However Long the Night

by Aimee Molloy

  This declaration set in motion a decades-long discussion about human rights, and nearly twenty years later, the UN General Assembly continued what Eleanor Roosevelt had started with the adoption of two legal covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Both reinforced the universal declaration, a moral declaration committing its parties to work toward the granting of labor rights, the right to an adequate standard of living, and freedom from forced marriage, as well as people’s right to life, freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the right to a fair trial.

  While these documents were an important and groundbreaking step in addressing the issue of human rights for all individuals, a growing awareness began to take shape in the 1960s about the many ways in which women in particular were subject to discrimination. As the feminist movement began to crystallize, women activists from all corners of the world called for a global commitment to specifically address the protection and promotion of the rights of women. The UN responded, taking steps to outline women’s rights more specifically, culminating in a decision in 1974 to prepare a single, comprehensive, and internationally binding instrument to eliminate discrimination against women. Five years later, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted. The CEDAW, as the convention became known, went into effect on September 2, 1981, faster than any previous human rights convention. It focused on three key areas: civil rights and the legal status of women, including a woman’s right to vote, hold public office, and be free of discrimination in education and employment; reproductive rights, including the right to reproductive choice and family planning; and cultural factors influencing gender relations. This last point required ratifying nations to address the social and cultural patterns that perpetuated gender discrimination, affirming that men and women have equal responsibility with regards to their family life, education, and employment.

  As the most comprehensive and detailed international agreement to seek the advancement of women, the CEDAW was celebrated among women’s rights activists around the world and would go on to become one of the most highly ratified international human rights conventions in history, having the support of 186 nations (the United States not among them).

  When Molly first came upon this information, she was surprised to learn that Senegal had ratified the CEDAW in 1980 and put it into effect in 1985. By accepting the declaration, the Senegalese government agreed to incorporate the principle of equality of men and women and to ensure the elimination of all acts of discrimination against women.

  Eight years later, in 1993, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was adopted by the United Nations. This document proclaimed that all women should be free from all forms of violence: physical, sexual, and psychological, including family violence, marital rape, and dowry-related violence.

  “This is it,” Molly thought, as she read through these documents. “This is what I’ve been looking for.” Here it was in black and white—a way to help women understand that despite certain customs and accepted norms, they at least had the legal right to demand protections against abuse and discrimination.

  Of course the big question was how to use these instruments. She looked everywhere to try to find examples of other organizations in Africa using human rights in village education programs. As far as she could determine, they had never been applied on a practical level or implemented as a means of changing social norms and expected behaviors.

  The question remained: Could she somehow find a way to apply these seemingly abstract principles at the level of an African village, where women clearly remained subject to the type of discriminatory and abusive practices these documents specifically protected against?

  MOLLY WOULD SOON GET the chance to attempt to answer this question. At about this time, a Tostan staff member named Lala gave birth to her fourth child. Each of her pregnancies and deliveries had been difficult, and her doctor had warned her that if she carried any more children, she could face dire health consequences. On her doctor’s advice, Lala had agreed to have her tubes tied after the birth, but when she woke up from her cesarean section, she learned the procedure hadn’t been done.

  “Why not?” Lala asked the doctor, exhausted and incredulous.

  “I went to get your husband’s permission,” the doctor explained, “but he refused to grant it. He believes it is a wife’s duty to have children.”

  Startled and angered by the doctor’s decision, Molly began to investigate its legal basis. Working with a local human rights lawyer, Sidiki Kaba, who later became president of the international Federation for Human Rights, she sought to understand if the CEDAW might be applied in this case, to help the doctor understand how his decision had violated Lala’s rights. A few days later, with copies of the CEDAW in hand, Molly and several female researchers nervously walked to the hospital to meet with its director.

  “Did you know there is a legal human rights instrument that has been ratified by the government of Senegal which allows for women to decide on health issues related to their own bodies?” Molly asked from across his desk, piled high with papers. “And did you know that a doctor in your hospital denied this right to a female patient, and her life is now at stake because her husband did not agree to a procedure she needed?”

  “It’s true,” the director admitted. “We have always required a husband’s permission for such procedures. It’s also true we’ve never had anyone question this practice before.”

  Molly’s three colleagues leaned forward as she prepared to deliver the lengthy and emotional defense of Lala she had prepared.

  But it wasn’t necessary. Peering over his glasses, the director held up his hand to silence Molly. “I recognize that you’re right. I promise we will listen to the woman and decide in favor of her health in the future.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Molly says. “I couldn’t have imagined that sort of response. To be honest, I was expecting we’d be run out of the hospital. But this is when I knew. We may have found a very powerful tool for improving women’s health.”

  14

  Ngir Sunuy Doom yu Jigéen (For Our Daughters)

  In 1995, after the participatory research was complete and Molly was in the midst of writing the new module on women’s health, she was approached by three Tostan staff members who had been part of the research team. They wanted to talk to her about an idea they’d been debating: including a discussion about the tradition of female genital cutting in the new health module.

  Molly was taken aback. “Of course I knew by this time just how sensitive and secretive this topic was,” Molly says. “My first response to the idea was ‘Are you crazy? No way.’” Since first learning about the custom of cutting girls’ genitals to prepare them for marriage, she had gone on to have a greater understanding not just of the tradition but also of the complicated politics that surrounded any efforts to stem the practice, especially if those efforts were attempted by a Western organization. Some Africans condemned the mere idea that Westerners should become involved in what they saw as a very African problem. Knowing that Tostan’s success rested entirely on local trust and a deep overall respect for traditional culture, Molly was extremely hesitant.

  She’d already run into enough trouble, given the fact that she was the director of an American organization based in Senegal. As Samir Sobhy, the UNICEF representative in Senegal at the time, recalls, “Molly had made some enemies simply because she is not African. Members of other NGOs were envious of her success and the support she got from our UNICEF office and the fact that a foreigner was getting funding they believed should have been going to local NGOs.”

  But the three Tostan women, all of whom themselves had been cut, were adamant. During their research, they’d been approached several times, often in quiet corners after the large group discussions had ended, by women ready to share their misgivings about the tradition. While these women be
lieved it to be required under Koranic law and were reluctant to say too much about it, they were curious, they admitted, if some of the problems girls faced were perhaps due to the procedure and not solely to evil spirits. They talked about seeing their daughters hemorrhage afterward, how some young girls had even died. They had themselves experienced their own difficulties during sexual relations with their husbands and certainly during childbirth. They wanted to understand more.

  “I just don’t think this is an issue that Tostan should take on,” Molly responded. “People will not be comfortable with the idea of an American working on this.”

  But the Tostan women wouldn’t let the topic die. “Tostan is hundreds of Africans, Molly. This is not about you, the only American in the organization,” one said weeks into their debate. “We are African women who need to discuss this issue. We have suffered and some of our daughters have died. The question of FGC is a human rights issue, and we believe it’s time to discuss this openly. You have a choice. Will you support us on this?”

  IT WAS AN EXPERIENCE with Zoé that helped Molly make up her mind. By this time, Molly’s daughter had grown into a beautiful, vibrant nine-year-old. But life was not always easy for Zoé, growing up in Thiès, the biracial daughter of two Americans. “At this time of my life,” Zoé, now twenty-seven years old, recalls, “It was impossible to pinpoint my own identity. I wasn’t completely black or completely white and was much lighter skinned than all of my friends. I was officially American, but I grew up in rural Senegal and considered myself Senegalese. I could speak fluent English, French, and Wolof by the time I was five but have a hard time saying what my first language is. When asked to describe myself, or say where I’m from, I know that I’m not just one word. I’m a whole paragraph. I’m proud of this now, but as a child it wasn’t easy. Like all young girls, I just wanted to fit in.”

  It was this desire to fit in that prompted nine-year-old Zoé to approach Molly with a very serious concern one day, after spending an afternoon with a few Senegalese girlfriends. One had reported that her cousin was preparing to be cut. When Zoé asked her to explain, her friend said the tradition was an important part of Senegalese culture that a girl had to experience before she could be considered ready for marriage. Girls who were not cut would have a hard time finding a husband.

  “I don’t understand why you haven’t done this for me,” Zoé said to Molly, on the brink of tears. “Why would you keep me from this? Do you think I’m not brave enough to endure it?”

  Molly was stunned.

  “Zoé, sit down,” she said. “Do you know what cutting involves? Do you know what they do to you during this procedure? Sit down so that I can explain everything to you.”

  Greatly alarmed, Molly rushed to her room to get the pictures she’d collected of the different types of FGC to show Zoé and explain exactly what happens, as well as the consequences that follow for the rest of a girl’s life. Molly could hardly get the words out fast enough.

  Zoé’s eyes widened as she poured over the drawings and listened to her mother. Imagining the pain of having the most sensitive organ of her body amputated, her hesitation grew. Molly explained what she had learned from women who had seen their daughters hemorrhage or who had to treat painful cysts resulting from botched operations.

  “I didn’t know this, Mom,” Zoé said in a hushed voice. “I just didn’t know.”

  “It blew me away,” Molly now recalls. Here her own daughter, an American, was feeling the pressure of the tradition. “It was a very decisive moment in my own understanding of the power of FGC, and I knew what I now had to do.”

  Over the next several months, Molly threw herself into her work, searching for how best to bring information on women’s health—including a discussion of human rights and FGC—to village women. When she felt she’d finally gotten it right, she went back to the director of AJWS and explained that thousands of women interviewed had asked to do a module on their own health before discussing that of their children.

  “We agree you should always listen to the people whom you are serving, so go ahead and do this module first,” the director responded.

  The new module on women’s health, including a discussion of human rights—Module 7—was piloted with several thousand women in twenty villages, in four regions of Senegal. The reactions to the sessions were almost immediate. Just a few weeks after it had been completed in the villages, Molly began to receive feedback that made her head spin. “I was so surprised,” she recalls. “I heard that the women from one village formed a delegation to confront a man known to beat his wife, explaining that this was a violation of her human rights and they would no longer accept it. I learned of the women’s excitement, because for the very first time they understood the phases of pregnancy and could now plan for the day they’d give birth.” She received poems from women in response to the module. “Before, we felt unsure and oppressed, we walked with our heads lowered! But now our heads are held high,” wrote the women in one village, in a poem they entitled “Human Rights.”

  Women from the village of Ngaparou wrote another poem entitled “Who Is Module 7?” reading, in part:

  Ah! Module 7!

  You came to Ngaparou and chased away illness from our families.

  Come, Module 7!

  Help our Senegalese women know their rights,

  especially their right to health.

  Help them to learn about their bodies.

  You, women of Ngaparou,

  share your knowledge with your daughters,

  especially at puberty.

  Speak to them about menstruation, about sexuality.

  Don’t be ashamed any longer!

  Women of Senegal, answer Module 7’s call.

  “The women’s stories were keeping me awake at night trying to understand what was happening,” Molly says.

  But nothing could have prepared her for the call about to come a few weeks later, in late June 1997.

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT you mean,” Molly said into the phone to Malick Gueye, a Tostan coordinator from the region of Thiès.

  He said it again: the women of the Tostan class in a village called Malicounda Bambara had, after completing Module 7, convinced the people of their village to end the practice of female genital cutting. It had been a long process, he explained, involving many months of intense discussion and debate.

  “The facilitator in the village, Ndey, had me interview many people yesterday because I couldn’t believe it myself. The women have clearly made up their minds, and no girls were cut this year.” Malick paused. “Molly, I never thought anything like this could happen. But this is real. This is really happening.”

  15

  Yeewu-Yeete (Showing the Way)

  News of the Malicounda Bambara decision traveled fast, capturing the attention of villagers throughout Senegal. “It was such an anxious and uneasy time,” Molly remembers. “We all knew things could go either way—the decision would either be understood as an act of bravery, or the women would be ridiculed and ostracized. All we could do was wait and see, and pray for the best.”

  At first, the coverage appeared positive, portraying the Tostan participants of Malicounda Bambara as intelligent women who had made a thoughtful decision based on their new knowledge of human rights, the negative health consequences of FGC, and a desire to end a practice they had finally come to question.

  But as Molly had feared, it wasn’t long before another story began to emerge.

  As reported in some newspapers, many villagers were shocked and felt angry and betrayed by the women’s pronouncement. Accused of being under the spell of Western influence or of having been paid to stop the tradition by an American, they were labeled “revolutionaries” and accused of turning their backs on tradition. An article in Le Soleil, a Senegalese daily newspaper, was accompanied by a cartoon of women burning down the “circumcision hut” and a young girl behind them saying anitche (thank you) in Bambara.

  With every dispara
ging article, the men of Malicounda Bambara grew increasingly incensed and Kerthio Diawara, Maimouna, and the other women of the Tostan class increasingly discouraged. As one of Kerthio’s male relatives said angrily to her, “When we agreed to your decision we never dreamed you would be putting your intimate parts out in the village square. These are private matters that should not be discussed publicly. If you had just made the decision and quietly carried on we would have no problems. But you are discussing secret things related to our culture that make us look bad.”

  A few weeks after the announcement, Molly returned to Malicounda Bambara to check how the women were faring. The exuberance of their previous discussions was gone. “They are calling us revolutionaries and traitors to our culture, but we are not these things,” said Maimouna. “We are making peaceful change in an effort to promote women’s health. We are not attacking our traditions. We are trying to change a practice that has dangerous health consequences for our daughters.”