Prometheus 6

Mutilating Africa's Daughters: Laws Unenforced, Practices Unchanged
By TINA ROSENBERG

Mariam Bagayoko was a powerful and respected person in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Now she is shunned and criticized by many of her neighbors. Ms. Bagayoko used to perform what the West has come to know as female genital mutilation, a practice inflicted on more than 90 percent of girls in Mali.

In 1988, she began to get visits, sometimes twice a week, from Kadidia Sidibe, the director of a Bamako women's group opposed to the practice. At first, Ms. Bagayoko hid when her visitor approached. But after seven years, Ms. Sidibe's photos and videos of mutilated girls with serious health problems finally persuaded her to stop.

Today she runs a group of former circumcisers, as they are called in much of Africa, who talk to Mali's women in prenatal care clinics and at markets, and train teenagers to speak in schools. When she tries to convince women not to mutilate their daughters, Ms. Bagayoko says, she may be accused of betraying their culture for Western money and depriving girls of the chance to marry, thus condemning them to poverty.

Earlier this month in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Bagayoko met eight other former circumcisers from various countries who now work against the practice. The meeting was organized by Equality Now, a New York-based group that finances African women's organizations that fight female genital mutilation. At least 130 million women in Africa have been circumcised, and two million more girls undergo the practice every year in 28 African countries, mostly in the continent's north and central areas.

Female circumcision is just beginning to get attention in Africa, and about 13 countries now punish the practice with jail terms. But with the exception of Burkina Faso, where the government has vigorously enforced the laws, the laws are largely irrelevant.