The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (25 page)

Foreigners visiting Africa adore the Masai, the seminomadic herdsmen who live in Kenya and Tanzania, because in an increasingly homogenized world, they cling tightly to their traditions. A Nilotic people who emigrated from Sudan and southern Ethiopia a thousand years ago, they live in some of East Africa’s richest game areas, and tourists on safari love to take pictures of statuesque Masai men in their red
kikoi
robes, walking sticks, and stretched earlobes, and of Masai women adorned with elaborate beaded jewelry. Traditional Masai dancing entertains visitors at fancy lodges.

Narok itself is culturally mixed, though it became less so after 2007’s disputed presidential election, when Masai mobs drove out the Kikuyu, long the country’s dominant ethnic group.
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Resentment toward the Kikuyu—and the political order they represent—runs deep among a tribe that saw little benefit from Kenya’s development. “The Masai have struggled more than most other tribes to come to terms with the modern world,” Jonathan Clayton wrote in the
Times
(London) in 2004. “They have taken badly to farming, land enclosures and the Western values propagated through state education.” This, wrote Clayton, has led them to cling more tightly to traditions like circumcision, and to force their daughters into early marriages in order “to protect their daughters from Western influences and fend off economic hardship.”
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Agnes Pareyio, the founder of Tasaru Ntomonok, has dedicated her life to fighting such customs. A Masai woman in her early fifties with an open, friendly face and a comforting, imposing maternal bulk, Pareyio has a gap where her two bottom middle teeth should be, a traditional Masai body modification. Besides that, when I first met her the only outward sign of her ethnic heritage was the beaded bracelet she wears. Her hair was braided and coiled in a bun. When she goes into the surrounding villages she sometimes shocks other Masai by wearing trousers, though on special occasions she dons the colorful robes and elaborate jewelry for which the Masai are famous.

Pareyio grew up in an ordinary Masai village, though she didn’t have an entirely ordinary childhood. Her father had been forced by the colonial government to attend school, an experience that convinced him of the importance of education. He sent Pareyio to boarding school, where she had a friend from a community that didn’t circumcise their daughters and was horrified to hear about the practice. For Pareyio’s mother and grandmother, excision was a natural and unquestioned part of life—it was unthinkable that a woman could be married until her clitoris and labia had been cut off. But Pareyio’s friend planted doubts in her mind.

During the December holiday when she was fourteen, Pareyio returned home from school to find her family preparing a great feast. She asked her mother what was going on, and she replied, “All these people are here because there’s a ritual that is going to be performed.” Pareyio realized what they were planning and told her mother that she refused to let it happen. Her mother enlisted Pareyio’s father for support, but he backed his daughter. Upset, her mother told Pareyio’s grandmother, who came screaming, “Who is that that is saying she will not be cut? What are we going to call her? Are we going to call her a child? Or a woman? What will we call her?”

Within the village everyone was talking about it, calling Pareyio a coward. Eventually, the pressure became too much for her, and she agreed to go through with it. Her legs were pried open and her genitals slashed off. Afterward, an old woman felt the wound to make sure nothing was left. The pain was horrible, and it came back twice as badly every time she urinated. She has regretted it her entire life.

Luckily, she was sent back to school, and her parents didn’t marry her off until she was eighteen. Soon after her marriage, Pareyio got involved in Maendeleo ya Wanawake, a nationwide women’s organization, where she became a local leader and, before long, a campaigner against female circumcision. To demonstrate the consequences of the practice, she commissioned a model of the female reproductive tract with detachable parts from a local woodworker, then walked with it from village to village, talking to any group who would listen. She spoke about shock, pain, and hemorrhaging, and explained how circumcision complicated delivery. “After excision, what is left is a scar,” she said. “During birth, the body cannot expand as it is supposed to,” leading to prolonged labor and even brain damage in babies. Furthermore, she argued, women “must have their right to enjoy sex.” The only point of circumcision, she said, “is just to tame a woman, depriving them of their sexual rights.” She compared herself to a car without a key to start the engine.
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Pareyio quickly became an infamous figure. “When I started showing this model, my husband thought I was crazy,” she said. People mocked him—and threatened her. Embarrassed, he took another wife, and she took her four children and went to live on her own.

T
hen, in 1999, a girl who had heard Pareyio speak in her church ran away from home. She was twelve years old, and on the eve of her circumcision she made her way to Narok from a village forty kilometers (about twenty-five miles) away. According to Pareyio, the girl came across a local teacher and told her, “I’m looking for a woman by the name Agnes who visited us. She said to us that it’s not good to be cut, that it’s wrong to be cut, and that there was a need for us to go to school. I want to go to school. I don’t want to be cut.” But instead of taking the girl to Pareyio, the teacher, herself a Masai, brought her back to her parents’ home. The girl was excised the following day.

Pareyio was shocked when she learned what had happened. She tracked down the girl and arranged to enroll her in boarding school, but knew that wasn’t enough. In the future, if girls ran away there needed to be a place for them to go. Soon enough, more did. Rebellion, it seemed, was a contagion that could spread. Pareyio found housing for the girls among some of her local supporters while she looked for something more permanent.

Then, in 2000, Pareyio had a serendipitous meeting with Eve Ensler, of
Vagina Monologues
fame. A playwright-turned-global-activist, Ensler’s great cause is violence against women, and her V-Day campaign raises money for grassroots women’s groups worldwide. On a trip to Kenya she saw Pareyio in the field, doing a presentation in a village with her wooden model. Enormously impressed, Ensler bought Pareyio a jeep—V-Day is written across the top—so that she could cover more ground, and started fund-raising for a shelter. In 2002, Tasaru Ntomonok—which means “rescue the women” in the Masai language—was born, and the girls started coming, on foot and by bus, from dozens and even hundreds of kilometers away. Sometimes Pareyio will get a tip that a girl is about to be cut or forced into a marriage, and she’ll drive out to get her. Once, with the help of local police, she saved a nine-year-old girl who, in the words of the UNFPA, “was being frog-marched to her husband’s home to become his fourth wife.”
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The phenomenon of the runaway girls was bigger than just Tasaru. In February 2003 the BBC reported that at least one hundred girls from Kenya’s southwest region had sought shelter in churches after fleeing home to escape circumcision. “No one helped them run away,” said a local women’s rights activist. “They know we have been teaching against the dangers of FGM.”
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Dozens of others have fled to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in the Rift Valley town of Eldoret, not far from the Ugandan border.
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T
he Tasaru Ntomonok Girls Rescue Center consists of three low brick buildings with orange trim on Narok’s outskirts. One of them has “V Day Safe House For The Girls” emblazoned across the front, and inside a warren of small, basic but immaculate rooms are painted a cheerful blue, each with two sets of bunk beds. Most girls stay there only when they first run away and during holidays; as soon as she can, Agnes uses funding from Ensler and UNFPA to enroll them in nearby boarding schools. (It costs around one thousand dollars per girl, per year.) During the summer of 2007, Tasaru was caring for sixty-eight girls. More than one thousand have passed through, and almost seven hundred have stayed long term. Three of the first runaways have just started college.

There’s something magical about these girls’ bravery, about the way they left their whole worlds behind them rather than submit to a fate that once seemed immutable. Anne K., a moon-faced fourteen-year-old with the big sloe eyes and tiny nose of an anime character, was only eleven when she left home after her father ordered her circumcised against her mother’s wishes. She spoke softly, almost whispering, as she explained how her mother helped her sneak away at 4:00 A.m., how she walked forty kilometers through the bush on an empty stomach; how she encountered many wild animals, including elephants, though luckily, “they didn’t beat me.”

She knew of Tasaru because Pareyio had visited her village, and other girls had run away before her. “At Tasaru, I was welcomed,” she said. “At the time I came to Tasaru I didn’t know many things, such as the importance of education.” Her mother had had eight children, but Anne was the only girl, and as such her domestic burden was heavy. “When I was at home, I wake up in the morning, I prepare breakfast for my brothers. After that I go to school. After school I start working again,” gathering firewood and washing clothes. She was tired all the time. Tasaru introduced her to a life where her happiness was valued. “At Tasaru we have leisure time, we play, we sing together,” she said. “Agnes, she has helped us. She has saved our lives.” Sitting in a classroom at the Narok boarding school where she’s in grade six, she said, smiling shyly, that she hopes to become a pilot someday. Her teacher mentioned that she’s first in her class.

Anne’s parents have never visited her. If her mother tried, Anne said, she’d be beaten. Pareyio tries to reconcile girls with their mothers and fathers, but it can be a long, difficult process. In 2004, Equality Now publicized a hideous case of forced mutilation following one Tasaru girl’s reunion with her family. After running away in 2001, sixteen-year-old Santeyian Keiwua returned home when her mother promised to leave her and her fourteen-year-old sister, Dorcas, intact. Her mother kept her word, but one day when she was away, the girls’ brother and a group of neighbors beat them, held them down, and had them cut. When their mother returned home she rushed them to the hospital, where they stayed for nine days. “The way this thing was done does not fit any description. It was done in a very malicious manner,” the examining doctor told a Kenyan newspaper.
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With police after him the girls’ brother fled, and they returned to Tasaru, terrified that if they went home, they’d be forcibly married as well.
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Some mothers come to see their daughters while they’re living at Tasaru, but their fathers rarely do. Especially in its early days there was considerable rage toward Pareyio. “They were very much against Tasaru. They say you are going against the tradition of the people,” said Hellen Kamaamia, a local teacher who serves as Tasaru’s treasurer. Besides, men typically pay for their wives with cattle, the Masais’ traditional source of wealth; fathers who can’t give their daughters in marriage are literally poorer for it. Furious men—fathers or would-be husbands—would sometimes show up outside Tasaru’s door with swords, demanding their girls back, and Pareyio would have to face them down. “Agnes is bold,” Kamaamia said with obvious admiration.

It helps to have the law on her side. In 2001, Kenya passed the Children’s Act, which bans circumcision for girls under eighteen, as well as forced marriage. As we’ve seen, some question what is accomplished by national laws against female genital cutting, given how unpopular and poorly enforced they are. There is even evidence that such laws are leading some Masai to cut their girls at ever younger ages, before they can protest or escape.
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But it was the Children’s Act that allowed Pareyio to save the nine-year-old bride and that lets her call the police when fathers come threatening. Activists sheltering other runaways also say the law made it possible for them to protect girls from their families.
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D
espite her stalwart rejection of harmful traditions, the last thing Pareyio wants is for the girls at Tasaru to end up alienated from Masai culture. Instead, she wants Masai culture to change to embrace strong, educated girls. Female circumcision is the way girls have traditionally been initiated into Masai womanhood. Pareyio sees much of value in the initiation process, and she’s trying to keep it alive without the cut.

Each August groups of girls come to Tasaru for an alternative rite of passage ceremony. Many of them are girls who ran away, but some are brought by parents who have themselves been convinced to eschew circumcision. For five days the girls go into seclusion, where Pareyio teaches them about sexual and reproductive health, HIV prevention, and the harms of cutting. She invites old women from the community to give them all the instructions about maintaining a home and a family that usually accompany circumcision. On the last day, amid songs, feasting, and gifts, the girls are declared adults.

Slowly, Pareyio’s community has started to see her as a leader rather than a threat. Through UNFPA Tasaru bought a maize-grinding mill that former circumcisers can use to replace their lost income; some of them have become Pareyio’s most important allies.
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In 2004, frustrated that the law against female genital cutting wasn’t being enforced strongly enough, Pareyio ran for deputy mayor of Narok district—and won. “There is a lot of respect now, because people have seen that I take their girls to school,” she said. “I don’t mess up their daughters.”