A woman was yesterday arrested after her seven-year-old daughter bled to death after female circumcision.
It is female circumcision season in Wajir District, despite concerted efforts to discourage the practice.
"She was brought to the hospital more than 24 hours after circumcision. By then it was too late to save her life," said Mrs Ardo Mohammed, a nurse.
She said the girl underwent infibulation, the worst form of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) common in North Eastern Province.
Police intercepted family members planning to bury the girl. An elderly circumciser was also arrested after a brief search.
Deputy OCPD Job Lesinayu said they would be charged with murder.
But relatives want the two released, arguing the death was pre-ordained.
Ritual’s defence
"No parent would want to see her child die. At least the police should allow her to mourn her daughter," a former councillor, Mr Kunow Ibrahim, said.
It has also emerged that the child was among three girls cut by the circumciser.
And the tragedy has not dampened the cultural mood with scores of other girls facing the knife.
Elsewhere, an estimated 85 per cent of the more than 100 girls who underwent the rite in December, last year in Kuria District have dropped out of school and forced into marriages.
Local anti-FGM campaigners, led by Maendeleo Ya Wanawake branch chairperson Beatrice Robi, yesterday criticised parents for allowing their daughters to be married early.
Outdated practice
Speaking during the burial of Nathan Tolo, father of The Standard Senior Online Editor, Dan Okoth in Rongo, Ms Robi attributed early marriages to poverty and outdated cultural practices.
Tolo, a pioneer teacher and church leader, died early this month, after an illness and was buried at his Kodero Bara home.
Robi said the drop-out rate was alarming and would affect the education of girls in the region.
"We have carried out a survey and found that 85 per cent of the girls have been married off. This is wrong," she said.
She also told The Standard they had compiled a list of the affected girls, and would hold a workshop to sensitise parents against the rite.
By RASNA WARAH
Posted Sunday, April 18 2010 at 19:00
First, they came for our babies. Now, they want to adopt African women’s private parts. Yes, a charity based in the United States wants you to “adopt a clitoris”.
Clitoraid claims to help victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Burkina Faso by funding a “PleasureHospital” in this West African country that will surgically rebuild women’s “organs of pleasure”. Its spiritual leader, who goes by the name Prophet Rael, says that he founded the private non-profit organisation to help as many circumcised women as possible to “be whole again”.
Clitoraid is getting support from various US-based organisations, including those purporting to be feminist. (Interestingly, the government of Burkina Faso has already been performing these reconstruction surgeries for free.)
Now no-one can deny that FGM has had a devastating physical and emotional effect on millions of girls and women in Africa. Study upon study has shown that FGM — in all its forms — cripples women physically, makes childbirth and sex extremely painful and leaves lasting scars on women’s psyches. It cannot be tolerated or encouraged in this day and age.
So why is this organisation and its advocates receiving so much flak from none other than African women themselves?
In a blog posting titled “Can? We? Save? Africa?”, San Francisco-based Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg explains: “For years now, African women have been complaining that even as we are engaged in domestic campaigns to end the practice of female circumcision within our communities, the eager participation by Westerners, particularly Western feminists, has done much more harm than good.
“In a nutshell, Western feminists have taken over the space, displaced African women’s voices on the issue and have carelessly thrown about their neo-colonial weight in ways that have served only to further entrench the issue.”
Kamau-Rutenberg has now started a campaign that questions the motives of Clitoraid and other campaigns like it, including one called Underwear for Africa that targets orphans in Kenya.
Started in 2007 by the US-based charity Mothers Fighting for Others, the campaign aims to collect underwear for distribution to Kenyan orphanages, IDP camps and such places where underwear is apparently in short supply.
The organisation claims to have donated 2,000 pairs of underwear to children living in two IDP camps in Kenya in April 2009. A noble gesture, but why does it bother so many Africans?
“PART OF THE PROBLEM WITH PHILANTHROPY towards Africa is that of ease,” explains Kamua-Rutenberg, who as head of a non-profit organisation in the US says she keeps running into well-meaning but completely off-the-mark efforts to “save” Africa. Unfortunately, the devil is always in the details. In the rush to simplify complex situations such as the one in Darfur, we lose understanding of historical context and how that impacts what is currently happening.”
Central to the debate is the question of dignity. If African women’s body parts can be appropriated — or “adopted” — by well-intentioned, albeit ignorant, Westerners, then what will be appropriated next? If they can adopt our bodies, what’s stopping them from “adopting” entire nations?
A case in point is the singer Madonna’s relentless campaign to adopt Malawian children even in the face of opposition from the parents of the children themselves.
James Kambewa, a security guard in South Africa and the father of five-year old girl Mercy, is challenging Madonna’s right to keep his daughter, but admits that he does not have the kind of money to hire a lawyer who will take Madonna to court. Are his rights and dignity worth less than hers because he is poor?
Recently, at the Pan-African Media Conference, Prof Guy Berger from South Africa argued that Africa’s negative image in the international media will only be fixed if the reality of Africa is fixed first. In other words, when African countries become wealthy, well-functioning societies, the international media will have no choice but to focus on the positive.
I beg to differ. In the last few years, African countries, including conflict-ravaged Sudan and Ethiopia, have enjoyed double-digit economic growth rates, but one would never know it by looking at images of these countries in the international media, where war, witchcraft, poverty and famine in Africa make more headlines than thriving economies.
Perhaps the question we should be asking is: Who is saving who? In his book The Road to Hell, Micheal Maren writes: “The starving African exists as a point in space from which we measure our (Westerners’) own wealth, success, and prosperity, a darkness against which we can view our own cultural triumphs...
“The belief that we can help is an affirmation of our own worth in the grand scheme of things… And it is in their (Africans’) helplessness that they become a marketable commodity.”
