It’s wrong to hold onto cultures that perpetuate FGM

If you are a girl, what is the weirdest thing a guy has told you about what they believe a woman should do before the said man can marry them? I will go first. A guy I was having a random conversation with told me that they must ‘test-drive’ a woman before they can marry them.

Test-drive in this case meant this woman must prove to the guy that she can cook, clean a house… before they can marry them. I have nothing against cooking or cleaning but found it ridiculous that someone would have such, as a standard.

Okay, let’s assume they pass your cooking and cleaning audition, and then something happens a day after you get married and she can no longer use her hands to cook or clean, what then?

Anyway, I had long stored this conversation in my memory bank as the weirdest thing I have heard a guy say until I had a conversation with my friend, about a guy who told her she had to be circumcised for him to marry her.

Can you imagine a man telling you that one of the conditions for him to marry you is that you have to get circumcised? Sounds like a line straight from a book about a woman seeking asylum…except that in this case, this actually happened to my friend.

Farida and I were going to the cinema on Saturday and I thought the movie we were going to watch would be the highlight of my day, but our conversation during the cab ride to Parklands stole the show.

My friend went on a date. The guy seemed good for her and they were aligned on many things – their education and upbringing had reasonable differences that, in her estimation, could be easily bridged. Unfortunately, the guy insisted that my friend be open to being circumcised. And just like that, my dream of having a friend who is in a serious relationship went up in smoke!

“This guy was serious. With a deadpan expression on his face. He told me in his community a woman has to be circumcised before he can marry her,” she said.

“I come from a community that obviously does not circumcise its women. So if circumcision was a big part of his considerations for marriage, his first stop should be at a woman who comes from a community with a culture of female circumcision, right?” Farida posed.

Also read: Efface cultural ‘norms’ fuelling gender violence

She had a point. But I did not respond right away. When it comes to cultural issues, I am usually careful not to speak too quickly.

“Did you tell him you are not open to female circumcision? Maybe if you two had a conversation, you would have resolved that difference?” I said, and realised how stupid my line of thinking was as soon as I voiced it.

“A friend of mine got married into a family with a culture where women are circumcised. She wasn’t circumcised, but her husband’s mother and grandmother circumcised her when she was giving birth to her first child.”

Her distraught friend only discovered from a doctor when she went to find out why she was taking too long to heal from childbirth, even though she had had a straight forward home delivery.

She told me after her friend’s experience, she has fully understood that culture is not something that a boy and a girl can sit across from each other at a fancy restaurant in uptown Nairobi and make a decision on.

Farida called the relationship quits after that first date because there was no point starting a journey that led nowhere.

What stood out later for me, as I reflected on the conversation, was the fact that we were having this conversation as the world around us marks the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence (GBV), and female cutting, also called female genital mutilation (FGM), is classified as a form of GBV.

In Kenya, conversations about ending FGM have become a broken record. We will need someone with a mystery code to come and crack that one for us.

The sad thing about this whole conversation, I told Farida, was the fact that FGM perpetrators, in the case of her friend, were women.

A good reminder for us that the battle to end GBV is not a war between men and women. It is a fight against cultures that have run their course; or cultures that do more harm than good.

In this fight, we must fight on the same team against retrogressive cultures, not men against women, or vice versa.

“Women should not sponsor violence against other women,” I said. And she agreed.

The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG ([email protected]).