FGM/Cutting: a Mutilation of the Soul
FGM in Kenya – a Film about Nancy Tomee
by Sara Nason
The Christmas holidays in North East Kenya, are celebrated by the Pokot Tribe as the ‘Cutting Season’. It is a hot, dry time of year on the equator and the tribal land is crisscrossed by dusty paths pounded by cattle herders like the Pokot who are a nomadic pastoral tribe related to the Maasai. The nomadic herders, their necks and arms adorned with beads, are bringing their precious cows to their wife-to-be’s father. The cows are bride price and will be exchanged for the patriarch’s daughter. Deep in the thorny wilderness these young daughters must face ‘the knife’ in preparation for their marriage-sale.
Ostrich feathers flutter in the warrior’s hats as they stride proudly alongside their bony cattle through the market towns. Tall and lean from herding cows and goats through miles of wilderness, they inhabit a world of river, earth and sky. The thorny harshness is occasionally softened by gorgeous desert flowers burning brightly in the sun. They strut gracefully, their athletic legs wrapped in red tartan kilts as they catch the eye of giggling young girls — Is it him? the warrior who will be buying them? Cow tails swish the flies off rumps as men slumped by the side of the road reach for another gulp of the local brew and reflect on the murderous adventures their fathers once had cattle rustling. Warriors still kill for cattle in the remoter areas: animals are insurance against the unpredictability of the seasons and the failure of crops.
Girls between the ages of 12-16 with their genitals cut are for purchase with cows and beer. The wealthy herder-warriors can out bid rivals for the highly prized brown skinned, hard-working and obedient girls — tutored to endure unspeakable hardship in silence.
Some of these herders will be older men who have perhaps 2 to 3 wives already, and perhaps a small tribe of 20 or more children. It is a harsh, polygamous, masculine world where bravery is more highly prized than compassion. Only the fit, the lucky and the ruthless survive.
Young girls excitedly prepare for their rite of passage. The ceremony will transform their status from a young girl in to a ‘mature’ and marriageable woman overnight. What awaits them on their ‘day of celebration’ is for most a cruel surprise. Mothers withhold the truth from their daughters, for it is taboo to speak openly of it. Women’s silence is doubly secured by the threat of violence. For women who speak out can risk beatings or in more extreme cases banishment or even the much-feared accusation of being a foul-mouthed witch. Centuries of silence has been secured this way, or the price paid for speaking out.
Yet whilst Female Genital Mutilation used to be openly practiced and celebrated across many tribes in Kenya, cutting has recently become illegal and is now practiced secretly and underground. The message is ignored by the many nomadic cattle men and warriors in the more lawless ‘out back’, away from watchful eyes. For them it is unthinkable to purchase a wife with their precious cows, unless the girl is cut. The cycle has continued from time immemorial. What would be the reason to change it?
Some young girls will die alone in a pool of their own blood. If the slicing of the exterior genitalia leads to unstoppable bleeding they may be condemned, isolated and rejected by their family as their life fades. Bleeding is believed to be the sign of a witch’s curse.
The girls who survive the intense agony will endure years of unspeakable pain: first when the recently healed wound is penetrated on their wedding night, initially with a cattle horn thrust into their scarred vagina to make passage for their husband. Or the pea sized hole left by the wound will be sliced open with a razor blade as a ‘modern’ alternative. In this surreal Eden, under beautiful flowering desert trees, a woman spends her wedding night in unspeakable agony.
She must also endure the torture without uttering a sound, just as she did when the old circumciser’s shaky hand sliced off her exterior genitals, like carving meat at a butcher’s shop. If she lets out a cry, she will bring shame on her family.
Torn and ragged from repeated openings, those who are too remote or too poor for clinics will endure childbirth with home episiotomies performed by a traditional birth attendant. In an emergency, broken glass, a rusty knife or piece of tin roof can be used to re-open the wound. Even finger nails. Pokot women’s ability to endure pain is unimaginable. At each childbirth they will ‘face the grave’. For young pubescent girls with their hips too narrow to give birth there is little hope. Words cannot describe the fate of the girl-child. I feel it is a discredit to them and the horror of it to even try.
Not long ago, Kenya celebrated 50 years of Independence. Yet in Kenya’s hundreds of square miles of bush, women are trapped in unspeakable suffering. Nelson Mandela said before he died that, “Freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression.” Being cut is a horrific experience for the 3 million African girls who suffer FGM/C annually. (figs. AMREF Health Africa.) The trauma and suffering impacts every aspect of family and tribal life. It impoverishes everyone. According to the World Health Organization, globally, at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone some form of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM/C). Female genital mutilation has been documented in 30 countries, mainly in Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Asia. In Kenya the prevalence of FGM/C is 21 percent of girls. (Figures Amref 2014). See the FGM/C map at the end of this article.
Some girls are no longer willing to face the knife. Or follow their mother’s unquestioned acceptance. There is an awakening. Pioneers of a new generation are having the courage to resist and do the unthinkable: speak their own truth. These courageous resistors suffer the challenges of all pioneers, yet their numbers are growing.
Nancy Tomee, now in her early 20’s is one of the early pioneers.
When I walked into Nancy’s parents’ compound, high on a remote hill in West Pokot, miles from any modern amenities, it was clear that Nancy was driven by a passionate desire for change. She was refusing to have her genitals cut and be sold to an older man for cows so her brother could go to school. She longed for education herself and demanded to be treated equally. I filmed the scene as an extraordinary argument between Nancy and her mother erupted over the washing up, in which she stated she wanted to end the cycle of suffering of the generations of women before her and pioneer a new way. Even if, as she would say, it was normal for women to be treated like animals, she innately knew it was wrong. Many of her generation accepted it as their inescapable fate but Nancy spoke out fearlessly. She was spat upon and abused by those around her, but she stood firm due to her inner conviction that her story would be different.
Nancy was an uneducated girl living in a mud hut in a culture that prized meekness and obedience, but she was a rebel, a brilliant speaker and a fearless taboo-breaker. She told me many years later that her Grandfather, a well-known storyteller had predicted at her birth that she would change her tribe. She was prepared to challenge her whole culture if it meant she could follow her own dream.
It took immense moral courage to say what she did. I filmed her as she declared to the elders and chiefs of her tribe that she would not only empower herself to resist, but others too. She told them she would set “an example”. I realized then, that as a storyteller, it was a unique gift to capture this young leader’s first public speech on film. I was also aware that sharing her story could amplify many-fold the change she desired. Nancy chose to become a role model and inspire hope wherever the need to stand up for one’s own truth is required.
If Nancy, a barely educated teenage girl, in one of the remotest and most patriarchal tribes in Kenya can refuse to become another victim in the chain of abuse stretching back over many centuries then we all can. She dared to follow her deep, innate inner wisdom after observing her mother’s life of suffering from abuse.
Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have and Nancy is a shining example of being true to her own self. Her story is in Africa, but her quest is universal. For it is Nancy’s, and it is mine, and it is all of ours even if at times we may forget.
Nancy’s lion-hearted courage and compassion inspired me to continue beyond that first meeting and the first short documentary. I decided to follow my own heart too and make a feature documentary called Nancy: A One Girl Revolution, shot over 6-7 years, covering her extraordinary journey since the argument with her mother. One of the highlights has been her speech at the United Nations in New York — she hardly knew what the UN was. The hilarious descriptions of New York as seen through Nancy’s eyes as she tells bedtime stories to her younger siblings on return from the UN are some of my most memorable moments!
At a deeper level her story charts an archetypal journey to fulfill her potential as a woman. Whilst it is about resisting FGM, child marriage and violence against women, it is really a story about inner transformation and the quest for inner and outer wholeness.
Nancy is a natural storyteller. Many of her stories describe the betrayal by the women around her: her Grandmother’s attempt to drug her, her parents attempt to cut her by force and the wider damage to her tribe that the violence against women and FGM inflicts. Some stories were so brutal they left me wondering how love could exist here at all and how Nancy had kept her heart intact.
By the time I had met Nancy on that far hill in North East Kenya, she had already been resisting for 7 years or more. She was consciously refusing to perpetuate the ongoing mother-daughter-mother-daughter cycle of abuse, but she was still facing immense pressure, abuse and threats. She was told she was better off dead. Her ability to follow her own inner compass when surrounded by those who threatened her was astonishing. I admired her for her courage to take on her whole tribe, but it was her kindness to others that meant that I too did not give up when the struggle to tell her story was tremendous. For my experience was dwarfed by hers.
She had already run away from home once and it was by supreme good fortune that she had stumbled – a frightened child with tear stained face – into the arms of the wife of a school teacher some 10 hours from her parents’ mud compound. She ended up finding refuge here as a ‘mothers help’ for 7 years until I met her back at her parents’ compound on that far hill being forced to resist once again. She had been allowed to go to school in exchange for housework.
She had witnessed her mother beaten senseless, her teeth knocked out by her father. Like many other women Nancy’s mother was forced to cut trees for charcoal, it was the only way she could provide an income for the family and satisfy her husbands demands. Everything she earned with the children in mind was taken by her husband - this often meant she and the children went without. Eventually Nancy’s father abandoned her and she was left to support the children alone. Later her mother was able to express her despair to Nancy about what it was like being treated like a worthless object. Her impotent rage was clear.
As a child it had become obvious to Nancy that cutting was no initiation into the good that life offers or for that matter the traditionally feminine values of love, connection, nurturing, and compassion. Instead it was a brutal rupture with childhood so abrupt and so violent that it was and is a total betrayal of a child’s trust. This is later compounded by teachings by elder women that to be a good wife is to be meek, obedient and silent. As a film maker I have no way of knowing the depths of fear or the anger women must hide from eachother because so much is unspoken and concealed. Yet Nancy’s mother’s deep pain and outrage was so clear when she tells Nancy her story in her own words.
It is often reported that trauma and shock can leave the victims of FGM feeling confused and uncertain of who to trust, for it is an absolute betrayal of trust from one’s closest care givers. It may disconnect a woman from her deeper Self because she has not been able to trust her own inner voice. She is taught that her feelings are of no value and her body belongs to the tribe, not herself.
What could be a greater violation of wholeness than to physically cut away the genitals of a woman? It is a symbolic act: cutting off, controlling and subjugating the body – the connection to pleasure, to life, to wholeness. It attacks women at the core of her being. The mutilation of the body is also a mutilation of the soul.
A young girl undergoing FGM is betrayed by her mother and betrayed by her father. She is told to be brave and to avoid shaming them whilst she is neutered like an animal and sold to another man. How can she truly trust another human being, let alone herself after such a trauma? She has been taught that honouring her feelings is too dangerous, too much of a challenge to ‘society’. Yet this will not prevent feelings from happening. Treated more as a domestic servant than a wife, she will be unable to express them. Does this lead to women numbing the connection to their soul, to the voice within that guides, leading to a disconnect from their own deeper wisdom?
Violence against women hurts everyone. Women are at the centre of family life, they give birth and in traditional societies like the Pokot, will exclusively bring up the next generation. They are the building blocks upon which the whole tribe depends.
Traditionally it is taboo for Pokot women to speak out about the negative impacts of FGM, so this lack of open discussion can be a major obstacle. Indeed as awareness spreads, the main barrier to change may be what social psychology calls pluralistic ignorance. This is when a majority of tribal members privately reject a social norm like FGM/C, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that most others accept it. Everyone thinks everyone else believes, and the fear of rejection, ridicule or worse results in a conspiracy of silence. It takes courageous opinion leaders to change social norms because it is often at great personal risk. Indeed Nancy and others have faced many threats, even death threats in the past. However if open discussion can be supported, more would speak up about the profound damage done to women as well as the impoverishment of family, tribe and the natural world.
That is why I feel Nancy’s story could have such an impact. She has been prepared to break the taboo of silence, but not just for herself but for all the female children of her tribe as well. Her courageous story on film also demonstrates how everything is connected and how violence against women, poverty, FGM, child marriage, bride price, deforestation, over-population & climate change are all part of the same story.
Women’s subservience and subjection to tribal customs means that a woman’s insight, experience and wisdom goes unheard. Her knowledge as a mother and wife is not welcomed to balance men’s opinion nor is her experience and wisdom able to act as guide for the tribe.
FGM damages trust and the sexual and emotional connection between men and women. Marital relationships are often loveless. What is the impact on children?
Women and children suffer and die needlessly. Cutting can spread HIV, and cause death or multiple birth complications as well as side effects such as fistula. All the health impacts, affect the whole tribe as children are left motherless, or ill.
If our bodies hold records of trapped emotion and trauma, which is now considered to be true by a growing number of health professionals, then thousands of women worldwide are holding trauma within their bodies because of this attack on the core of their femininity.
Research shows that gender inequality is linked to poverty and low levels of development. Girls are not educated and tend to be married early and have more children than more educated women. Tribal development is retarded.
Men control women’s income. Why would a woman who cannot own what she earns work hard, when she and her children will not benefit from her labour? Especially if her husband drinks and beats her — something that is commonplace.
Polygamy and early marriage lead to population expansion where one man may produce over 20 children. This leads to pressure on resources and, ultimately to children’s poor health and even, ultimately, starvation.
Nancy’s Mother explains how abuse and being cut off financially by her husband led to her resorting to cutting trees for charcoal in order to survive and eventually choosing to try and force her older daughter Nancy to be cut to raise money to fund her son’s education. This story is repeated over and over again by other women in the area. Impoverished women pushed to the edge resort to tree cutting and charcoal making or cutting their daughters as a last resort. In North East Kenya the seasons are already changing. Cutting trees causes erosion and rivers to dry up. The problem is being continually compounded.
My direct observation is that the fate of women and Nature is entangled within the Pastoral tribes. Violence against women can directly impact Nature too, scarring Mother Earth, not just women’s bodies. The tribes’ unique blend of Christianity, Islam, Animism, superstition and indigenous wisdom means that there is still a strong spiritual connection with Nature threaded throughout their lives and ceremonies.
Unlike the Abrahamic religions, the Pokot Tribe believe in spirits which inhabit mountains and groves of trees. However, I have observed that the brutality towards animals and women is not something I have observed in other indigenous tribes which are connected to Nature, unless there is similar multiple generational trauma and abuse.
As a film maker and artist, my opinions come from direct observation. My fear is that a combination of resource scarcity, population expansion and poverty as well as the powerlessness of women (demonstrated in the practice of FGM, child marriage and polygamy) is leading to a crisis in the region. Climate change is adding to a scarcity of resources and an unravelling of the ecosystem. This combination could lead to economic collapse. Empowering women may help to avert this breakdown on multiple levels although it may take generations to change and heal.
Women’s anger is dangerous when it goes underground, yet in this case it could be harnessed to propel rapid social change. As Kofi Annan says “There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women”.
My hope is for a new Wangari Maathai, someone prepared to empower women and plant trees. As she said “We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and, in the process, heal our own—indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder.” My hope is that Nancy’s story on film can encourage awareness of this need.
In this remote part of Africa, it is clear women are feeling the inner call for change and a desire for a deeper participation in their world; a desire that women in the West also seem to be articulating louder and louder.
Anne Baring, Jungian Analyst and author of The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul says - “The voice of the long-silenced Feminine is needed to heal the Wasteland—the current state of the planet and the lives of the billions of men, women and above all, children that are blighted or destroyed by human cruelty, greed and ignorance. Centuries of conflict between nations, religions and ethnic groups have brought us to the present time when we must find a way of transcending this archaic pattern of behaviour or risk destroying ourselves as a species. Will we choose to imitate the patterns of the past, or can we embrace the truly immense transformation of consciousness we will need to make if we wish to forge a different future for coming generations?”
Western women’s psyches are also wounded by the legacy of a not so different past. Our experience is less nakedly violent. However, the “Me Too” exposé has revealed the abuse that exists beneath the veneer.
Pokot girl resistors like Nancy are the first generation to resist. It is these women who will determine Africa’s future. Another African woman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says “I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. Nancy’s young son was on her first 5-day march across the Pokot area to spread awareness that FGM must be abandoned. She is committed to bringing up her son differently to any generation of men before him. She offers hope.
Nancy and I have laughed together about how many cows men would pay for her. However, to most Pokot men, outspoken women like Nancy with ‘opinions’ are ‘already spoilt’. Yet Nancy’s hope is that her work will ensure her son grows up in a generation of boys who demand that their wife and children are uncut and educated. Her ability to tell stories with a life-affirming exuberance is part of her charisma, and I am convinced that her Grandfather’s prophecy will be true. For she has also redefined what it is to be a ‘married’ woman in the Pokot. She and her ‘husband’ or partner are equals. She has transcended the message she grew up with that girls must sacrifice their life for boys and a wife’s value is only in her beauty, fertility and obedience.
Nancy has awakened my awareness too. I am more aware of the subtle messaging within my own culture. I grew up with a similar message to Nancy’s even if the context was within a loving, educated and affluent western family. I have had to learn to value myself because I inherited an identity mostly associated with being valued through becoming a wife and mother. I have had to learn that I am good enough even though I am childless and unmarried. Like Nancy I have had to learn to honour my feelings and trust them, as well as to find the courage to voice my own truth, even when unpopular. Even in our socially aware times I have had to face stereotypes both socially and within my own programming.
Bethany Webster writes about why it’s so critical to the world for women to heal what she calls the ‘Mother Wound’. Similar to the sister wound in that women are forced to compete by a system which values women not by any inherent value in her life itself, but by the value she brings to others. She tells us patriarchy severely limits a mother's ability to initiate her daughter into her own personhood, because in a patriarchy, a mother has been deprived of her own. It sets her daughter up for self-sabotage, her son for misogyny, and a disrespect for the mother "ground" out of which we come, the earth itself. She also tells us if unhealed the pain goes underground and into shadow, “where it manifests as manipulation, competition and self-hatred. Our pain can be grieved fully so that it can then turn into love, a love that manifests as fierce support of one another and deep self-acceptance, freeing us to be boldly authentic, creative and truly fulfilled.” ( What Is the Mother Wound by Bethany Webster)
On Bethany’s website she quotes Eckhart Tolle saying “The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”
Africa is desperately in need of women leaders, and women who understand this and can tell stories about empowered women and embody it too. In Wangari’s words we need to “give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder”.
Nancy is the granddaughter of a storyteller. She is a natural ambassador for change. Yet she faces many obstacles and some from ‘her own side’. After Nancy's triumph over the pressure to be cut she was faced by new trials. For no sooner had the story of her incredible courage been shown worldwide than her very success caused competition. Rivals competing for status tried to dislodge her and her allies. These were often women working to stop FGM themselves.
Her mother began to feel betrayed by the lack of bride price that she would have received from Nancy’s suitor which would have helped support the family when desperate. Her sister, who tragically had chosen to be cut despite Nancy’s pleas, was angry. Nancy was excluded by rivals and on one occasion had stones thrown at her for not supplying money she did not have. Life is not easy for a pioneer.
After reading the Jungian Analyst Anne Baring’s books and listening to her seminars on the Deep Feminine, I feel Nancy’s story is just a small part of the potential for a worldwide awakening and reconnection with the Divine Feminine. As Anne Baring has said, a rebirthing of the Feminine is required in response to the need for a new consciousness triggered by the social and ecological crisis of our time, a crisis that has its roots in the repression of the feminine principle over some four millennia. She believes our species is in the process of a huge evolutionary leap in consciousness.
Carl Jung’s words, quoted by Anne, resonate deeply with me when he says, “The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man” and “Woman is faced with an immense cultural task; perhaps it will be the dawn of a new era.”
Nancy’s rebirthing of her tribe’s attitude to women requires strong support for old beliefs are deeply entrenched. One hundred years on from the Suffragettes, the new frontline is in Africa and the Middle East where women may have the right to vote, but not always ownership of their bodies, or even their lives.
Yet there are remarkably few films about African feminist heroines, least of all from remote African villages, especially from patriarchal tribes like Nancy’s.
Interviewing the men of Pokot is like excavating the deeper subterranean rivers that run beneath the surface of my own western culture too. It is like peeling the layers to reveal the naked fear of woman within the male psyche which is behind the need to control women. Especially interesting is how the male fear of women is projected on to foul tempered and opinionated women (angry women) who are condemned as witches.
Men assume without question that uncut women are promiscuous. As one Mutatu driver bluntly put it, “the clit is hot for sex and must be cut off”. In short women’s sexuality must be controlled. The Pokot man’s uncensored expression of these fears helps to reveal the deeper psychological roots of misogyny.
Women who experience difficulty in childbirth (which is caused by complications associated with FGM) can be accused of promiscuity because their challenging labour is considered to be a sign of their guilt or wrongdoing. These women may even be forced to confess to a false adultery. These fear-filled projections of witchcraft and promiscuity are echoes of our own not so distant European history, where innocent women were burnt to death at the stake, accused of being the accomplices of the devil.
Equally, Clitorectomies were performed on ‘hysterical’ women within the last 100 years and in the Middle Ages men locked up the wives ‘they owned’ with chastity belts for fear of women’s libidinous behaviour. It was only in 1918 with the Representation of the People Act that British women over 30 gained the vote, after a long and bitter struggle by the Suffragettes.
Western women’s hearts and psyches are only just recovering from the legacy left by the persecution and devaluation of the feminine. When Nancy came to London, she was lucky enough to meet Lady Diana Dollery, the granddaughter of Myra Sadd Brown. This famous Suffragette had thrown a brick through the war office window and had gone to prison for it. Nancy and Diana genuinely connected because they both understood the courage it took to be the one to put their head above the parapet. Nancy visited Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue and was incredibly encouraged to see for herself that she was part of a global movement, and was not alone.
Nancy A One Girl Revolution is not intended to make a unique heroine of Nancy but to inspire others to realize the potential within themselves — for it takes a huge collective effort to change a culture. Like ripples from a stone thrown into water, each girl can impact other girls and as ripples join other ripples a movement for change becomes unstoppable. The film is about these role models: one girl at a time, leading to a girl revolution!
It has been humbling to witness this awakening in the remotest and poorest part of Africa, yet to see it also reflected worldwide. I have gradually become aware that what I am witnessing in a remote part of Africa is a microcosm of a shift going on across the world where women are challenging the old values and social customs underpinning a society that is out of balance and disconnected.
Human beings worldwide are driven by the search for happiness, aliveness, connection and ultimately as Jung would say, integration and wholeness. Thanks to the Suffragette Movement western women alive today are perhaps the first generation for thousands of years that has enjoyed the chance to consider fulfilling that and pursuing their personal talents, dreams and potential...
Stories tend to find you, even if it takes time to unravel why. That is the case with Nancy’s for it is unusual for a privileged British white girl from an upper middle-class family to connect with an impoverished black girl from a remote rural village, living in a mud hut. Yet our connection is genuine. There was something in me that recognized Nancy’s story as my story too. I had experienced gender discrimination and it had left me feeling disempowered and voiceless, but here was an uneducated girl from the remote African hills standing up despite the very real threats facing her. What struck me then and now, is that her story has an archetypal, universal quality, for in many ways it is every woman’s story; it is a story for all those women who have the courage to say ‘no’ to abuse and aspire to live more fully. Nancy leads the way simply because she follows her own inner wisdom even when it is at odds with the approval of those around her.
Nancy’s example triggered my own realization of the huge task women have and my small part in it. In Anne Baring’s Magnum Opus “The Dream of the Cosmos” she says “The recovery of the feminine principle has been like the excavation of a precious treasure.” Nancy began my own excavation of this treasure. It is what unites us.
It is not NANCY’s revolution but a girl revolution and that means all of us. She is one of us; it is all our story. Mine too. Tectonic plates are shifting at a deeper level. Yet whilst Nancy has the courage to speak up, and say ‘no’, what makes her story important is that this personal awakening is a potential within each one of us. Her story simply articulates the path towards it and perhaps to wholeness as well.
This article can also be found here:
https://www.anne-baring.com/anbar80_FGM.html
References:
Anne Baring's Website - Awakening to The Divine Feminine.
https://www.annebaring.com/anbar34_awakeningtofeminine.html
Anne Baring's Website Awakening Women Awakening World
FGM/C in Africa