The girls begged the village chief to intervene, but they knew it wasn’t the village leaders they needed to convince, it was their own parents. They left his office to go to the community hall to make posters: “Parents Have Pity!” “No More Excision!” “No More Early Marriage!” “No More Forced Marriage!” Then they brought those posters back and began to march in front of the administrator’s office. Boys, more girls, teachers and parents soon joined them. Even the director of the school walked with them. Someone ran several kilometres to the highway to find a phone to alert the media. National radio, local and national newspapers rushed correspondents to the scene. This was unheard of—a collection of ten-year-olds demanding change.
In the middle of the protesters was little Khadia, shielded by her friends and marching with the others. She’d run away from her uncle’s house, picked up a poster and joined the historic scene that was unfolding in Polel Diawbe.
At first, Khadia wouldn’t talk to anyone. The village leaders invited her to come inside the administrator’s office; once there, she could only cry. One of the men said, “We’ve come to help you. You’re young, you want to learn, you have a future. We’re going to do everything we can to have this marriage stopped.” Finally Khadia spoke: “I don’t want marriage. It’s wrong. I want to go to school.” In just a dozen words, she had spoken for every girl in the village.
The protest was all over Senegal’s radio programs the next morning, and phone-in lines were flooded with callers who wanted to show their support for the little girl. The president of Senegal sent gendarmes to the village with a stern reminder that despite tribal customs, girls under the age of sixteen were forbidden by law to get married. The prefect (district chief) arrived on the scene. Two days later, Khadia was back in her classroom, the marriage plan cancelled.
Where diplomats, international health experts and NGOs had failed, a group of preteens took a brave step into the future, bringing their village after them.
In northern Senegal the year before the incident with Khadia, one young girl who’d been married off at eleven and become pregnant at twelve had died in childbirth. Everyone knew it was because she was too young to be having a baby. Everyone also knew she’d been subjected to female genital mutilation, which hadn’t been banned in her village and made her first delivery more dangerous.
More than 130 million women who are alive today in twenty-eight countries have been sexually mutilated in the name of tradition. Every day, an average of six thousand little girls are taken to old women known as “the cutters,” who excise their clitoris and labia with a razor and then sew them up. There’s no anesthetic, no sterilization. There’s just agony, a future of pain and sometimes death. And there’s a powerful taboo against speaking of the procedure to anyone.
Polel Diawbe is situated in the heart of the most conservative district of Senegal, where taking action against a practice seen as a religious and cultural duty risked insulting the elders, enraging the religious leaders and isolating families who broke with tradition. Still, the village stopped performing the procedure.
So what was behind the villagers’ rebellion? There’d been a lot of discussion about early marriage in Polel Diawbe sparked by classes held by an organization called Tostan, which means “breakthrough” in the Wolof language. It was started by Molly Melching, a force of nature who came to Senegal in 1979 from Danville, Illinois, as a twenty-two-year-old on a one-year teaching assignment and never left. She learned the language, adopted the styles of the people, moved into a village and experienced an epiphany: change isn’t an external event, it’s internal. If someone tells you to stop doing something that you think is right, you’ll reject the advice. “But given the opportunity to gather the information needed for change, you’ll make the best decision yourself,” says Melching, six feet tall—a charismatic woman who fills a room with her presence. “If it’s your idea, it’ll work.” That realization inspired Melching and her Senegalese team to create a program that would help women to make their own decisions.
Tostan has been teaching courses in health and human rights in Senegal’s villages since 1992. In 1997, the first victory was posted by the women of Malicounda Bambara who had taken the courses and then banded together and declared an end to FGM. Within months, other villages made the same public declarations. Since then, Melching estimates that more than forty-three thousand girls have been spared the procedure. In 2001, the Senegalese added early and forced marriages to their reform of harmful cultural practices, and one by one the villages are banning it. Today, Senegal is on the verge of becoming the first country to entirely abandon both FGM and child marriage.
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The rainy season began the day I travelled to Khadia’s village in 2004. Along the highway in this northern district, which is known as the Fouta, black plastic bags litter the ground and cling to tree branches like hooded vultures. Eighteen-wheeler trucks belch brown fumes onto the acacia trees silhouetted across the landscape. The Sahara desert is encroaching on this area, pushing its sand dunes onto the arable land that the villages depend on for food, and shepherds herd bleating goats to the scarce patches of green. Here old Africa is bumping into the modern world, rocking the rhythms of life uncomfortably. For Molly Melching, this village has been a watershed.
She’d been here before in 2002 to try to start the Tostan program and found herself held hostage in a hotel in nearby Ourossogui. Men from the village surrounded the building, burning tires and threatening her. They feared that if they let her out of the hotel, she’d change their women, erase their past, alter their culture. To these men, Melching posed too big a threat to what they saw as their way of life. “It’s so frustrating with fundamentalists,” she says. “It’s like, ‘My mind is made up, so don’t confuse me with the facts.’ ” Even the district prefect, who said he agreed with Melching’s ideas, told her not to come back because he couldn’t protect her. The women sent another message: “Come back, we will protect you ourselves.”
Senegal’s former minister of communications, Aissata Tall Sall, a woman known for her tough stand on women’s issues, says, “I come from this region. It is so conservative that I would have been beheaded for mentioning FGC. But Molly did it. She’s a very courageous woman.”
Social anthropologists have usually assumed it would take hundreds of years to end female circumcision, but Gerry Mackie, a researcher at Notre Dame University in Illinois who has written extensively about foot binding in China, disputes this conclusion. He says, “Melching’s approach indicates that FGM will end suddenly and universally.”
Like FGM, foot binding had gone on for more than a thousand years. No one knew how it started. Many tried to stop it, worried about the painful medical consequences to women. Then, at the end of the 1890s, a small group of women formed the Healthy Foot Society. They held public meetings to talk about the value of having feet that grew naturally so women could walk easily. They made a public pledge that they would never bind their daughters’ feet and would never allow their sons to marry a girl whose feet were bound. In seven years, the practice had stopped almost completely. The success, says Mackie, came from the public pledge.
He told me during an interview I did with him after I first met the women of Malicounda Bambara, who had also taken a public pledge to stop female genital cutting, that going it on your own against custom leads to being ostracized: if you break with tradition, you or your daughter can’t wash with the others, cook with the others, eat meals with the others. Vowing to stop together avoids singling out one woman or her family. Mackie said, “The women of Malicounda copied the techniques of the anti-foot-binding reformers when they took part in the Tostan program.” The other key, he explained, is the fact that Tostan provides the education but never tells people what to do.
Part of that education is starting a dialogue that includes the whole village. Incredibly, Senegalese men claimed that they had no idea what was actually being done to girls and women who were circumcised. Since no one talk
ed about it, most of the women didn’t know precisely what had been done to them either. The price they paid was a lifetime of pain. If a girl doesn’t bleed to death, if she doesn’t die from shock or pelvic infection or tetanus, she will be left with an opening the size of her baby fingertip. Urinating, which can take as long as fifteen minutes for a girl whose entire vulval area has been damaged, hurts so much that she’ll try to avoid it, which causes urinary tract infection, leading to kidney problems and sometimes blood poisoning. When she marries, she’ll be recut with a razor to make intercourse possible. Then comes the agony of childbirth with a birth canal opening that has been mutilated. Labour is prolonged—three to five days is not unusual—so the baby is often starved of oxygen. Like so many women before her, she’ll say, “The first one always dies. It is making a passage for the other children.”
The roots of this brutal rite are as confounding as the business of stopping it. The practice started twenty-two hundred years ago in Egypt and spread westward. Some say it is a religious requirement, but though it is practised by Muslims, Christians and a Jewish sect in Ethiopia, it is not mentioned in either the Quran or the Bible. Some say it improves the health and child-bearing capabilities of women, despite irrefutable medical evidence to the contrary. Other bizarre claims are that it makes a woman more attractive and a better wife. In fact, it badly scars her, hobbling her with pain and sexual trauma.
Mackie told me that people trying to stop FGM had been asking villagers the wrong question. “The question is not, ‘Why do you practise FGM?’ The question to ask is, ‘What would happen if you didn’t practise FGM?’ ” Marriageability turned out to be the key. If a girl wasn’t cut, she was considered unclean and unmarriageable. The consequences for a single family to give up the ritual would be devastating. There would be no marriage for their daughter, no grandchildren, no respect.
The tradition of early marriage also has murky origins. In many places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is thought that a girl should not ovulate in her parents’ home. In other words, if she is not married by the time she can produce a child, she might bring shame to her family. “Girls under the age of sixteen are simply not physically mature enough to be having babies, especially if they have been circumcised,” says Melching. Moreover, married girls cannot attend school, so their education is halted. Enduring both early marriage and FGM, girls reach adulthood with disadvantages that last a lifetime.
Melching’s program has a unique method of teaching with drama instead of written material, which could make the illiterate villagers feel inadequate. And Tostan’s message is a combination of rights and responsibilities. “To have the right, you have to have responsibility,” says Melching. Tostan literally acts this concept out in plays. When I visited one of the villages near Polel Diawbe, I watched a Tostan drama featuring a pregnant woman; I was taken both by the power of the story that the players acted out and also by the reaction of the crowd watching the play. The central character was obviously sick and in danger of losing her baby as well as her own life. She had the right to pre- and postnatal care, but she didn’t come to the health centre until it was too late. The lesson was well taken by the villagers who gathered around the makeshift stage: you have the right to medical care, but it’s your responsibility to get it.
In another village, the drama revolved around a girl who had to leave school to be married. When the cutter was called to reopen the vagina that was closed when she was circumcised, the girl began to hemorrhage. The silence among the twelve hundred villagers was poignant. The girl in the play died, and the onlookers burst into shouts of “Pak pak pak,” which loosely translated means “Death to the harmful tradition.” The play was so moving that the village cutters formed a circle around the players and tossed their tools for circumcision into a pot for burial.
There are thirteen thousand villages in Senegal, and not all of them have a history of FGM. Of the eight thousand that do, approximately five thousand have stopped the practice since 1997. The newspapers once chastised the women of Malicounda Bambara for rebelling against tradition. Now they hail them as heroes. The religious leaders once thought the women were going against the Quran. Now they say the women showed the truth. Koumba Tokola, a community manager in the Fouta, says, “We didn’t know before that the practice led to these problems. Now we know, so we have to speak out. We’re the women, the ones who were cut, the ones who endure the consequences, so we’re the ones who have to stop it.” Propaganda and prohibition failed to end FGM and early marriage. But Melching’s program of human rights and health education and public declarations is succeeding.
Tostan’s lessons about rights and responsibilities are far-reaching. In Senegal, more than 40 percent of the children don’t have birth certificates and are therefore not registered as citizens. Birth registration is part of the Tostan program, as is vaccination. Lessons about the right to a clean environment have resulted in garbage cleanup, tree planting and villagers adopting a more efficient stove that uses two-thirds less wood for cooking.
The cost of the Tostan program is about $100 per woman, or $5000 per village. Melching figures she needs $5 million to finish the job she started in 1992. The program has spread beyond the borders of Senegal into 23 villages in Burkina Faso, 5 in Mali, 5 in Sudan and 120 in Guinea, so she believes that if Tostan finds the funds, FGM and early marriage will soon be history everywhere.
I watched her for a morning sending fax messages and calling donors. I’m stunned that the woman who has found the formula for success in stopping cultural traditions that are damaging to women and girls can’t get the budget to finish the job. When I talked to UNICEF in New York, I discovered that the power players hadn’t held the meeting to establish costs and timelines; they simply hadn’t made it a priority. Maria Gabriella De Vita, director of Child Protection at UNICEF, says the Tostan program works. “We know what to do, the strategy is there, but the international community has not created an agenda or set dates to reach the objectives.” The bureaucracy was winning as the girls were waiting.
That’s what was on Melching’s mind when we turned off the single highway that forms a ribbon around the Fouta and negotiated the muddy flats on the way into Polel Diawbe, where I hoped to meet Khadia. Across the riverbed, the villagers gathered to greet their hero, Molly, with enormous applause. They wanted to show her the drama they had prepared for the upcoming ceremony to formally end FGM and early marriage. Before the play, we sat on the sandy ground, ten of us sharing a bowl of food, eating the spiced rice, glazed onions and chicken portions with our hands. There was a delicious taste of victory in Polel Diawbe.
Khadia, the child I’d travelled such a long way to see, wasn’t there. Her friends told me she was visiting relatives in Dakar and wouldn’t be back until school began again. Dando Gise, a classmate who had marched that fateful day in the village, said with all the solemnity a little girl can muster, “A tradition that harms is not one we should keep.” Then she dashed off to join the other girls from Khadia’s class, who were laughing, teasing, playing—acting their age.
The introductory speeches were loud, full of weighty proclamations about the future. The pageantry of the evening performance began in the fiery red glow of sunset and concluded in the soft mauve of dusk. The dancing, singing, drama and storytelling spoke of a deep-rooted culture in Senegal that is still thriving despite the eradication of harmful customs once seen as crucial.
When I checked in with Molly again in the spring of 2012, she had a message for me from Maimuna Traore, one of the leaders in Malicounda Bambara. Traore wanted me to know this: “In the beginning, I was often called a traitor to my culture. However, I now consider myself more Bambara than ever before. Our deepest values are those of well-being, peace and good health. That is why we abandoned this social practice that brought only pain and suffering into our community. We are proud to change those practices, which we learned are a violation of our deepest values.”
Melching added, “When the histor
y of the abandonment of FGM in Senegal is written, it will highlight the villagers themselves who travelled from community to community to promote human rights and better health for the girls and women of their family.”
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The change is not complete, but it is still an immense turning point for women and girls. In other countries where women suffer from so-called cultural practices, systemic change is well under way. “It’s time for people, especially women, but men as well in Muslim society, to break the taboos about discussing the issue of sexuality,” says Farida Shaheed. “In many ways sexuality is at the root of women’s oppression. There have been huge attempts by men to control women’s sexuality both in terms of how they dress and how they behave and in terms of their reproductive power. In our parts of the world, there’s been a silence about that—it needs to be broken.”
That silence is being broken. In Iran, for example, by women like the human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who says, “Men who come from a patriarchal cultural background do not agree with full and complete equality for women and men, and the reason for it is that equality weakens their power. Those men exist in the government of Iran.” And in Afghanistan, where Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, is also breaking the taboo against speaking up: “If a woman wears a short skirt, the men cannot control themselves. And that’s not our mistake. If they don’t have enough confidence to not be disturbed by the tap-tap of a woman’s footstep [the Taliban forbade high-heeled shoes, as they didn’t want to hear the sound of a woman approaching] or her hair showing or short clothes, it’s their problem, not ours. They are the ones who are always shouting and using culture and religion to oppress us. The men who have confidence don’t have problems with women’s equality rights.”
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