SIERRA LEONE-WOMEN: Circumcision Divides A Nation

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lansana Gberrie

FREETOWN, May 23 1996 (IPS) - The 14-year-old girl had just given birth to a dead baby when the hospital labour room was overwhelmed by a terrible odour, recalls Dr. Olayinka Koso-Thomas.

“The girl had developed serious complications — in medical terms we call it vestico vagina problems — the direct result of genital mutilation,” Koso-Thomas told IPS. “We are still battling to have the thing fixed. Her urinal organs are seriously affected.”

The experience was so compelling that this week Koso-Thomas, who has been quietly campaigning against female circumcision for more than a decade, finally came out into the open and organised a seminar to discuss the problem. The meeting was remarkable for the frankness with which the issue — previously taboo to raise in public — was discussed.

A female paramount chief from the southern Bonthe district, the heartland of the ‘Bondo’ society — the name given to womanhood initiation rites of which genital mutilation is an integral part — confessed that she herself is not circumcised but gives freedom to her subjects to do so.

“That may sound an unusual admission but it’s fairly understandable,” says Koso-Thomas, president of the Sierra Leone Association for Women’s Welfare, a local NGO. “Paramount chiefs are given a fee anytime these women want to practice their rites and it’s an integral income generating activity. That’s why most will resist its abolition. Maybe if the government should start paying them salaries, their minds will change.”

But as she herself admits, the chiefs are not the most serious obstacle. Female genital mutilation is performed on an estimated 90 percent of women in Sierra Leone, by women, and is a deeply ingrained custom — a badge of honour even.

Koso-Thomas dates its beginning to the 1880s when a woman paramount chief, Madam Yoko, founded the ‘Bondo’ society. However, historians believe that Yoko merely popularised a much older tradition.

Compounding the problem is the fact that it is most commonly practiced by the people of the provinces — or those who retain close contact with traditional life. In contrast, those fighting for its abolition are, like Koso-Thomas, from the minority Freetown-based Krios, descendants of freed slaves.

“I’m a member of the Bondo society and I’m proud of it,” says Sally Kamara, a university final-year political science student. “There is a sense of cultural aloofness in this campaign. Our culture must be respected.”

A scathing editorial in the ‘New Citizen’ on the seminar was even more categorical. “What the organisers (tendentiously) call female genital mutilation is actually known as the Bondo society in Sierra Leone… The Bondo society is not just genital mutilation, but the business of female circumcision has been upgraded among the 13 of the 14 tribes in Sierra Leone as an agency of socialisation.”

The paper continued: “The Bondo bush is a venue where young girls are taught the social mores related to the society in which they will grow up… To attempt to use external and un-African arguments to destroy a whole culture and beliefs will be firmly resisted.”

Not all papers have shared the conservatism of the ‘New Citizen’ in commenting on the seminar. ‘For Di People’ for example has been challenging the Bondo society — not on the ethics genital mutilation represents — but the serious health threat it poses for women.

However, voices of opposition here are frequently stigmatised as wayward elements influenced by the West. During presidential elections earlier this year, cultural conservatives used the power of the Bondo tradition to flay those regarded as timorous in support of the practice.

Presidential contender John Karefa Smart was portrayed as one of those. Married to an African-American, opponents suggested that his wife would use her influence to ban the practice.

When President Tejan Kabba recently nominated Amy Smythe, a Krio, to head the Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs, a section of the press and parliament opposed her on the grounds that as a non-Bondo member she would not understand the problems of rural women. She got the ministry only because Kabba firmly backed her.

In a country where women account for 60 percent of the population, any proposed government campaign against circumcision could have a serious backlash among those who see the Bondo society as an affirmation of womanhood.

“Most of these are illiterate rural women with strong attachment to the culture. Assuming that the campaign against female circumcision goes through, how will the government convince such women?,” notes Thomas Gbow, a high court judge. “It will be political suicide for a democratically elected government to even suggest that.”

But Koso-Thomas insists that her group is soldiering on. “In a sense we have scored a lot. Previously even highly educated women wouldn’t encourage you to raise the issue but now, since some of them attended (last year’s) Beijing women’s conference, their attitudes have changed. We can now discuss it openly, and we hope to positively influence the grassroots women by doing so.”