African women, including Senegalese hip-hop star Sister Fa, are
leading a successful campaign against the widespread practice of
female circumcision
Tracy McVeigh
Sunday February 6 2011
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/feb/06/female-circumcision-sister-fa
In Africa, if you play music in an open space, any music, then people
will generally come. "It is the way to reach people, to bring them
together." So says Sister Fa [http://www.sisterfa.com/" title="Sister
Fa], a Senegalese urban soul and hip-hop star who has been lending her
voice to a remarkable new drive against female circumcision in 12 of
the countries worst affected by the practice across the continent.
The first report into a United Nations project that began in 2008 has
shown remarkable success rates with more than 6,000 villages and
communities in six countries already abandoning the practice of female
genital mutilation [http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/25/
female-circumcision-children-british-law" title=" female genital
mutilation] (FGM) ? also known as cutting or female circumcision ?
with the numbers growing every month.
The change is down to a unique approach with a proper understanding of
local culture, says Sister Fa, who has seen her own home town of
Thionck Essyl, where she herself was "cut", abandon it altogether.
Mutilation is practised in 28 African countries, where 140 million
women have been subjected to the brutal practice and a further two
million are at risk every year.
"We're using music because the young people are the future. They need
to understand that they are not alone," Sister Fa told the Observer
from Dakar, where she is on a tour called "Education Against
Mutilation". Other cultural ambassadors are performing similar
journeys.
"It is when you are alone, when you think: 'How can I not cut my
child? She will be marginalised, pushed in a corner'," Sister Fa
continued. "When the cutting ceremony is organised for the village and
one girl is not there, everyone will know that she is not there, the
whole village knows she is not cut. Then that girl is treated like an
animal, you can't get married, you can't cook or pass water to someone
for them to drink.
"So usually the NGOs come in from outside, foreigners maybe, and they
try to do a demonstration and say: 'We don't want you to do this', and
the people think: 'Why should we stop? This is our culture, our
tradition, who are you to come here once and try to put pressure on
us? This is our life, go away.' But if you reach communities and keep
coming back and keep coming back, then we are finding you can change
things."
It was her Austrian father-in-law who persuaded Sister Fa that it was
time for her to speak out. "He said: 'It's time. It's time to break
the taboo.' It wasn't easy for me. Even now, when I talk about these
things in Senegal, if I am interviewed on the radio, then people will
call in and not talk nicely, threats, tell me I must not talk against
these things."
But African women talking to African communities about mutilation is
exactly the way to change things, says Nafissatou Diop, co-ordinator
for the UN project, a joint programme between the United Nations
Population Fund and Unicef.
Diop said 12 years of mistakes by well-meaning NGOs had been closely
examined and the lessons learned.
"We understand that what some charities were doing before was wrong,"
said Diop. "They were looking at the supply side and targeting those
people who were doing the cutting, but taking them out of the system
doesn't stop the demand, nor does outsiders going into a village and
setting up a demonstration with an anatomical model of a woman's body
that shocks everyone in the village, telling them their daughters will
die and then you go away never to come back. It does not suffice.
"We are realising that you need to sustain what you are doing, open a
dialogue, non-judgmentally, put things in local context and bring them
to a voluntary abandonment of FGM. When this type of intervention is
driven by and within a community, it is not seen as being a 'foreign
influence'."
In Ethiopia, the prevalence rate has fallen from 80% to 74%, in Kenya
from 32% to 27% and in Egypt from 97% to 91%. With the help of strong
voices like that of African women like Sister Fa, the ambition is to
wipe out mutilation within the next generation.
"We reach the young people," said Diop. "The women, but the men too.
In their head we have to make them believe they can marry a girl who
is not cut. Believe me, the FGM would stop tomorrow if the men wanted
it to."
In Europe, too, lessons of the programme need to be learned, say
activists. Sister Fa now lives in Berlin. "Cutting is still here, a
lot of women are in prison, but cutting is still here, nothing is
changing," she said. "There are a lot of laws to punish people, but
it's prevention we need."
Today is International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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