Tiskane izdaje
SARE HAROUNA, Senegal - When Aissatou Kande was a little girl, her family followed a tradition considered essential to her suitability to marry. Her clitoris was sliced off with nothing to dull the pain.
But on her wedding day, Ms. Kande vowed to protect her daughters from the same ancient custom. Days later, her village declared it would abandon female genital cutting for good.
Across Africa, an estimated 92 million girls and women have undergone it. But Sare Harouna, like more than 5,000 other Senegalese villages, has joined a growing movement to end the practice.
The change has not yet reached Ms. Kande's new home in her husband's village, but if elders there pressured her to cut the baby girl she is taking into the marriage, she said, "I would resist them." Her parents back her up.
"They would never dare do that to my granddaughter, and we would never allow it," said Ms. Kande's mother, Marietou Diamank.
The movement to end genital cutting is spreading in Senegal at a quickening pace through the very ties of family and ethnicity that used to entrench it. The practice, common in many African nations, is ebbing.
Here in Senegal, Tostan, a group whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof, Senegal's dominant language, has had a major impact with an education program that highlights the dangers of the practice, while being careful not to denounce it as barbaric as Western activists have done.
Senegal's Parliament banned the practice over a decade ago.
"Before you would never even dare to discuss this," said Mamadou Dia, governor of the Kolda region where this village is located. "It was taboo. Now you have thousands of people coming to abandon it."
Tostan has pursued an ambitious effort here with support from Unicef and others. Its two- to three-year program costs about $21,000 per village − a substantial sum considering the countless villages that continue the practice.
An improbable collection of characters shaped Tostan's methods: Molly Melching, an educator from Illinois; Demba Diawara, an imam from a Senegalese village; and Gerry Mackie, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Ms. Melching, 61, came to Senegal as an exchange student when she was 24 and never left, devising a rural education program in a village where she lived in the 1980s, and starting Tostan 20 years ago. The group aims broadly to improve health and spread awareness of human rights. Women in village classes themselves raised the issue of genital cutting. They told of daughters and sisters who had hemorrhaged and sometimes died from botched circumcisions.
In 1997, women in the village of Malicounda Bambara declared their determination to end the practice.
But Mr. Diawara, an imam in the village of Keur Simbara and a Tostan student, warned Ms. Melching that a single village could not stop such a deeply rooted tradition. The only way, he said, was to persuade villages whose young people intermarried to abandon the pract ice simultaneously.
So Mr. Diawara, 77, visited the 10 intermarrying villages of his extended family. The villages agreed to give up the tradition and in 1998 held what is believed to have been Africa's first collective abandonment.
That June, Professor Mackie read an article about what Tostan had done and mailed Ms. Melching a copy of his 1996 article, from a sociological journal, about foot binding, which had disfigured Chinese girls over centuries. Professor Mackie noted the method used to eradicate foot binding, parents pledging not to bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet, was similar to Tostan's driving mission.
Alicia Little, a British novelist, had played a catalytic role in ending foot binding in China. After moving to China in 1887, she researched foot binding and discovered that a congregation's public pledge to end the practice had worked. Parents pledging neither to bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet ultimately ended the practice within a generation, Professor Mackie wrote.
Bassi Boiro, the elderly woman who was Sare Harouna's so-called cutter for years, said she used a knife handed down through generations of cutters in her family until it became "too dull to even cut okra." She then switched to razor blades.
Now she has accepted the decision to end the practice and speaks about the harm caused by her life's work. "I didn't realize it was my doing," she said. Sare Harouna's imam, Muusaa Jallo, was convinced of the need to stop the practice and has spread the word in many other villages. As he placed his hand gently on his toddler's head, he said, "I have already decided this one will not be cut."
His 8-year-old, Alimata, sat solemnly to the side. "I will abandon it like my parents," she said, almost inaudibly. "I won't do it to my daughters. It's not good to do that , and they did it to me."
