Blooms in Somaliland
were professional circumcisers until recently, earning $10 to $15 a girl. “We’ve been taught that it’s against Islamic law,” they state, “so now we teach this to our communities.”
The spokesperson for the battle for women’s liberation and the abolition of female genital mutilation is a 78-year-old woman: Edna Adan Ismail, midwife, former foreign minister and United Nations delegate. In the 1970s, she was the first woman in the Horn of Africa who dared to cry out publicly against the ferocity of the pharaonic ritual.
“It means death for mother and child,” she bellows today in the hospital she built in Hargeisa with her own funds, adding that the maternalinfant mortality rate in Somaliland is more than four times higher than the average of developing countries.
“Only seven hospitals in Somaliland carry out caesarean sections; in the other health facilities, if the artificial barrier hasn’t already suffocated the child, the stitching is ripped open with scissors, which can lead to the fistula [a hole in the vagina that allows stool or urine to pass through], the worst death sentence possible.
“Why do you think I’ve been fighting against infibulation for over 40 years? Because it kills.”
“We have created a national movement, involving husbands and religious leaders, but we haven’t become a critical mass yet,” says Aamina Milgo, chairperson of the Network against female genital mutilation in Somaliland. In a country where government statistics show that 85% of the women are illiterate (compared with 64% of the men), her primary target is ignorance.
‘There are people who believe the clitoris will grow disproportionately if it’s not cut, and those who accuse Westerners of inciting us against our own culture. In the past, they instilled us with the belief that suffering through the torture was something to be proud of. To this day, for many women, not being sewn is a stigma.”
Even though the codes of the clans come before the laws of the state and even before the Islamic sharia, the women’s coalitions fight for the abolition and illegality of female mutilation, as has taken place in 21 African countries affected by this problem. “A draft of a proposal of law has been in the Parliament since 2011,” Sadia Abdi states, “but the ministry of religious affairs, which examines and evaluates all decisions, has yet to take a stand.”
An eminent imam, Yousuf Abdi Hoore, explains the critical point: although infibulation “is cruel, and extraneous to Islam”, a mild type of female circumcision appears in a prophetic tradition (hadith) and so, according to the Islamic school followed in Somaliland, it’s recognised as an obligation.
“It’s called sunnah: a very small incision to the clitoris, thereby bestowing beauty and purity.”
But women reject any compromise: “We demand zero tolerance for all types of genital mutilation,” says Sadia Abdi who, law or no law, wants to change the way people think.
“By creating awareness and knowl- edge in the villages, and getting mothers, fathers and religious leaders involved, my hope is that the next generation will be free from the horrors of infibulation.”
While the usual afternoon wind blows, she takes us to view Hargeisa from high ground: a flat geometry disturbed by the twin hills Naasa Hablood (Girl’s Breasts) — as if femininity, in this nonplace, was already blooming on the horizon.