‘Some people say I bring shame on my community’
Dublin-based Ifrah Ahmed underwent ‘excruciating’ female genital mutilation in her native Somalia, and now she is risking her safety to lead the fight to ban the practice, she tells Liadan Hynes
‘YOU know when you get shocked by electrics? That’s how it feels. It’s really hard to describe. It’s so painful.” Ifrah Ahmed was eight when she and nine other girls who lived near her were subjected to female genitalia mutilation, in her home just outside Mogadishu in Somalia. “I grew up in war, and there was nothing,” Ifrah tells me as we sit in her Dublin home. “The only thing I knew was bombing and killing.”
Growing up, Ifrah and the other girls had no idea of what was in store for them, yet the practice was considered custom in her native country; 98 per cent of Somalian women and girls undergo this treatment, something which Ifrah, through her charity the Ifrah Foundation, has now dedicated herself to eradicating.
“I remember being held and tied down,” she says now. A lively talker, when we come to this part of her story, there are long pauses between each sentence. “There is no medical procedure,” she explains, adding that she was cut with a scissors, by a doctor. Her grandmother, who with her father reared her, was with her.
“My grandmother was holding me. And it was really, really, really painful. There was a medical doctor, he had a scissors, needles and razors. When he cut three people, he would pour hot water on the blade, and then go on to the next. I remember my hands being tied, and screaming.”
Afterwards the girls, whose legs were tied together, had to lie where they were for 40 days. Going to the bathroom was excruciating, Ifrah recalls.
“Because of the cutting and the sewing, when you wee it’s very bad. Imagine you cut yourself and you put lemon on it. Pain that cannot be described. It’s very difficult.”
Ifrah’s wounds were level three — the most severe form of female genital mutilation.
In the film about her life, A Girl from Mogadishu, made by Mary McGuckian, we see Ifrah arriving in Ireland in 2006; she was almost 18, she tells me. On leaving Somalia, she had thought she was going to Minnesota, where her aunt, who funded her trip, lived. In fact, the people her aunt had paid to get her niece out of war-torn Somalia had different plans.
When her social workers in Dublin began processing her refugee status, Ifrah was brought for a medical examination. In the film, her doctors are visibly shocked when they witness the extent of the physical damage Ifrah has suffered. Seeing their consternation, Ifrah wonders if she is ill; have they discovered something in her blood tests? Her realisation that they are horrified at what she has suffered, and her subsequent own dawning horror, is one of the most moving parts of the story.
Ifrah moves rapidly from in some way accepting such brutality to a determination to try to stop this happening to other women.
“For me it was a normal practice; ‘this is our culture’,” she explains now. “But we have to change. Living in Ireland gives me the voice. I want to be the voice and not the victim.”
While Ifrah doesn’t expand on her ‘culture’, this crime against girls and women has been variously described as a rite of passage by families and communities who believe it to be a necessary preparation for adulthood and marriage, or attempt justification of it for hygiene and aesthetic reasons.
Campaigners argue it is carried out to control women’s sexuality — that the coercive removal of part of young girls’ genitalia, especially the clitoris, is done to control virginity before marriage and fidelity afterward, and to increase male sexual pleasure.
An estimated three million girls worldwide are at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation every year
What Ifah did next was extraordinary. Far from home and traumatised, she nevertheless almost immediately began her campaign to ban FGM, initially reaching out to her community.
“In that place where we were living, we had made a little home for ourselves,” she says of the refugee centre where she originally lived in Dublin. “We made a little family. We are from different countries, but we have been through FGM in different ways. The moment I had my check-up, I thought ‘oh my God, what happened to the other girls?’ I remember going back to the place and speaking to the other girls.”
The women shared their stories, one woman describing how she had been cut with broken glass.
Shortly after her medical examination, Ifrah underwent surgery to try to alleviate some of the problems she had suffered.
Rather than being overwhelmed by the dawning realisation of just how wrong what had happened to her and her friends was, Ifrah was immediately energised.
“People say ‘how did you move on?’ I say ‘you can’t carry your past always. You have to think positively. And you have to think of a way to make a difference’,” says Ifrah, whose natural charm and deep reserves of strength and energy would seem to make her perfectly suited to her career as an activist. “If I think only of my past, I would never move on, and I would never do anything for myself. For me it’s important to move on and have the strength to do something for myself and for other girls.”
Not all of her friends felt the same.
“I felt like let’s do something, and they were all like ‘no no no’,” she says.
Unlike the others, she was not afraid to rock the boat. “I said ‘you know what, I’m going to do it’.” First, Ifrah, now 31, gathered together the Somalian community in Dublin, to talk to other women about what they had experienced, and to encourage them to see that FGM must be stopped. “I wanted to know how they feel and how they were treated.”
Not everyone welcomed her actions. She began to receive calls and messages, threatening her, telling her to stop.
“Some people felt I was bringing shame on the community. I never care about anybody,” she says stoutly.
The threats didn’t stop her, but she has taken precautions for her safety. “That is why nobody knows where I live,” Ifrah explains. “And I only have a select number of friends, and they know that rule number one is that they cannot give my number to anybody. Rule number two, they cannot give my address to anyone.”
To raise awareness, Ifrah organised a fashion show with a friend, a beauty pageant titled Miss Ethnic Ireland. A Facebook page was set up, which became the origin of the Ifrah Foundation,
Sammy Leslie, of Castle Leslie, now a good friend, whose home provides a place of refuge when Ifrah’s work becomes too taxing, helped her to turn the foundation into a registered charity.
Designer Helen Steele created clothes for the show. Later, Ifrah connected with TD Joe Costello, whom she describes as “one of the best human beings I can think of,” and his wife, then Mayor Emer Costello, who later credited Ifrah with being largely responsible for the passing of legislation in Ireland outlawing FGM in 2012.
In January of this year, in the first case of its kind in Ireland’s history, a married couple originally from an African nation were convicted of female genital mutilation on their then one-year old daughter. Originally, the father had claimed the child’s injuries were due to falling on a toy, yet medical evidence as described during the trial indicated that her injuries were not consistent with this explanation. The head and glans of the child’s clitoris had been completely removed.
“I think I was too bossy when I was growing up,” Ifrah laughs when I ask if she had always displayed such remarkable self-starting tendencies. “My grandmother said when I was a kid I would steal the
‘Because of the cutting and sewing, when you wee it’s very bad. Imagine you cut yourself and you put lemon on it’
eyeliners from my sisters and use their face mask. And I never liked cleaning house or anything. When you’re a child you grow up doing things in the house. Maybe I used to escape things.”
She did things her way, she reflects.
In A Girl from Mogadishu , in a speech to the EU Commission, Ifrah tells her listeners this was “the greatest gift of my life; the gift of survival. The gift of a voice, where before there was only silence.”
“I never thought I would be this way,” she tells me. “I got the voice in Ireland. I felt I could take this voice back to Somalia.”
Which is exactly what she did. In 2013 Ifrah became an Irish citizen. Having a passport meant she could travel, and so she began working in Somalia towards her goal of eradicating FGM, attempting to implement a national programme to eradicate it in Somalia.
She was appointed gender advisor to the president of Somalia. “It felt that I was part of the community,” she says of becoming an Irish citizen. “And it gave me the opportunity to travel back and do the work I’m doing in Somalia.”
Reactions were mixed. “I went back to Somalia and I was told I should go back to my country. I feel like, where do I belong?”
Her work as an activist has meant she cannot now visit her father when she returns to Somalia, as her campaign — with the threats she still experiences — would endanger his life.
“I could not associate with my father because of the risks and the dangers. I decided to take the risks. But I could not allow myself to risk my father’s life, because if anything happened I could not forgive myself.”
Her grandmother died in 2015; Ifrah did get to see her before she passed away. “She was very old, and I didn’t want her to die without her knowing that I never blamed her. And I never did.”
In part, she says, she got her strength from the woman who raised her. “My grandmother was very strong. She said growing up I was very tough.”
The last few years have been spent travelling in Somalia, on the foundation’s work. It is, she reflects, a stressful place to be. “When I get tired, I say I’m going back to Ireland.”
The support network she has created here sustains her. “I’ve got friends in Ireland that would text me if anything happens. I have really good people. Mostly what helps me is the people who surround me.”
She is home in Ireland now, focusing on the Irish FGM issue. Her next plan? To meet with the new government, she replies with a huge smile.
“Make sure that no more girls are cut in Ireland. When I came to Ireland, I was told I had a voice.”
Watching how she uses her voice is deeply impressive. The charity premiere of A Girl from Mogadishu takes place on March 24 at the Lighthouse Cinema; the film goes on general release from April 3.