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Mutilating Africa's Daughters: Laws Unenforced, Practices Unchanged

Mariam Bagayoko was a powerful and respected person in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Now she is shunned and criticized by many of her neighbors. Ms. Bagayoko used to perform what the West has come to know as female genital mutilation, a practice inflicted on more than 90 percent of girls in Mali.

In 1988, she began to get visits, sometimes twice a week, from Kadidia Sidibe, the director of a Bamako women's group opposed to the practice. At first, Ms. Bagayoko hid when her visitor approached. But after seven years, Ms. Sidibe's photos and videos of mutilated girls with serious health problems finally persuaded her to stop.

Today she runs a group of former circumcisers, as they are called in much of Africa, who talk to Mali's women in prenatal care clinics and at markets, and train teenagers to speak in schools. When she tries to convince women not to mutilate their daughters, Ms. Bagayoko says, she may be accused of betraying their culture for Western money and depriving girls of the chance to marry, thus condemning them to poverty.

Earlier this month in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Bagayoko met eight other former circumcisers from various countries who now work against the practice. The meeting was organized by Equality Now, a New York-based group that finances African women's organizations that fight female genital mutilation. At least 130 million women in Africa have been circumcised, and two million more girls undergo the practice every year in 28 African countries, mostly in the continent's north and central areas.

Female circumcision is just beginning to get attention in Africa, and about 13 countries now punish the practice with jail terms. But with the exception of Burkina Faso, where the government has vigorously enforced the laws, the laws are largely irrelevant.

Even in some places where it is illegal, medical personnel perform circumcisions in government hospitals. The only solution is to change attitudes on the village level, and that's where people like Ms. Bagayoko come in.

About 15 percent of those who undergo genital mutilation, mainly women in the Horn of Africa, suffer the most dangerous and extreme version, infibulation. Isnino Shuriye, who was also at the Nairobi meeting, performed infibulations among the Somali community in northern Kenya. She would cut off the clitoris and all the labia of 7-year-old girls. She would sew up the girls to be totally smooth, with a pencil eraser-sized opening for menses and urine. Each girl's legs were bound together for weeks so scars could form. Ms. Shuriye used no anesthetic.

All types of female circumcision have huge psychological and physical dangers. Some girls bleed to death during the operation, or die of tetanus or infection shortly after. But for infibulated women, the dangers are even greater. Many infibulated women suffer constant infections and other health problems because urine and blood back up. Their husbands must bring a knife to their wedding night to cut them open. Childbirth often is fatal for infibulated women and their babies, and their wounds make them much more vulnerable to the AIDS virus.

But the health problems that convinced Ms. Bagayoko never budged Ms. Shuriye. Members of the group Womankind brought doctors to talk to her, but she felt that they were just trying to plant Western ideologies. Ms. Bagayoko said that although many women suffer gynecological problems, "people say it's because of bad spirits. It's not attributed to the circumcision."

The practice damages girls in other ways. Sophia Noor of Womankind Kenya says that many girls are so traumatized by the pain that they never go back to school after they are circumcised. The economic and social effects of girls' leaving school by age 7 are incalculable.

Despite these problems, the practice thrives. Many Muslims, and not only Muslims, believe uncut women to be dirty. Women who can feel sexual pleasure are considered impossible to control and so are unmarriageable. "I know many families that have decided not to circumcise their daughters," says Ms. Bagayoko. "But they can't talk about it openly lest their daughters be shunned."

One strategy that has proved effective is persuading religious leaders to dispel the widespread, erroneous belief that Islam calls for circumcision. Ms. Shuriye finally laid down her knife after Womankind brought liberal Islamic clerics to see her, who convinced her that the practice was nowhere in the Koran. They also told her to apologize to her victims and offer them camels as compensation. Ms. Shuriye has no camels to give but has been begging forgiveness from the women she cut. "I now feel like I've committed a sin against God," she says. In Mali, where local groups are very active, one of them, Sini Sanuman, just convinced one of the country's most important Islamic leaders to begin speaking out against it — a huge victory.

More than 14,000 people in Mali have so far signed a pledge to combat circumcision. Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, says that African attitudes seem to be evolving more rapidly on circumcision than on other human rights problems.

"Progress won't happen without the community groups,"` she says. "But it's the one issue where we're seeing a tiny, tiny light at the end of the tunnel."