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D R A M A++Q U E E N

What's the worst thing your mother ever did to you? Send your submission to theDrama Queen for a Day contest

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T A B L E++T A L K

What brilliant solutions have you come up with to solve daily hassles? Join the "Mothers of Invention" discussion in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Class warfare, Part Two
By Ira Eisenberg
How a California high school became a battleground in the struggle over what America's students should be taught about homosexuality
(06/02/98)

The showdown at San Leandro High, Part One
By Ira Eisenberg
A battle between parents and gay-rights advocates may be a preview of the country's next great culture war
(06/01/98)

Infant Revolution
By Dawn MacKeen
The children who are giving Nike a dressing down
(05/29/98)

No turning back
By Sallie Tisdale
At what point do you need to tell your child he can't come home again?
(05/28/98)

My son, the cross-dresser
By Lisen Stromberg
Why are tomboys cute but "janegirls" weird?
(05/27/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINKARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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AFRICAN AWAKENING | PAGE 2 OF 2

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Female circumcision has gained increasing condemnation worldwide. In the United States Fauziya Kassin-dja's struggle for asylum to escape genital cutting in her native Togo received widespread press and was recently recounted in the book "Do They Hear You When You Cry?" But in Senegal, the practice has gone virtually unquestioned. Even to discuss it in public was rare. Last month, a woman in Diabougou village told me, "We didn't talk to the men about this; this was secret."

Yet in several villages, countless men and women, speaking through interpreters, described an astonishing awakening during the past two years. It began in part, they said, when a Senegalese organization called Tostan arrived to start a community education program. Financed partially by UNICEF, Tostan's mission was to promote literacy and lifelong learning, and to engage women more fully in the economy. The program provided men and women with practical and informal training in subjects alien to most African schools, such as management skills and independent problem solving, and then slowly moved on to touchier subjects such as women's health.

Female circumcision was in fact rarely mentioned. But it finally became unavoidable as Tostan discussions began tackling topics such as infection, stillbirth, deaths in childbirth and sexual pain. Eventually, men and women began to acknowledge the devastation their own traditions might be causing.

To Americans, these truths are so obvious they don't warrant discussion. But in Senegal, that revelation has meant peeling away lifetimes of discretion and secrecy. "We noticed there were a lot of health problems, with girls bleeding, and when they got married. But we didn't associate this with circumcision," said Maimouna Troare, 60, who heads the women's organization in Malicounda, a village about 55 miles southeast of the capital, Dakar. Local women's groups such as Troare's have been essential to expanding the program to educate people about the practice.

In the past, American feminists and other outsiders seeking to liberate African women from a barbaric practice have been shocked to find that their outrage was often met with indifference and even defiance from the women. Molly Melching, an American who began Tostan's program in 1988 and is now the only non-Senegalese in the organization, says she understands why. A tall, charismatic woman who dresses in bright caftans made by Senegalese tailors in Dakar, Melching has the trust of locals, who regard her -- as one woman said -- "like a sister." From Africans' standpoint, Melching says, angry posters depicting girls with their legs splayed and blood spattered alienated parents, who believed they were protecting their beloved daughters from harm.

"Western feminists came in 20 years ago and approached female genital mutilation talking about orgasms," says Melching, who moved to Senegal 23 years ago as an exchange student from the University of Illinois and never left. She remembers her own revulsion when she first heard about circumcision rites from her fellow students at the University of Dakar. In Tostan's program, she says, "We say nothing about orgasms. Women don't want to talk about that. It's irrelevant. All we speak about is health."

But sexual pleasure, of course, is not only relevant, it's often the crux of the matter. As the girls' mothers, themselves circumcised, know, cutting a woman open on her wedding night makes sex agonizing. But the culture's overriding concern was to try to stop girls from having sex before marriage. "Marrying a virgin is very, very important," Troare says. "You can see: If she isn't a virgin, there is no wedding feast."

Having reported on female circumcision from various countries in Africa, I'd heard the old arguments before. Ask why circumcision is practiced, and the most common answer refers obliquely to sexual pleasure -- that uncircumcised girls might have sex before marriage, and that, in the past, girls were circumcised to keep them faithful while their husbands migrated to jobs or went to war. Recently, a family deep in Ethiopia told me of almost identical convictions, including that the clitoris was unclean and grew too big for women's comfort.

It's not only rural Africans who hold such beliefs. In a bustling urban neighborhood of Cairo a few years ago, I witnessed a fierce argument over female circumcision between a taxi driver, who thought his wife's sexual interest might be greater if she had a clitoris, and a waiter, who worked mainly in five-star hotels in the Arabian Gulf and who believed uncircumcised women were sexually reckless and often lesbians.

The ritual is so integral to community traditions that it had to be universally applied or scrapped completely. Leaving people to decide for themselves was bound to fail since, for one thing, marriage depends on it. It would take men as well as women to make it work -- a major undertaking, considering that men had been mostly hidden from circumcision rites and rarely talked to their wives about health problems. What's more, the village clansmen were scattered throughout the area, and everyone had to be involved in the decision.

A critical figure in the campaign in Ker Simbara was Demba Diawara, one of the imams, or Islamic priests. At the age of 64, Diawara had enrolled in Tostan's classes to learn to read and write, and finished them convinced that circumcision was ruinous to girls' health. Diawara was the perfect emissary: a forceful raconteur with a crackling wit who speaks in complex proverbs. Most important, he was a man, and a religious imam. In a country that's 90 percent Muslim, the imams' opinion about female circumcision was crucial to whether the village decided to end the practice.

For three months, Diawara walked from village to village in the searing heat, dressed in his green rubber thongs and weathered white robe, pleading with all Ker Simbara's relatives to abandon female circumcision. "We went back and forth, back and forth, until everyone agreed," said Diawara. "Even if you learn something is bad, if it's your tradition, you can't just get up and stop it."

Ironically, the decision to free girls from genital cutting has not been without its cost to women. In one village, Aissa Tou Sarr sat under a big tree with two of her former assistants and described how she had lost one of the few reliable sources of income for Senegalese women -- circumcising girls. In a green and white robe with matching headdress, Sarr told me how she had learned her skill from her grandmother, who had circumcised her at 15, and in turn she had circumcised her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters. She recalls being horrified when Diawara walked into her village of Samba Dia to try to persuade the people to join the decision. "I was really angry. I couldn't stop thinking, 'How am I going to take care of my family?'"

With her assistants, Sarr had cut about 200 girls each year during the rainy months, Senegal's circumcision season, when children are home from school for the harvest. For each operation, the parents paid her a free lunch, a bar of soap and 5,000 francs (about $8.60). There was plenty left over after she'd paid her overhead: bandages, rubbing alcohol and razor blades.

It was a job that gave Sarr an integral role in the community, one that was transformed with cruel suddenness into vilification. In educational plays the villagers created, the circumcisers are now portrayed as money-grubbing butchers. It was a painful thing for her to witness at first, but under some pressure Sarr came to believe that circumcision is truly hazardous. "I decided to stop when I learned that this might cause infections and sterility. I didn't want to be a cause of that."

Although circumcisers have become scapegoats, they were simply upholding the cultural norm. In fact, while some women have spearheaded the movement against female circumcision, others have been among its staunchest defenders. Time and again, women told me about having seen someone bleed uncontrollably or lose a baby. Yet their insistence that circumcision would protect their daughters from wantonness, and the fact that uncircumcised girls might not marry, kept the illusions alive.

Leaving aside discretion, it's difficult to ask circumcised women about sexual pleasure. As one woman said, "I feel I have full sexual pleasure with my husband, but then I wouldn't know what it is to be uncircumcised." Then she added, "I cried when we made the decision to renounce this. It was the end of a very long tradition."

Just as Tostan's two-year education program began meeting success, its grant from UNICEF expired, and Melching is planning to try to raise funds in the United States next month. Yet even if Tostan's consciousness-raising sessions catch on across the country, it's not clear whether it can ripple through enough villages and towns to make a significant dent in female circumcision in Senegal, let alone across Africa. Egypt and Burkina Faso both have laws against female circumcision, yet most women are still circumcised in those countries.

In a visit to a neighborhood outside the seaside town of M'Bour, just a few miles from the village of Malicounda, it became clear how difficult the battle for the rest of Africa will be. In the courtyard of a housing complex, three women and a man sat in the late afternoon sun under a clothesline hung with freshly washed robes. When Melching broached the subject, they erupted with anger, shouting at her in Wolof, Senegal's national language. "This is like stomping on our tradition," yelled Mame Fatou Diatta, 33, her eyes blazing. "I'll hold to my traditions until the end of time."

Next to her, Cherifo Daffe, 64, backed up her rage with his homespun Muslim beliefs. "Our religion says the smell isn't good," he says, referring to the clitoris. "It must be cut out. We abhor anything that's dirty about the body."

Over the next quarter-hour, the argument became increasingly vociferous until suddenly Fatou Diatta challenged Melching to bring her Tostan classes to the neighborhood. For Melching, it was a triumphant moment. "You'll see," she said quietly in English. "In a few months, they'll be saying something different."

In the meantime, in villages across Africa, girls continue to be mutilated -- a point that was painfully obvious as I watched several young women act out a play in which a circumcised girl bleeds to death. Among the players was Buya Ba, the 15-year-old who was circumcised just before the Ker Simbara repeal. Before the performance began, Buya told me she was resigned to her decision. "I felt I was obliged to do this," she told me. "The important thing is, nobody makes fun of me now." Yet a few minutes later, she jumped up to take her part -- and with gusto, the girl who last year begged for a circumcision lashed out at the fictitious circumciser for putting girls' lives in danger.
SALON | June 3, 1998

Vivienne Walt is a regular contributor to Salon. Her last piece was on the Rwanda genocide trials.