Female circumcision must end

History helps human societies maintain the things of the past, which they can cling to for the future, and those they can safely cast into the bottomless ditches of obsolete traditions. The confidence of societies in determining the things they can keep, improve, or delete altogether is called progress. Progress or more appropriately ‘learning from history,’ is necessary for societies for the casual fact that we are prone to mistakes, prejudices, biases or uncontrolled changes in society. Sometimes the factors that led to a certain truth simply disappear. Nowadays, incessant improvements in technology, globalisation and affordable education grant us the opportunity to do things in more facile manners, identify our individual errors, or merely jump on the bandwagon of globally accepted norms; why not?

It is with such ideas of progress that I declare the practice of female circumcision obsolete and unnecessary in Sierra Leone in particular, and Africa especially. This is not a question of denigrating Sierra Leonean traditions and the long social services that the institution of circumcision rendered to our people; it is a matter of progress and human rights as required by our participation in the global community, especially the United Nations. The use of culture and tradition in the twenty-first century to rationalise the unnecessary removal of the female clitoris is a sign of our refusal to embrace the teachings of history and to accept the progress our country clearly needs. Apart from the usual blind cultural nonsense we use to defend our unwillingness to change, no one in Sierra Leone can truly explain the contemporary necessity of clitoridectomy.

Some even argue without the slightest hesitation that female circumcision is intended to prevent promiscuity in women. While this is a good intention, promiscuity is not some exclusive female syndrome. In fact we all know that women are not the most promiscuous in Sierra Leone. But to prove this further, it is arguable that among all the ethnic groups of Sierra Leone, the Krios are less promiscuous, and they don’t even practice female circumcision. In a behavioural sense, there is nothing that an uncircumcised Creole girl does in the streets of Freetown today that is not done by a circumcised Temne or Mende girl. One sex cannot be blamed for the debauchery of society. As a Nigerian comedian puts it, ‘there are two things involved.’ Or as the good lord himself says, ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’

Another argument that sounds credible, if it was made in the middle ages, is that female circumcision is hygienic and prevents stench in women. Well, wouldn’t the simplest solution be bathing! We do not scrape the skin off our armpit or heinously cut off our arms simply because our armpits sometimes produce odour. There are other unpleasant analogies of secreting body parts we could remove, but I’ll leave that to our individual imaginations. The rational truth is that there is nothing female circumcision can do for the clitoris that cannot be done in modern hospitals, if need be. Globalisation has granted me the opportunity to move around a little, and having lived among both the circumcised and uncircumcised of the earth, I cannot attest to any pungent stench in one that is not in the other, depending on their sanitation routine. If religion, which is more fundamental than culture, recommends ablution to deal with our bodily impurities, why can’t our common sense catapult us beyond the laziness of cultural excuses?

My dilemma with this issue had always been the admirable fact that before the advent of colonialism, and with it Western institutions, the bondo, Sande, Poro etc. served as our educational institutions, where the elders of our societies – as carriers of the goods of our past – transmitted vital elements of savoir-vivre to adolescents.

Our elders, as trustees of our societies, scrutinised the elements of their time and transmitted the things that were absolutely necessary for the preservation of their kind. The variables of these teachings change from generation to generation, and it becomes imperative for the current generation to lay conscious foundations for the next. But if you don’t, I hope you would have better explanations for your daughters than the defeatist haven of culture and tradition.

I am aware of the fact that there are those among my people who would quickly taunt me as being brainwashed by Western ideas and ideologies. By all means I accept, but if you are reading this, so are you. If we accept Western education, Western-styled parliaments, Christian names, Western suits other than pihuin, some even reject their languages, and so on and so forth, then we have to use them to better our societies not damage them further.

It is my patriotic duty to condemn the decadent aspects of my country while promoting the good. It is not enough, as the national anthem compels us, to pray that ‘no harm on thy children may fall.’ We must always employ the entirety of our devotion, strength and might to stand for their rights. Only then shall we be truthful to the ‘land that we love, our Sierra Leone.’

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* Joseph Kaifala is from Sierra Leone. He is director of The Jeneba Project, a not-for-profit organisation providing educational assistance to Sierra Leone. 
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