Uncut, unwed and cast out, but a
In rural Kenya, a group of strong-willed women is giving traumatised young runaways a second chance at life
Janet has hard, suspicious eyes that suddenly soften when she smiles. At 14, she is already enjoying her second life, telling us about it with the pride of someone who has fought hard to write her own destiny.
“My parents had arranged a marriage for me with a 50-year-old man,” she begins. “Preparations for my circumcision ceremony had begun. I remembered how my sister had bled and cried after the cut. So I ran away.”
A tall, slender girl, she ran into the forests of Baringo County in Western Kenya wearing only slippers, and finally stopped after 150km and six days without a clear destination or food.
“I drank from water springs. At night I would climb trees to escape attack.” She would have made it to Uganda if she hadn’t collapsed before reaching the border in the marketplace in Kongelai, a rural settlement in West Pokot County.
While closing down their stall as night fell, a woman and a young girl noticed the frightened, dirty, twigthin bundle and asked: “What are you doing here all alone?”
Two years have passed since then and now Janet has become the fifth daughter of Theresa Chepution, the widow who sold fruit at the market.
After giving her a good reviving and cleansing at the river, Chepution gave Janet a uniform and sent her to school because she couldn’t bear the fact that she was illiterate at her age.
And Janet could never have imagined that such a rigorous yet loving countrywoman would understand the core of her distress. Chepution had been subjected to the same fate Janet had been able to dodge: married at a young age, her first two children were stillborn because infibulation (the surgical removal of the clitoris and the stitching up of the vulva) had rendered her tissues rigid.
“I suffered a great deal,” she tells us under the shade of her stilt houses for maize. “So I didn’t have my daughters cut. Listening to Janet, my pain [was] aroused at the thought of how much our people’s traditions have wounded us.”
Her people are the Pokots, the predominant ethnic group in Kenya’s Baringo and West Pokot counties, who also live in the Karamoja region in Uganda that is visible just behind the hills from Kongelai.
The Pokots are seminomadic pastoralists, with about 600 000 of their number residing in Kenya and 100 000 in Uganda, according to figures from the national bureaus of statistics in those countries. In the past they have been at war with their rivals, the Maasai and the Turkana, and t hey are still obstinately enclosed in a patriarchal society that measures their daughters’ worth by the quantity of cattle their future husbands will offer as a dowry.
The cutting and sewing up of the vulva is the prenuptial ritual performed to turn a young, immature girl into a “real” woman who will later lose her virginity when a goat’s horn is used to cut her open again on her wedding night, and who will give birth to a child before she is 15 years old.
“According to Pokot culture, if you are not circumcised you remain a girl forever and are banned from all female duties, including milking the animals,” Susan Krop (37) tries to explain. Like Janet, she also resisted forced marriage because she wanted to finish primary school.
In Kongelai, she is one of only a handful of women who, in addition to the Pokot language, speak a little English and perfect Kiswahili, the official language in Kenya.
This is also why she was elected chair of the Women’s Network, which counts 103 active members and 2 000 supporters scattered among the manjata, the traditional mud huts along the Suam River.
The female synergy here is fostered by ActionAid, the only international organisation to have advanced into these remote, red-earthed areas.
Since 2012, the Women’s Network has been committed to educating families on how harmful infibulation is, and explaining that true wealth is not measured by a dowry in cattle, but by the peace of mind of a girl who studies, and can cultivate dreams and learn skills that will help the entire community to shake off poverty.
Krop says she has been beaten by furious fathers. “But if we were able to convince the ngoroko, we’ll be able to convince everyone else too within a few years,” she says, smiling. She is talking about the “warriors”, the young men who once fought for control of the pastures. They are extremely brutish and sex- ist, yet some of them have decided to join the Women’s Network and have accepted wives who are uncut. “They are healthy, educated and improve our lives,” says their spokesperson, Patrick Longureruk.
According to Krop, the prevalence of infibulated Pokot women in Kongelai has dropped “from 80% a few years ago to 50-70%”. This figure is still much higher than the national average of 21% estimated by the United Nations Children’s Fund in its 2016 female genital mutilation (FGM) prevalence report, in a country that is considered a champion in sub-Saharan Africa in the battle against FGM.
In fact, according to a 2014 survey by the country’s health ministry, FGM has dropped by 22% in all of Kenya since 2003, and a 2015 report by the United Nations Population Fund foresees a further drop of 40% by 2020.
Two laws punish those who perform the cut and those who support it: the national Anti-FGM Board was established to oversee the problem and, since 2014, a prosecution unit has been investigating cases throughout Kenya.
“But do you think the people around here even know it exists?” sighs Krop. She has come up with a more effective strategy to spare girls from the bloody ritual within these forsaken forests: despite their own state of poverty, a group of foster mothers, currently 28, takes into their own homes girls fleeing the mutat and early forced marriages.
“Rarely does a parent reclaim them. When the girls refuse to get married, the family loses the dowry and the girl isn’t worth anything. We foster mothers support each other in order to provide for them,” she says.
The Women’s Network plans to build a centre for the girls they cannot put up in their own homes. Currently, the dormitory of the local school accommodates 30 little girls and adolescents, all with a dark, troubled look in their eyes.
There is Sharon, 15 years old, who has been sold by her alcoholic mother in exchange for a case of liquor. “I ran away before I got cut. I didn’t want to leave school,” whispers the girl before looking down and covering her eyes with her hand, crying softly for a long time.
Krop will later tell us that Sharon’s mother had threatened to kill herself if the girl did not bend to her will. And she kept her promise, hanging herself.