Senegal Makes Progress Against Female Genital Excision
But the practice, called mutilation by most, is still
common in Africa and parts of Asia.
By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2007
NEMANDING, SENEGAL — When Oureye Sall walked through her
village in years past, young girls would flee in silent panic at the sight of
her face. She was the cutter.
She inherited the trade from her mother and
made a tidy profit: a dollar per operation for the practice known locally as
"cleaning," and in much of the rest of the world as female genital circumcision,
or mutilation.
Sall broke each razor blade in two for economy's sake and
used each half until it was too blunt to cut properly. Sometimes she did 15 or
20 operations a day, other times two or three. She has no idea how many girls
she cut in her decades-long career.
"Of course the girls would fight,"
she said of the procedure, in which she sliced off the external sexual organs.
"Of course they would hit you. They would cry, they would kick.
"But
you'd have three good strong women to help you. Someone had to actually sit on
each leg and someone had to control the arms and upper body. We would cover
their mouths. You don't want the neighbors to hear."
'Fear and
alarm'
Isa Toutouri was 9 when her time came. She almost bled
to death.
"You can imagine your heart beating so strongly from fear and
alarm, just before they come over and hold you down, said the 40-year-old, who
lives in a village called Keur Omar Bambara. "You cannot imagine the terror when
they just hold you down, without even touching you yet."
Sall says that
when she cut the girls, sometimes the mothers would inspect their daughters and
say it wasn't "clean" enough. More must be excised. Or sometimes a girl would
bleed so much that she would pass out, and Sall would slap her face and call out
prayers. She claims she never lost any.
The story of how the cutter
changed her mind and gave up her work tells of how a few hopeful seeds blew
across Senegal, ushering in a revolutionary social change that had eluded
Western agencies for decades. With the help of a U.S. humanitarian agency named
Tostan, Sall and others are campaigning to wipe out female genital excision in a
single generation, much as China abandoned foot-binding.
Sall began
attending classes for villagers on health, human rights and literacy, organized
by Tostan, which means "breakthrough." Women at the classes began voicing
concerns that the operation Sall performed was harmful or dangerous, but she
didn't stop. She was convinced that critics of the long-standing rite were
jealous of the money she made from the business.
Yet there was a
pricking doubt. To reassure herself, she went to a religious teacher, looking to
confirm her belief that the practice was required by Islam. He said it was
not.
"In that moment I looked back with so much regret at all the girls
whom I had harmed and asked God to forgive me," she said.
There seemed
only one hope of redemption for all the pain and suffering she had caused: She
joined the campaign to wipe out the practice.
Since the 1950s, the
United Nations has opposed female genital excision as an abuse of human rights,
yet more than half a century later, the World Health Organization and many other
humanitarian agencies have failed to make much headway in eliminating the
practice in Africa.
According to a 2005 UNICEF report, as many as 3
million girls are cut each year in 28 African and Middle Eastern countries. In
some countries, such as Guinea, Sudan and Somalia, 90% to 99% of the population
practices it.
There are varying degrees of excision. In Senegal, some
communities remove the clitoris, others all external organs. If men marry women
of other ethnic groups that do not practice female excision, their wives are
shunned. No one will sit near them, talk to them, eat their food or drink the
water they fetch. Villagers will walk away when they approach, sometimes
complaining loudly of a bad smell.
Sall once cut a woman, about 30, who
was so desperate for acceptance that she was willing to go through the
excruciating pain.
The day the country outlawed the practice in the late
1990s, Sall cut 15
girls.