Ascent of Women (14 page)

I went back in 2004 to update the story because the women had extended their campaign to reform harmful cultural practices to child marriage. Could they do it again—turn the tide on a practice that was grossly damaging but fully accepted, even expected? I was in for a lesson in the power of youngsters.

The day that changed everything had started out like any other school day in the remote village of Polel Diawbe in northern Senegal. Khadia Ly, ten, was sitting in her Grade 3 classroom when suddenly there was a ruckus at the door. Khadia’s uncle pushed his way past the teacher, yanked Khadia from her desk and announced that her school days were over. Then he hauled her off to prepare her for a marriage to her twenty-two-year-old cousin. The uncle was acting on orders from her father, an immigrant worker in Ivory Coast. Her mother had had no say.

Khadia’s future was no secret. Although she was only ten years old, she’d be forced to have sex, and once she started to
menstruate she’d soon be pregnant, as was the custom for all young girls. But what happened next surprised everyone in Polel Diawbe, a village of 2,666.

After the little girl had been taken away, Khadia’s friends stormed out of the school to confront the village chief at the community administrator’s office. Her teacher followed. The news travelled from one thatch-roof hut to another, and within minutes, centuries of silent obedience gave way to a call for change.

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 talked 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.