Avoiding mutilation, she then helped others
Kenyan woman worked to end Maasai tradition of female genital cutting
LENKISEM, KENYA— The first time cutting season came around, Nice Leng’ete and her older sister ran away and hid all night in a tree. The second time, her sister refused to hide.
For Maasai families, the cutting ceremony is a celebration that transforms girls into women and marks daughters as eligible brides. But to 8-year-old Nice, it seemed like a threat: She’d be held down by bigger, stronger women, and her clitoris would be cut. She’d bleed, a lot. Most girls fainted. Some died. Still, her sister gave in. “I had tried to tell her, ‘We are running for something that’s worth it,’ ” recalled Leng’ete, now 27. “But I couldn’t help her.”
Leng’ete never forgot what her sister suffered, and she was determined to protect other Maasai girls. She started a program that goes village to village, collaborating with elders and girls to create a new rite of passage — without cutting.
In seven years, she has helped 50,000 girls avoid the cutting ritual.
Her work mirrors national — and global — trends. Rates of female genital cutting worldwide have fallen 14 per cent in the past 30 years. Here in Kenya, cases have fallen more than twice that fast.
New laws have made a difference, here and elsewhere. Kenya outlawed female genital cutting in 2011, and a special unit for investigating cutting cases, opened in 2014, prosecuted 76 cases in its first two years.
But laws made in the capital often have little effect on culture in the countryside, where custom is deeply ingrained and men’s power is virtually absolute. In Maasai country, male elders enforce the customs, and the cut has long been one of the most important. The belief has been that women aren’t women unless they are cut, which means men can’t take them as wives. Much of how Maasai society is organized relies, in one way or another, on that ritual.
“Every community has their own reason for why they cut their girls,” said Christine Nanjala, who leads the special prosecution unit. “You’re dealing with culture, and when you’re dealing with culture, you’re dealing with the identity of a community.”
“Some rural old men asked us, ‘What will we call this woman who is all grown up, married, has children and is not circumcised?’ ” she added. “They do not have a name for such a kind of woman.”
Leng’ete’s community did have a name for her. “It’s a very bad name in my native tongue,” she said, one meant to shame a whole family.
That shame is one reason families pressure reluctant girls. Leng’ete’s grandfather, her guardian, took a gentler approach and asked her, after her second escape, to explain herself.
“‘I’m only 8,’ ” she remembered telling him. “‘Wait until I am 9.’ ” She added, “I was trying to bargain.”
But when he brought it up again, she still refused.
“I told him, ‘I will never come back even if it means being a street child,’ ” she said. “When he realized I wanted to run away from him forever, he said: ‘Let’s leave her. When she wants to go, she will tell us,’ ” Leng’ete remembered.
Her grandfather was an elder, so he couldn’t be overruled. But the community still ostracized her.
Things were different for her sister. After the cutting ceremony, she was taken out of school and, at age 12, married off to an abusive, older man. She had three children.
Leng’ete, meanwhile, began to remake her reputation.
Traditionally, women aren’t allowed to address elders. Leng’ete realized she had a chance to counter tradition after the elders sent her to a workshop on adolescent and sexual health run by Amref, a Kenyan health organization.
She told the elders that she had a duty to share what she had learned with the whole village. It was her first bargaining chip, and it — almost — worked. They gave her permission to address the younger men, but none of them stayed to listen to her.
“No girl had been courageous enough before to challenge the status quo, to challenge men,” Douglas Meritei, one of those men, said. She kept trying, for two more years. She made such a nuisance of herself that the old men told the younger ones to sit with her. But only three would talk with her.
Leng’ete refused to be discouraged. “I thought, ‘Well, last time I had zero, this time it’s three, that’s not so bad,’ ” she said.
Gradually, more of the younger men came to talk with her, she said, and gradually the topics expanded — from HIV prevention to teenage pregnancy and its health complications, to early marriage, to school attrition and, finally, to the cut.
“At first, I thought that what she was saying was utter nonsense, and I did not even give it a second thought,” said Meritei, who was one of her earliest allies. She won him over by talking about the physical consequences of the practice. “Her understanding of the medical conditions convinced me,” he said — even to the detriment of his social stature.
Making an example of herself and all she had accomplished, Leng’ete convinced the younger men that cutting wasn’t good for the community and she turned them into backchannel diplomats, who helped persuade the elders.
Finally, after nearly four years of dialogue, the elders in her village changed hundreds of years of culture and abandoned cutting. Her campaign spread to neighbouring villages and eventually to the highest seat of Maasai power, the elders’ council that convenes at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. Leng’ete became the first woman in history to address the elders at the mountain.
In 2014, they changed the centuries-old oral constitution that rules over 1.5 million Maasai in Kenya and in Tanzania, and formally abandoned female genital cutting. In pushing to overturn a cultural commandment, she found that her own cultural pride was her strongest argument.
“It’s just the cut that’s wrong,” she said. “All the other things — the blessings, putting on the traditional clothes, dancing, all that — that’s beautiful. But whatever is harmful, whatever brings pain, whatever takes away the dreams of our girls — let’s just do away with that.”
“Whatever is harmful, whatever brings pain, whatever takes away the dreams of our girls — let’s just do away with that.” NICE LENG’ETE ADVOCATE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS