by Aimee Molloy
Two days later they met again—always three times a week for the three years of the Tostan program—and once again Ndey brought up the subject of the tradition. “We’ve prepared a theater on the topic,” she explained, asking for volunteers to come to the center of the circle. “It’s based on a story about a girl named Poolel. Who would like to take part?”
The women typically loved theater. It was an essential part of their culture and used often during their Tostan sessions, but only a woman named Tene Cissoko stepped into the circle to volunteer. With her coaxing, a few others reluctantly followed.
“Be sure to make the theater as vivid as possible,” Ndey suggested, taking her seat. “Consider including anything from your own experience with the tradition—songs you sang to your daughters after their procedures or that your mother once sang to you.”
The women came alive in their roles. As the story went, the day came for Poolel to undergo the tradition. She was taken to the cutter for her procedure, but afterward something terrible happened. Poolel began to bleed profusely, greatly worrying her mother. When the bleeding worsened, her mother took her to the village health agent. Her efforts to stop the bleeding failed, and it was obvious to her mother that Poolel was in great pain. She was eventually taken to the regional hospital, where the doctors tried to save her life. But it was too late. Poolel died the next day.
“Let’s talk about why girls are cut,” Ndey said after the women had returned to their seats. “What consequences befall a girl who is not cut?”
Why were girls cut? It was a silly question, like asking why one breathes. Every woman in the room knew that the tradition was among the most momentous events of a girl’s life, preparing her to become a woman, to eventually be deemed acceptable for marriage, and, most important of all, to fully belong and have a respected role within her society. For a girl not to be cut—to be a bilakoro, a name considered among the worst insults in their culture—was unimaginable. Not only would a bilakoro have trouble finding a husband, she would also be rejected and ostracized by the rest of the community, by women especially. Considered impure and unfit to enter the circle of “real women,” the food she cooked would not be eaten, the clothes she washed rewashed by others.
Nobody said this aloud, however, and the tense silence in the room was disturbed only by the sound of children playing soccer in a distant courtyard. Ndey began to worry that the women would again decline to speak and she’d have to find another way to fill the remaining hour of class, but then Takko, the village midwife and a mother of three, hesitantly raised her hand.
“I know this is an uncomfortable topic for many of us here,” she began, “but all last night I thought very seriously about this. We never talk about the tradition, but maybe it’s time.” Takko went on to describe the problems in childbirth she’d witnessed in her work as a midwife, and how difficult it was for the doctor to sew up scar tissue, therefore requiring more time for a woman to heal. She had long suspected that women who could not have children may have suffered infections following the cutting, causing their infertility. In Senegal, the majority ethnic group—the Wolof—do not practice the tradition, and during her training as a midwife, Takko had assisted in the births of some of these women. She had noticed they were more elastic and therefore had much easier and less painful deliveries. “What Ndey is telling us is true. This is not a healthy practice.”
Takko sat down, her heart racing. She was unsure of how the other women would respond, and she felt the swelling rush of relief when her friend Aminata finally spoke. “As you know, I’m a Toucouleur,” Aminata said, referring to the predominant ethnic group from the north of Senegal, “and according to my customs I was cut as an infant and sealed shut afterward.” The women knew this was sometimes the type of cutting practiced. After a girl was cut, her legs would be tied together until the wound closed. Aminata’s mother had arranged for her to be married at fifteen—at least she thought she was fifteen. Birth registration was a custom of the tubaabs, the French who had colonized Senegal beginning in 1890, and in the nation’s villages, few people knew their exact age.
“On the night before my wedding, my mother explained I would have to be cut open the next morning in order to consummate the marriage. I panicked and tried to refuse all of it,” Aminata said. “Marriage to the man chosen for me, being cut open. But I had no choice. The procedure to open me was agonizing.” Afterward, still in pain, she fled her village. “I’d been told that if I wasn’t penetrated that night,” she timidly told the class, “my wound would again close, but I didn’t care. The pain was so severe I couldn’t imagine having intimate relations with my new husband.” She remained in hiding for a few days until the pain subsided. That man eventually divorced her, and she was married a few years later to another. She ended up having several children, but each time she had great difficulty in childbirth. “My body was so damaged, I could hardly be put back together again,” she told the others.
When Aminata finished, another woman stood to speak. And after her, another. One by one, they cautiously shared their experiences of the tradition. Throughout it all, Kerthio sat listening. She too had a story, but it was not one she could disclose. For the last several years, and to that very day, she had kept this experience her most private and guarded secret. One she had once believed she would take to the grave.
TEN YEARS EARLIER, KERTHIO’S daughter, Mariama, had died at three months old. Despite the time that had passed since that day, the aching sorrow Kerthio still felt lingered so deeply and solidly within her, it was as if it originated from somewhere deeper than her bones. Mariama was her first child. Kerthio had been married a year earlier, at the age of sixteen, chosen by her parents to become the second wife of a much older man with a few children already, and she knew she would live the remainder of her life unable to forgive herself for allowing her daughter to die. She’d been told by a local marabout, a respected religious leader believed to possess supernatural healing powers, that she needed to buy a special amulet to protect her daughter from evil spirits, but she had, for reasons she would never understand, neglected to get one. She was convinced it was solely because of this neglect that Mariama had died.
Kerthio’s second daughter arrived a year later, vibrant and healthy. It was about four years later when Kerthio decided to have the tradition performed on her. She had been planning this day since her daughter was born, and in consultation with Maimouna, they chose an auspicious date. Kerthio mentioned nothing about these plans to her husband. After all, the women’s tradition was never spoken about with the men of her village. While a father knew in general terms that the tradition existed and, like the women, often believed it to be a religious obligation under Islam, most men understood very little else—not what the operation entailed, not that it was being planned, and often not even that it had occurred.
On the morning of the chosen day, soon after her husband had left for the fields, Kerthio eagerly awaited the cutter. After she’d arrived and taken her daughter away, Kerthio spent the remainder of the day feeling anxious and distracted as she worked alongside the other women to complete her chores. As late afternoon fell and she stirred the nebidaay sauce over the large platter of millet, its steam rising in circles around her face, her head felt crowded with images of what she imagined was happening to her daughter, images born from Kerthio’s own experience of having undergone the tradition years earlier.
A clean straw mat would be laid out in the back courtyard, near where the cooking was done, and the tools readied: cloth, a bar of soap, and a razor blade or knife. The cutter’s assistant would then go and gather goat dung—it was believed that goat excrement had antiseptic qualities—and stir it into a large, metal tub of water, steeped with special leaves and perfume. She’d boil the liquid until the firewood underneath bloomed crimson with heat and the dung had fully dissolved, and then carry the steaming tub to the ground next to the mat, where Kerthio’s daughter waited. Sitting cross-legged at the child’s feet,
the cutter would grip the razor blade in her hands. Too large for such a delicate job, the blade would be carefully broken in half. The assistant would grip the child’s arms, pinning them firmly to the ground, as the cutter lifted the young girl’s pagne, a traditional wraparound skirt, and spread open her legs. Sure to keep as much pressure as she could on the girl’s arms, the assistant would instruct Kerthio’s daughter to be brave. It will all be over with quickly, she might whisper. And it will all be worth it. Kerthio believed these words. Life was filled with hardships and suffering, especially for women. This was her daughter’s first opportunity to prove to herself, as well as to the community, that she was courageous, that she could endure the excruciating pain so many women like Kerthio knew so well themselves. Kerthio wondered if the assistant would turn aside her gaze as the cutter took the razor blade and, with a few quick cuts, remove the girl’s clitoris and labia.
Kerthio might have imagined it, but she could sense her daughter’s screams slicing through the distant, heavy air, scattering the heat and the flies as she was lifted from the mat and placed into the milky dung water, which would quickly turn red with blood. The women would give the water time to clean the wound before lifting the trembling girl back onto the mat and pressing the area with the wet neem leaves they had collected.
Kerthio had expected her daughter to be gone for a few nights, tended to and cared for afterward by the noble elder women who traditionally played this role in the village, but later that same night, as Kerthio swept the dust from the floor of her hut, she heard a soft knock on her door. It was one of the traditional cutter’s assistants, and she carried Kerthio’s sleeping daughter in her arms.
“Is everything all right?” Kerthio asked, alarmed, scooping her daughter into her arms.
“Something’s the matter,” the woman said, the nervousness evident in her voice.
“What is it?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing, but we thought it best that she return home with you,” the woman said. With that, she turned and left.
Kerthio laid her daughter on the bed they shared. The child seemed weak and exhausted, and Kerthio stayed by her side for the next few hours, wiping the sweat that spread like dewdrops on her skin, feeding her sips of tepid water drawn hours earlier from the well. She eventually fell asleep beside her daughter, but later that night she was awakened by the feeling of wetness spreading on the mattress. She thought her daughter had urinated in her sleep, but when she brought the oil lamp closer, she saw the pool of blood.
Her heart racing with worry, she rushed to wake Maimouna, asleep in her hut nearby. “Come,” she whispered to her mother. “I need your help.” They sat at the girl’s side, offering prayers to stop the hemorrhaging. As she watched her daughter grow dizzy and weak from blood loss, her voice become brittle from pain, Kerthio’s fear escalated. After losing Mariama, she couldn’t bear the thought of losing another child, and the panic she felt threatened to take control of her. She stayed by her daughter’s side throughout the night, pausing only to eat a little rice at Maimouna’s insistence. By the next morning, the bleeding appeared to subside a little, and Kerthio ran to the nearby hut of one of the village’s traditional healers. The man came to Kerthio’s room and recited prayers over her daughter. He then instructed Kerthio to offer four yards of material, two candles, and a kilo of kola nuts to an elder woman.
Her daughter slowly recovered, but Kerthio could never forget the child’s pain or her own fear that night. Later, a few years after giving birth to another girl, Kerthio knew it was time to have this daughter cut. She was tormented with thoughts that the same thing might happen again. She knew her daughter had been lucky. Some girls in the village experienced serious health problems, some even died. She tried to speak to Maimouna about her anxiety, but her mother became very upset. “Of course you will have her cut. We will not have a bilakoro in the family,” she said. “If you do not do it, then I will.”
Kerthio didn’t dare speak of her fears again. What good would that do? she wondered. Adhering to the tradition was simply a part of life in her village, part of what it meant to be a good and devoted member of her ethnic group and religion. Even if she had been able to express her misgivings, there was no recourse. After all, every society imposed certain standards on women, born from deeply held beliefs, their origins often long forgotten, and in Kerthio’s culture, this was the highest standard. It had been this way for centuries and would continue to be this way forever. She didn’t have a choice.
Unless.
She deferred the ceremony for one year, and then another. Finally one night, unable to sleep, Kerthio made the decision: she was not going to have her daughter cut. She could not, of course, admit this to anyone. Doing so would guarantee her daughter a lifetime of hardship and rejection. A few months later, Kerthio gathered the courage to lie, announcing to her family and friends that she had had the operation performed quietly. Everyone believed her, of course. After all, what mother would ever not cut her daughters?
REMEMBERING THE EXPERIENCE THAT day in the Tostan class, Kerthio shrank in her chair as around her the women continued to speak with an unusual sense of honesty and candor.
“I’ve heard that women who are not cut are able to enjoy intimate relations with their husbands,” Tene was saying. “I’ve heard sex is sometimes less painful.”
As the conversation lingered, a few of the older women in the class grew increasingly discomfited, including Maimouna. “This is our oldest tradition, and it is a religious obligation,” she said with obvious annoyance. “It is not right to be discussing it.”
Among the other women, Maimouna held a power as forceful as a thunderstorm; an admonishment from her was usually enough to silence a discussion. But the women continued their conversation, during class and beyond. In hushed voices, while waiting in line at the well the next morning, over meals in the evening heat, on quiet walks to the market, they discussed their understanding of the tradition, of why exactly they did it. They’d always been told it was a necessary means of finding a good husband—and it was generally assumed that men expected it—but in reality, it was the future husband’s mother who acted as the gatekeeper of the practice. She was the one who insisted a woman be cut when it came time to choose a wife for her son. Men never spoke of it. But even more so, everyone believed it was required under Islam. To not do it, they had been taught, was to defy their ancestors as well as their faith.
But Ndey had said that important religious scholars had attested to the fact that the tradition was not even mentioned in the Koran, and even though the practice is found among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, none of the holy texts of any of these religions prescribes female genital cutting. In fact, the practice is largely thought to predate both Christianity and Islam.
Despite the fact that Ndey was not from their village, they trusted her. She had been a wise, patient, and kind teacher. She’d moved to Malicounda Bambara to facilitate the classes, living in a small room provided to her by one of the families. After this year with them, she had become a treasured part of their community, and the education Ndey brought to the village had led them, they believed, to a true awakening. After all, as far as the women of villages like Malicounda Bambara believed, education was not meant for girls. Of the thirty-five women enrolled in the Tostan class, few had gone to primary school, and those who had did not go far.
But now, through the Tostan program, they had become truly educated. Not only had they learned to read, write, and understand basic math, they’d also come to understand germ transmission, rehydration therapy, and the importance of vaccination. They had been taught leadership and project-management skills and how to conduct feasibility studies for projects in their village, like the soap-making project they’d established, through which many of the women were earning their own income for the first time in their lives.
But most of all, they had come to learn about something they believed might truly transform their lives: the concept of human righ
ts and their own right to human dignity.
WHEN, SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE the discussion of the tradition, Ndey first led a discussion on human dignity, explaining that all people—men, women, and children—have inherent human rights, the women were puzzled. They had been taught as young girls that their role was to be obedient and submissive, at first to their fathers and then to their husbands. Beyond tending to their children and households, they hadn’t any say in how their village or larger community was run. In fact, they had never been invited to village meetings where decisions were made, and even if they had been, they would not have dared to speak. And for many of them, physical violence was simply a normal and expected part of their lives. In fact, there were a few good reasons for a man to hit his wife: if she spoke in public, neglected the children, or, most important of all, refused his sexual advances. Should that happen, or should their husbands insult them, they had been taught to be accepting and patient. Before Tostan, they would never have dreamed of questioning these expectations, or their role in the family or society, as that would have been seen as a betrayal of the group and a desire to set oneself apart from others. Which is why in the beginning they didn’t believe that Ndey’s information—the idea that every person, even women, had equal human rights, including the right to work, health, and education, to voice one’s opinion, and, most significantly, the right to be free from all forms of discrimination and violence—could possibly be correct. If these rights did exist, certainly they applied only to men. Again and again, the women in the class asked Ndey to reiterate what she was saying, to make sure they understood: they too had these rights?