me.

Many Kono women see anti-FGM campaigns as a threat to their power. During the 1996 election campaign, the
New York Times
reported, Bondo women pledged to support the president in return for his promise to check anti-FGM lobbying, and his wife sponsored mass circumcisions to garner votes.
⁴⁴
After he won, the person he nominated for minister of gender and children’s affairs was held up in parliament because she was thought to be uncircumcised and thus unfamiliar “with our adored customs,” in the words of one MP. Educated women who haven’t been cut will sometimes submit to the practice if they want to enter politics, and outside attempts to curb it are met with passionate protests.
⁴⁵
In March 2008, Agence France-Presse reported, hundreds of Bondo women staged a procircumcision demonstration in the town of Kailahun. Calling the rally a “show of strength,” one Bondo leader said, “Any organisation that has accepted funds from overseas donors to wage war against FGM is fighting a losing battle. Let donors keep their money; we will keep our culture.”
⁴⁶

A
s a teenager, Ahmadu didn’t know precisely what Bondo rites involved—initiates aren’t supposed to tell the uninitiated. When she finally asked her cousins outright, they broke the code of silence to explain, though they didn’t know enough about their own anatomy to be very accurate. One told her, “Oh yeah, they cut you, but I think mine grew back.” So Ahmadu had a vague sense that Bondo involved some kind of genital cut, but mostly she just associated it with female strength.

There had never really been any question that she’d be initiated. “Among the Kono, Bondo is part of life, it’s part of the culture,” she said. “There’s an expectation that all girls are going to go through Bondo. So in a sense it’s your right. It is your privilege. And if you don’t, then you are being denied your right. For me, it was something I was very excited to belong to. It’s always talked about. I cannot go a day among my relatives and not hear somebody make a reference to Bondo. So for me it was a question of when, not if.”

Ahmadu’s initiation was postponed because her family wanted her to go through it with an aunt around her own age, but her aunt lacked a green card and thus couldn’t leave the United States. By the time her aunt’s papers were in order, she’d decided she didn’t want to be circumcised, so her aunt stayed home while the family flew Ahmadu, then a twenty-two-year-old senior at George Washington University, and her eight-year-old sister to Sierra Leone to join Bondo during the Christmas break.

It was a discombobulating, sometimes thrilling and physically agonizing experience. There were days of feasting, dancing, and celebration as they visited their family’s ancestral villages. The initiation itself took place in Koidu, the capital of Kono, where her mother’s sisters lived. Ahmadu knew what was going to happen, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her little sister, because she didn’t want to frighten her. She wasn’t a virgin, and she started to worry that she’d never enjoy sex again, but her cousins assured her that she would. “I reasoned that whatever it was I was going to endure, it would be worth the experience, the excitement of watching and being involved in the drama around me,” she wrote.
⁴⁷

The initiates were served a bitter, tasteless ceremonial meal said to contain important medicines. They were bathed in a river and smeared in pale mud, then sprinkled with perfumed talcum powder. Their hair was braided ceremonially. In a video taken by one of Ahmadu’s uncles, the girls appear ghostly but smiling. “Drums were beaten as money was tossed from the crowd to the braiders,” she wrote. “Mock battles took place between what I later understood were members representing my father’s lineage,
fa den moe,
and those standing in for my mother’s line, or
bain den moe
.” A woman painted in white clay kept yanking Ahmadu and her sister off the ground, metaphorically kidnapping them, only to release them when representatives of her father’s family offered her “a substantial amount of money.”
⁴⁸

Later that evening a nurse who was a close friend of her mother’s broke protocol by explaining to Ahmadu how the circumcision was going to unfold. She said she was going to give her an anesthetic injection—itself somewhat controversial, because stoically bearing the pain is part of the point—as well as oral painkillers and antibiotics. She explained that there were nearby clinics in case of emergencies. “I was suddenly struck by the full extent of what I had allowed myself to get into,” wrote Ahmadu.
⁴⁹

They were secluded in a house and given more medicinal leaves. None of them were allowed to sleep. Celebrations went on all night outside. The next day they were taken to a sacred grove—the Bondo bush. “I was hoisted up by four or five of these stocky women,” she wrote. “I looked down: a large leaf had been laid on the ground directly underneath my buttocks.... Terror finally overcame me as the women’s faces, now dozens, now hundreds, moved in closer all around my near naked body suspended in mid-air. They grabbed my legs and arms apart. The women’s screams, the sound of drums, and then a sharp blade cut deep into my flesh on one side and then on the other. As I cried out in unimaginable agony, I felt warm blood ooze down between my thighs. Perhaps for the first time since I was an infant, I vomited.”
⁵⁰

Afterward, Ahmadu begged her mother to take her home, and her mother felt guilty and apologized. But in time she came to place a profound value on her initiation into Bondo—especially once she realized that it wasn’t going to impede her sex life. “For the majority of Sierra Leonean women, Bondo is an institution of women’s empowerment,” she said. “It’s about women’s traditional power and their links with ancestors. Because it’s mainly women in the rural areas that are part of Bondo, I think it’s an important way that women who are educated, who are working in urban areas, or out of the country, can connect with women at the grassroots.” Ahmadu has a son; were she to have a daughter, she said, she hopes her girl would choose to join Bondo as well.

To talk to Ahmadu is to begin to understand why a practice that causes so much pain nevertheless remains so entrenched and so zealously defended by its ostensible victims. Female circumcision has no more eloquent advocate. She reminds us that what public health officials call “harmful traditional practices” are in fact the very texture of life for many people, the rituals and norms that imbue existence with order and purpose.

A
ll the same, for Ahmadu circumcision was a choice, one she made as an adult. For the overwhelming majority of girls who undergo it that is not the case. Most have such options only when a cluster of deeply rooted values, beliefs, and hierarchies begin to deteriorate, a process that causes anguish and panic for some and offers the promise of liberation to others. The fact remains that, in general, the more alternatives girls have and the more exposure to the outside world, the less likely they are to opt for these old ways. And when they don’t, the anticircumcision movement is sometimes the only powerful social force on their side.

Nowhere in the world is that more clear than at Kenya’s Tasaru Ntomonok Girls Rescue Center, a shelter that houses dozens of Masai girls who have fled their villages in their desperation to remain intact. Located on the edge of Narok, a dusty market town in Kenya’s fabled Rift Valley, Tasaru is testament to the lengths to which some girls will go to escape painful traditions once they glean the merest hint of a way out.