(I had to split it into 2 parts and I’m putting
part 2 first-so read the part above this before J)
Kenyan History on FGM:
In
Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s there was a lot of controversy on the issue. Top
colonial folks tried to stop FGM however they only stirred things up and
created a lot of anger within the people. Christian missionaries, according to
Wikipedia, forbade people from practicing it for two reasons. Number one
because of medical concerns and number two because they saw it as ‘highly
sexualized’. The Kikuyu (the main ethnic group) did not appreciate it to say
the least. One missionary woman was murdered in 1930 after speaking out against
it. In Kenyan history, 1929-1931, this period is known as the female
circumcision controversy. It is interesting to look at it from the Kenyan
perspective. Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya’s 1st Prime Minister) wrote in
1930 that “ The real argument lies not in the defense of the general surgical
operation or its details, but in the understanding of a very important fact in
the tribal psychology of the Kikuyu – namely, that this operation is still
regarded as the essence of an institution which has enormous educational,
social, moral and religious implications, quite apart from the operation
itself. For the present it is impossible for a member of the tribe to imagine
an initiation without clitoridoctomy. Therefore the ... abolition of the
surgical element in this custom means ... the abolition of the whole
institution” (wikipedia). Support was also coming from the women themselves. A
missionary in Meru, Kenya said it was an entirely female affair where the
women’s council saw the girls become women. They saw it as a necessary
tradition in the rite of passage to becoming a woman.
In
1956, under pressure from the British, a council of male elders in Meru, Kenya,
announced a ban on clitoridectomies. This was followed by more than 2,000 girls
charged over the next 3 years with carrying out the procedure on each other
with razor blades. This was done in defiance and in protest against the
interference with women’s decisions for their own rituals. Since 1994, several
countries have enacted legislation against FGM. President Moi of Kenya issued a
decree against it in December of 2001.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) estimated in ’97 that 168,000 girls living there had undergone
FGM or were at risk. Something I found really interesting was “Fauziya Kasinga,
a 19-year-old member of the Tchamba-Kunsuntu tribe of Togo, was granted asylum
in 1996 after leaving an arranged marriage to escape FGM; this set a precedent
in US immigration law because it was the first time FGM was accepted as a form
of persecution. Performing the procedure on anyone under the age of 18 became
illegal the following year with the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital
Mutilation Act. The Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act was passed in
January 2013 and prohibits knowingly transporting a girl out of the country for
the purpose of undergoing FGM. Khalid Adem, who had moved to Atlanta, Georgia,
from Ethiopia, became the first person to be convicted in the US in an FGM
case; he was sentenced to ten years in 2006 for having severed his two-year-old
daughter's clitoris” (Wikipedia).
Here are some statistics on FGM and an update
that I read in the Kenyan paper, The Daily Nation:
UNICEF
said there was a dramatic reduction in cases of FGM in the 29 surveyed
countries. Among the 29 surveyed countries, Kenya and Central African Republic
have the steepest decline. It is now rare among the Kalenjin, Kikuyu and Meru
tribes but at the same time, 95+% of Somali and Kisii girls are still being
cut. “Practice is becoming less common in slightly more than half of the 29
countries studied” UNICEF reported. In Kenya and Tanzania, for example, women
aged 45-49 are approximately three times more likely to have been cut than
girls aged 15-19. They said the prevalence has dropped by about half in Benin,
CAR, Iraq, Liberia and Nigeria but then there are countries where there is no
discernible decline such as Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Sudan or Yemen. Somalia has
the highest percentage in the world at 98%.
Since 2003 the United Nations has sponsored an
International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, held every 6
February.
If you want to read more on it, here are 3
good articles I found:
- National
Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130726-female-genital-mutilation-united-nations-unicef-report/
- BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22186436
- Lastly, one from
UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org/protection/57929_58002.html
It’s school time for me in 30 minutes in fact; I
wish you all a very happy end of July and I leave you with a quote sent to me
by another PCV that I really enjoy:
“I
get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a
time. Sometimes it makes planning my day difficult” –EB White
Kisses from Kenya,
Zabet
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