Women of the Maasai fight back
Girls as young as 10 and 11 feel the blade but an extraordinary group is going against the patriarchal tradition
‘Th e Ma a s a i s o c i e t y denies girls an education; they prefer to send male children to school …” A cellphone rings, interrupting Faith Mpoke in mid-sentence. It’s an emergency that the small woman with tightly braided cornrows is used to tackling, quickly and with a cool head.
“A girl has just been cut. The ceremony is happening right now, but we don’t know where exactly,” she says as she listens to her informant, trying to figure out the precise location in the savanna to which she will send a delegation of women and a police escort to help the victim and denounce those responsible. “Aren’t you going, Faith?” “No, it’s safer if they don’t know my face,” she smiles, “Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to travel around the villages anymore.”
In Elangata Wuas, a settlement in Kajiado County in southern Kenya, 80km from Nairobi, everyone is familiar at least with Mpoke’s name. In this community of 13 000 people overshadowed by the Odonyio hills, she is known as the “different” Maasai: a scandalously independent woman to some; an extraordinary example to follow to others.
She is 33 years old, has a son and has been working with nongovernmental organisation ActionAid International since 2011. Every morning, she sets out in a Jeep from the gloomy town of Kajiado for the steep, barren dirt roads that lead to the thorny bushes enclosing the enkangs — camps with round, poorly lit mud huts — and tries to persuade her people that it’s time to look towards the future.
And the future, in the land of the Maasai pastoralists, begins with renouncing traditions that herald disease, maternal-infant mortality, ignorance and poverty, traditions such as female genital mutilation (FGM). “I underwent it, too,” Mpoke says in a faint voice.
“But my mother was a teacher and she fought for me to be able to complete my school education. This is an issue that is still taboo in my family. They disapprove of me and find me shameless because I talk about it and take my decisions without asking my husband’s permission.”
In Kenya, according to Unicef’s 2016 FGM prevalence report, 21% of women have felt the blade on their genitals. The national prevalence varies within the more than 40 ethnic groups in the country, and in the Maasai society (around 2% of the population) it reaches 73%.
The seminomadic cattle herders, obstinately devoted to a patriarchal social system, impose the ormurunya, a traditional knife, on girls aged 10 and 11. This entails the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora. Emuatare, the Maasai word for female circumcision, is less ferocious than the infibulation typically carried out in the Horn of Africa, which concludes with sewing the vagina closed. But it still disfigures a woman’s body, condemning it to haemorrhages, infections and complications during childbirth owing to the inelasticity of tissues. It also denies women sexual pleasure so that wives remain monogamous and submissive.
“But that’s not all,” says Mpoke. “Emuatare is the root of female illiteracy and early marriages. A cut girl is considered to be a woman, thus forced to leave school to get married to an older man who offers the girl’s family a dowry in cattle, their most valued goods.”
The “cut” is unrelated to religion, which, for the Maasai, is a syncretism of Lutheran Christianity and the cult of the ruthless god Enkai. Emuatare is an indisputable social norm that marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. “If you get pregnant before circumcision,” says Mpoke, “you are branded as an entaapai, a slut, and no obstetrician will assist you during childbirth.”
According to the ministry of health’s 2014 Demographic and Health Survey, prevalence of the practice has decreased by 20% among the Maasai in Kenya since 2003, but the struggle towards women’s liberation is still nascent.
Yet Kenya is considered a champion in the battle against FGM in sub-Saharan Africa: prevalence has fallen by 16% nationally since 2003 and the report Demographic Perspectives on Female Genital Mutilation, released in 2015 by the United Nations Population Fund, estimates a further decrease of 40% by 2020.
There are two strict laws being enforced: the latest one, passed in 2011, foresees up to three years imprisonment for cutters as well as sentences for those who discriminate against women who are not cut. The government established an anti-FGM commission in 2011 and a national prosecution unit has investigated cases in Kenya since 2014 to enforce the law. But within the confines of the Maasai enkangs, the only supreme law is what is sanctioned by the elders following the path of tradition.
“Many people organise ceremonies secretly,” says Konina Tarayia (50), the chair of the local Women’s Network at Elangata Wuas. There are dozens of female members of all ages with short-cropped hair and wearing huge, dangling earrings made of coloured beads.
They trudge for kilometres on foot to meet under the acacia tree out- side the ActionAid office to discuss women’s rights and social issues. “We have suffered genital mutilation for too long,” says Tarayia. “We want to spare our daughters and nieces from the pain. Once, a girl died from haemorrhaging. We women protested and her parents were arrested, but the cutter escaped.”
In two years, these relentless women, who mingle serious meetings with song, dance and irresistible laughter, have convinced many families to keep their daughters intact. They visit schools to talk about women’s rights, invent roleplay games and even involve former cutters — who until recently earned $20 a day to sharpen their knives — in the battle.
Kimuntet Kaise, leaning against her hut under the sweltering afternoon sun, tells how good she was at healing the wound by covering it with a paste of cow manure. Until