“Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.” Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Screaming cakes losing the FGM message
At the beginning of the last week, we ran
the gauntlet of a travesty masquerading as art; it was art that was tasteless,
ignorant, stupid and worthy of excoriation.
Indeed, we need to bring to light the
horrors of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Circumcision but there is
no excuse to treat this matter with levity and caricature if you have any
inkling or knowledge of what it entails, who is affected, how entrenched it is
and the obstacles in culture, traditions, norms and values that need to be overcome
to consign these acts to oblivion.
Such was the display of utterly, utterly
bad art when on a cake made almost to the form of Sarah Baartman [Wikipedia] who in the early 19th Century was the unfortunate freak show
in Europe.
The cake was cut into in Sweden by people
who should know better of the suffering of women less fortunate than themselves
to their entertainment and the artist with face painted like the cross between
a golliwog [Wikipedia] and a piccaninny squealing and crying at each cut in
the supposedly virginal area of the cake representing the act of circumcision.
It plumbed the depths of distaste and
disgust but more importantly, it drew no attention to FGM or the plight of
women who suffer from the debilitating effects of FGM, rather it became an
odious platform for the artist, galvanised the global rebuke of the Swedish
Culture Minister with a petition
online asking for her to
apologise for her cretinism to culminate in her resignation.
Mind Of Malaka does this matter the
greatest justice with her blog titled Of Cakes and
Clitorises.
FGM is NOT a Single Story
Now, I have been engaged in a rather robust
discussion on Twitter on the matter of FGM where I have a rather pragmatic
approach to the subject.
Having taken a stance on the event of the
Swedish cake one should be careful not to be railroaded by what is turning out
to be a single narrative of FGM thereby conflating the desired end of FGM with
every societal, traditional, religious, economic and social strand as if the
practitioners are a homogeneous entity – they are not.
Looking at the prevalence
of FGM [Wikipedia] across Africa [Graphic from Wikipedia], the practice
cuts across 30 countries from West Africa, through Central to East Africa and
veering up to the North of Africa where in Egypt it affects 97% of females but
you then wonder why the countries to the West of Egypt that have affinity with
its peoples like Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco do not practice FGM.
However, this practice appears to date
back to the Pharaonic times, in essence there is a mountain of entrenched
traditions and customs behind this activity that might prove immovable even to
those with the very best intentions.
Beyond this, each country and within these
countries we have communities that implement any of the 4
types of FGM [Wikipedia] cutting with Ethiopia, Gambia and Guinea
implementing the most intrusive Type IV mutilation that could affect 73%,
60-90% and 99% of females in those countries respectively.
Whilst Gambia and Guinea are close
neighbours in West Africa, Ethiopia is as remote as you can get from West
Africa as you wonder about the correlations between these countries.
Tough work ahead
Much as we would that FGM is outlawed,
banned, proscribed, abrogated or even criminalised, we are nowhere near seeing
that desire in reality, the practice is rife, the practitioners cover a broad
spectrum of people from the enlightened to the oblivious and resistance to
being sacrificed on the altars of traditions and customs is at best patchy and
within relatively minor tribes.
Outlawing FGM in Africa requires political
will and concerted efforts at education to persuade the core practitioners of
alternatives if possible or ameliorating measures need to be implemented to
monitor and regulate the practice.
Applying the political theory of the Overton Window [Wikipedia] to FGM, there are quite a
number to whom the prospect of outlawing FGM is unthinkable whilst the cake
eaters of Sweden and certain activists on this matter are on the other side of
the spectrum where the idea is popular and they are ready to make it policy.
As for so many new ideas because the
concept of the eradication of FGM is relatively new by reason of its extant
prevalence, the unthinkable has to become radical, then acceptable before it is
regarded as sensible from which point it might become popular and consequently
it might become policy.
Developing approaches to eradication or
regulation
The age-old value systems that aimed to
deprive females of sexual expression for the fear that overarching patriarchy
might lose complete control of their womenfolk needs to be visited with
temperance because the diehards might well prefer to die out than to see needed
change threaten their station.
There is no easy solution to this matter
and it continues to this present day, girls sacrificed to long held belief
systems many put at untenable risk to life, health and welfare – each of these
need addressing as much as the aggressive push to make FGM history.
There are proactive and reactive
approaches to consider much as some might deign to bludgeon and others might be
indifferent. These customs being part of the societal framework of the affected
communities has both men and women involved in the propagation of the acts as
their norms and no greater purpose is served if any side is castigated as if to
blackmail them into submission to the intended goal of the eradication of FGM.
Proactive alternative
On the proactive side, the Guardian
newspaper Fighting Back [The
Guardian UK] section filmed a documentary about changing attitudes to FGM
amongst the Pokot people [Wikipedia]
of Kenya where parents, daughters and activists worked towards adopting
alternative womanhood initiation rites.
- The reassessment of the value of females in those communities.
- The need for the education of females with the promise that they can be of greater significance to their communities than the immediate value of a dowry mostly comprised of cows and beer
- Addressing the apparent sense of loss of a girl is not circumcised and married off
- Addressing the communal stigmatisation that accompanies girls who have refused to be initiated through FGM
- Persuading the elders, men and the community to accommodate new thinking that makes FGM insignificant and unnecessary as a precursor to marriage
- Removing FGM from the process of initiation into womanhood.
One striking thing that came out of the documentary
was the recognition that girls who have decided not to follow tradition might
harm themselves though it was also encouraging that honour killings prevalent
in other societies where the price placed on female chastity is astronomically
high did not present itself in the Pokot narrative.
Reactive for safety
On the reactive side, this came as a
result of a botched
FGM activity [AkinBlog.NL] in
Nigeria in 2012 that led to the loss of life by exsanguination – the poor girl
bled to death in hospital, the perpetrators being her grandmother and other
womenfolk relations having run out of options after crudely mutilating the girl.
It goes without saying that FGM entails
radical intrusive surgery outside of professional supervision with crude
implements in possibly non-sterile conditions.
What is interesting is the
news [The Guardian UK] that
as many as 100,000 women in Britain have undergone the FGM procedure. Much as
it is illegal in the UK, ethnic minorities who one would expect are
enlightened, emancipated, educated and well aware of the complications that do
result from FGM procedures are adhering to the practice and are not persuaded
of the need to change.
The news story highlights a more
interesting development. There is a part of these ethnic minority communities
that are concerned about surgical procedures carried out by the unschooled that
they have procured the services of medical practitioners to perform the FGM
procedure.
In my blog written in February, the death
of the girl was preventable if the FGM procedure was not carried out and where
I ran the gauntlet of serious opposition and the amazingly implacable was when
I suggested that as long as FGM continues to exist in whatever community until
it is eradicated, the girls made to suffer such procedures must have at the
minimum a safe environment under medical supervision where the procedure is
carried out.
Bridging the contrary and the compromise
In my view, this is not to find a
workaround that will give FGM a new lease of life halting the drive to have it
eradicated but it is to bring the activity under regulation, supervision and
safe environments to deal with the immediate complications of administering FGM.
This is by no means comfortable, but the
practitioners who have not been persuaded of the need to stop FGM will procure
the services wherever they can – it is only sensible and it will be utterly
curmudgeonly to refuse girls safe environments for FGM when the battle and the
war to abolish FGM is far from won.
I extended that thinking yesterday with
the suggestion that FGM education be aggregated into primary healthcare
delivery systems and having brought FGM under medical supervision, it offers
the opportunity to address this matter as elective surgery with outcomes and
consequences all of which must be preceded with levels of counselling,
consultation, possible success factors and the repercussions for maternal
welfare which can be debilitating on quality of life for the person, her
offspring and her community.
In effect, if we are cajoled into adopting
a single story on FGM so as to treat it as a homogenous procedure practiced by
a non-diverse people of Africa with apparently similar traditions and customs
such that activism simply presents an unyielding single solution without
working out different compromises for the varied communities that will help
those immediately affected, we would be no further than what we saw in Sweden
and we might well go up there and eat some cake.
