This morning, while zoning out as someone gave a talk about malnutrition in Moore, I watched a pair of 3-year-old girls playing in the dirt next to their mothers. They were really cute. They both had chubby cheeks; one had droopy eyes that gave her a permanently sleepy countenance, and the other was already so beautiful, she looked like she should be in commercials. They were both wearing little skirts. At one point, one of the girls sat down on the ground facing me. It was kind of impossible not to notice the lack of underwear, but it took me a second to realize what I was seeing, or rather, not seeing. Why did something feel wrong?
Female excision is a widespread practice around Burkina. It is slightly less common in large cities, but most people that I've asked about it in my village estimate that at least 95% of the woman living here have some degree of genital mutilation. Type I involves removal of the clitoris only; Type II involves removal of the inner labia, and Type III means everything is cut off and all that is left is a small hole for peeing and having babies. I think the girls I saw had Type II.
Excision is technically illegal in Burkina, and there are regularly campaigns to educate the population about why it's a bad practice. Signs at my health clinic depict an old woman with an angry face holding up a razor blade while a terrified-looking naked girl races to her mother. (Public health signs here are a lot more graphic than law in America would allow. I guess they have to be, given the sub-25% national literacy rate, yikes.) The reality, though, is that parents/senior family members are almost always responsible for their own daughters' excision. The age at which they do it depends on the region. In a book I read about the Ivory Coast, it happens the night before a woman gets married (double yikes), but here I think it usually happens before the girls hit 7 or 8.
Why do they do it? Whenever I ask people, all they say is "it's tradition." I estimate that my village is about half Muslim and half Christian, so it is clearly not just a religious question, nor is it limited to any one ethnic group. I gave a series of sex ed classes to some of my students this spring, and on the pre-test, one of the questions was "true or false: excision facilitates childbirth." A lot of students, girls and boys, thought it was true. The answer is, of course, a resounding false. When I told them so, several of them got upset and said I was wrong, trying to argue with me. But in fact, third-degree excision causes such a risk of delivery complications that the women are forced to travel long distances to hospitals in major cities when it's time for labor because the facilities here aren't adequate to deal with them.
Other arguments for excision involve preventing promiscuity or infidelity on the woman's part, as if that were the real problem. Some people suggest that having a clitoris will make young women want to become prostitutes, and I once heard a man say that uncircumcised women would be "insatiable." (Uh, why would the men not want that, then?) Oddly, I once heard about a man saying that the reason that men need mistresses is because their uncircumcised mistresses satisfy them more than their circumcised wives ever could.
Other side effects include risks of HIV or other infection from unsanitary blades, leading to sterility or death. Since it's not being performed by doctors, there's the general risk of the agent doing a bad job and causing wounds that won't heal or that cause pain into the woman's adult life. Plus, depending on the degree, it can cause tearing and re-injury during intercourse and childbirth. Oh mah god, cringe.
If national law and campaigns aren't enough to change the tradition, what is? The law doesn't accomplish much on its own, because really, how are they going to enforce it. During the sex ed lessons, one 16-year-old boy said he thought that a man can't penetrate an uncircumcised woman, so excision is necessary for the propagation of our race. Clearly, then, education is not going far enough, either. Other students as old as 20 or 22 were shocked when I told them that excision is not only not practiced but extremely maligned in pretty much all developed nations. If this country were actually serious about recognizing this as a human rights violation and putting an end to it, then surely even Burkina could do better than this.
At the end of our lesson about excision, we asked the students to raise their hands if they thought that a practice that causes pain, infection, sterility, infidelity, and death and gives no apparent benefit to society should be stopped. Most of the students raised their hands, but somehow, 4 or 5 boys sat still. When asked why, they said, "I'm not a woman. It doesn't affect me." That, my friends, is why this country remains stuck in the 1500s. Sucks to be a woman in Africa.
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