Aissa Tou Sarr thought she’d never see that dreaded moment. From a far-off village, the old Muslim priest had walked for days in his rubber thongs and white robe, arriving here late last year to urge the community to stop Sarr from doing her life’s work: cutting off the genitals of young girls.
“In the beginning people were shocked and shouted in anger,” said Sarr. “This was Our tradition! Some walked out of the meeting.” Sarr was about to join a movement in which village after village has declared an end to female circumcision rites, a potentially devastating practice that has lasted in Africa since the Pharaohs.
Sarr, in her 50s, had been the ritual circumciser for the village for decades, using a razor blade to cut about 200 girls every rainy season. She learned the trade from her grandmother, who had circumcised her at 15, and in turn, had excised the genitals of her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters. It has provided her with a decent living: 5,000 francs (about $8.60), free lunch and a bar of soap for each operation. “I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘How am I going to take care of my family? What am I going to do?’ “
After weeks of bitter argument, the villagers vowed this year to never again circumcise their girls. Kept alive through wars, migration and slavery, a centuries-old tradition is dead. And Sarr, who now depends on her brothers’ charity, resigned herself to near destitution; Sarr’s hardship is nothing unusual in Africa. What is extraordinary, though, is the quiet rebellion in these villages. In the last year, 44 Senegalese communities have declared an end to female circumcision and have begun pressing others to join them.
In recent years, Americans have joined an international campaign to end female genital mutilation, as the opponents call the custom, in which a girl’s clitoris, and sometimes the inner and outer vaginal lips, are removed. The United States granted asylum last year to a woman from Togo, now living in Alexandria, Va., who had fled her home rather than undergo circumcision.
About 130 million African women in about 28 countries are circumcised, and thousands die each year as a result, in childbirth, or from infections and hemorrhaging, according to the World Health Organization.
Yet, despite the outraged arguments from judges and numerous officials that cutting off genitals violates girls’ rights, Western exhortations have had little effect in Africa. In fact, they have often been met with hostility by Africans, millions of whom believe the tradition is required not only by Islam, but for hygiene and sexual prudence.
But now, in this small West African country, with barely 8 million people, one education program is having some dramatic success, highlighting how Western campaigns might have gone awry. In remote areas with neither electricity nor an inch of paved road, the villagers have achieved what years of pleading from international agencies, health officials and, more recently, a few African governments, have failed to accomplish.
Ending female circumcision wasn’t on the agenda 10 years ago, when Molly Melching, then 37, of Danville, Ill., founded an organization called Tostan, which means “breakthrough” in the predominant language, Wolof. Melching, who has lived in Senegal since 1975 as an exchange student from the University of Illinois at Chicago, designed an intensive literacy and skills training program built around group discussions. Funded largely by UNICEF, she hired villagers to teach the classes and published workbooks in local languages.
But in several villages, countless people described how Tostan’s classes gradually made them begin challenging their most fundamental beliefs. Rather than confront head-on issues like circumcision, Tostan took several months before broaching the subject of women’s health.
Even then, Melching said, “we never spoke about sexuality. We only spoke about health, and rights.” Villagers said months of discussing infections, childbirth and sexual pain inevitably led them to question circumcision and so to discuss subjects almost never mentioned in public before.
Melching said she had learned from some critical mistakes of international organizations and Western feminists.
First, making a political issue of genital mutilation, or declaring it a barbaric act, does not convince many Africans. “These women really love their children,” said Melching, adding that many Africans counter Western indignation by likening the pain of circumcision to Western women suffering face-lifts and anorexia. Although Melching stresses human-rights violations, the health risks are what really hit home. “That’s something everyone gets: Without health, they can’t do anything.”
Second, Melching said Western organizations too often hope to persuade individual Africans to abandon female circumcision without understanding that such independence could leave an African woman with no husband to marry and a family subjected to scorn or ostracism. Demba Diawara, the imam, or priest, who arrived in Diabougou from Ker Simbara to plead the case against circumcision, said: “Even if you learn something is bad, if it’s your tradition, you can’t just get up and stop it.”
When entire villages sign on to the plan, no one woman carries a stigma. And the movement is gaining momentum as news of the villagers’ decision spreads across the country.
“A year ago, no one in Senegal even spoke about this,” said Melching. “A year later, everyone is involved. What happened? I think of it as the moment when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus.”
Yet, even in villages that have vowed to stop circumcision, it has been a battle. In Malicounda, a village of 3,000 located 55 miles southeast of the capital, Dakar, women argued bitterly with men, who feared that their public renunciation of circumcision would deeply embarrass them.
“We would not back down,” said Maimouna Troare, 60, an imposingly tall woman who heads Malicounda’s women’s organization. “We told them we would continue talking against female circumcision.” She advised the village men that “when the drumbeat changes, the dance has to change, too.”
“My own daughter bled from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., without stopping when she was cut,” said Oureye Sall, a woman in Malicounda. “She has always had problems, since she was married, bleeding all the time.”
Crude instruments are used without anesthetic. If the vaginal walls are removed, the opening is often sealed, save for a small hole for urine and blood. On wedding nights, circumcisers are then summoned to reopen virgin brides for their husbands.
And yet numerous women said that until recently, a mix of secrecy, discretion and shame kept them from linking health problems to circumcision. Now, a better educated, more urban generation was beginning to challenge the old ways. Tostan’s program had arrived at the perfect moment.
Until recently, the peer pressure had been too intense for individual choice.
In Ker Simbara, Dousu Konate says her adopted daughter begged her for months to let her undergo the operation; she’d been raised in a village that didn’t practice it. “The girls mocked her. The boys said, `You’ll never find a husband.’ ” At 15, the girl was married shortly after being circumcised last year, just before the village scrapped the practice.
Ker Simbara, about 60 miles from Dakar, needed agreement from their members of their extended families scattered far across the area, both to allay their possible fury and to ensure that girls could still find husbands.
So Diawara walked for three months in the blistering heat, from village to village. The fact that he was an older man, and religious, helped sway the other imams, whose consent was crucial–90 percent of Senegalese are Muslim.
“We went back and forth, until everyone agreed,” said Diawara, who learned to read and write recently in Tostan’s classes and became a convert to the organization’s stand against female circumcision.
One month after Malicounda’s decision was reported in Senegal, President Abdou Diouf made his first-ever declaration against circumcision, after 32 years in power, and is now pushing to make it a crime, punishable by six years in jail.
But it won’t be easy. Eroding fiercely guarded traditions can be explosive here.
In a back yard about three miles from Malicounda, a group of women erupted at Melching when she broached the subject.
“It was only when white people came and said you shouldn’t do this anymore that those women said they didn’t believe in circumcision,” said Mame Fatou Diatta, 33, her eyes blazing. “I saw Mrs. Clinton come and denigrate our culture!” she shouted, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s embrace of the Malicounda women at a televised celebration in Dakar.
“And near Ker Simbara, a group of elderly men sat under a big tree, arguing with Diawara over Islam. “Circumcision is normal, according to Mohammed,” said the local imam, cross-legged on a mat, with a heavy Koran open on his lap. “We could not stop it.”
So, too, thought Sarr, who lost her job as a circumciser, yet months of discussion won her over. Now, the same peer pressure that makes scrapping female circumcision impossible elsewhere makes it equally untenable to continue it here. As Sarr said: “When I learned that this might cause sterility, infections, I didn’t want to be the cause of all that.”
If the idea is to take hold throughout Senegal, let alone the rest of Africa, it will need many more hundreds of villages to join the fight.
During the past month, communities stretching hundreds of miles across Senegal have decided to join the effort, now making it likely that for the first time, the campaign might spread across the region and end female circumcision forever.
