In a tightly packed courthouse in Machakos, Kenya on February 26, Maasai and Samburu activists wearing red and yellow shukas sat with a grey-suited cadre of lawyers. Between them, Dr. Tatu Kamau looked utterly out of place. Her eyes shrank behind thick lenses, and she spoke slowly and precisely, with the weight of what was either fatigue or caution. She did not look like an iconoclast. She looked like the last one who wanted to be there.
Kamau is “that woman who wants to legalize female genital cutting.” Once a thoroughly unextraordinary physician working as an administrator at Kenya’s Ministry of Health, almost overnight she became famous — and hated — in the global health world.
In July 2017, Kamau filed a petition to overturn Kenya’s Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act, a landmark bill passed in 2011. The next hearing is scheduled for April 19 at the Machakos High Court, where she will argue that criminalizing female genital cutting (or FGC) punishes women for observing their culture and holds some cultures superior to others. It’s an argument that has long been made by FGC’s defenders, but never before in a legal effort—and certainly not by a woman physician.
The backlash to Kamau’s petition has been severe. Online and at public forums in Nairobi, she has been called a disgrace to Kenya, a disgrace to women, and much worse. A formidable alliance of NGOs has joined to oppose her in court, rallying so many supporters and activists from around the country that the little courthouse spills over with people.
Kamau, without even a lawyer by her side, is completely alone.
FFemale genital cutting, or FGC, is practiced in over forty countries throughout the world, primarily in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Often associated with rites of passage, FGC has traditionally been performed on girls when they reach puberty, though in some places girls are cut when they’re as young as four years old. The practice has been associated with child marriage and the consequences that come with it, like pulling girls out of formal education and putting them at greater risk of domestic violence and medical complications from teen pregnancy.
Every day, approximately 6,000 girls around the world under the age of 14 are cut. This means that all or part of the clitoris and labia is removed, and in the most extreme form, the entire vulva is sutured shut, leaving only a small opening for urination and menstruation. Without anesthesia, the procedure is extremely painful and can lead to severe infections. Women who have been cut often suffer from prolonged and obstructed labor, resulting in significantly higher infant mortality.
Whether explicitly stated or implied, the reason for cutting is often to curb sexual urge. Infibulation, in which the vagina is sewn shut, is a graphically literal example. But FGC is also a significant rite of passage in some communities, including many of Kenya’s; it’s when a girl becomes a woman. Without the cut, women are often barred from participating in society as full adults.
Linah Jebii Kilimo fled home as a teenager to avoid FGC; she wanted to finish school. Kilimo grew up in Marakwet, a community in Kenya’s Rift Valley whose elders have lauded Kamau’s petition. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she found herself looking at a brochure about the health consequences of FGC. She connected the dots, remembering what she had seen growing up: protracted labor and firstborn babies dying, women being carried away in stretchers.
So she decided to run for Parliament with the sole purpose of outlawing FGC. In 2003, she won. But it would take another eight years to ban FGC.
In 2011, Kenya’s Parliament criminalized FGC and anyone who enabled it: parents who arranged it for their daughters, neighbors who failed to report it, anyone who had FCG tools, and even anyone who used “derogatory and abusive language” towards an an uncut woman.
Even Kamau’s opponents agree that the law is imperfect, mostly because it’s driven FGC underground. Though the elaborate ceremonies that used to accompany the rite of passage — easy, conspicuous targets for police raids — have all but disappeared, FGC is still practiced in private. Its overall prevalence has dropped in Kenya from 37 percent in 1998 to 21 percent in 2014, but it is still widely practiced in certain areas; over 90 percent of women in Somali, Kuria, and Maasai communities have been cut.
Today, many affluent Kenyan families send their daughters to hospitals or clinics to be illicitly cut with sterile tools and local anesthesia instead of being cut by traditional circumcisers in the village, a trend in FGC known as medicalization.
“This happens a lot more than we realize, more than the general Kenyan public realizes,” says Sofia Rajab-Leteipan, an attorney who is representing Equality Now, one of the parties opposing Kamau in court. Kenya has some of the highest rates of medicalization in the world. She says it is still risky since medical professionals are not trained in circumcision and often “guesswork” their way through the cut.
Kamau argues that, once FGC is legalized, medical professionals can be trained properly and deliver the highest standard of healthcare for women who choose to be cut in medical facilities.
After all, some say, shouldn’t feminists believe women have a right to make informed decisions about their bodies? Is it patronizing to insist that brown and black women be jailed for FGC while white women in the West can get vaginoplasty, or cosmetic surgery for the vulva?
TThe fact that Kamau finds herself on the lonely side of public opinion today is a testament to how rapidly the conversation about FGC has changed. It was only in 1997, after all, that FGC was recognized as a public problem — an international human rights issue, even. That was the year the World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund issued a joint statement that put FGC on the map as a “form of violence.”
Practiced for centuries, it’s only been campaigned against for two decades. For much of this time, those campaigns have been led by Western organizations, particularly Western feminists.
The same year that joint-agency statement was issued, Kenyan writer Micere Githae Mugo warned against the patronizing attitudes towards women who need rescuing from FGC. African women, not outsiders, she said, should lead the conversation. Though Mugo herself denounced FGC, she argued that feminists should not silence women who practice it, but help take down the social and economic conditions that prevent women from speaking out against tradition.
Tostan, a non-governmental organization in Senegal, has done just that. Their programs have won international acclaim for the over 8,000 communities in West Africa who have vowed to abandon FGC. Notably, Tostan doesn’t ask communities to abandon the practice, only to discuss and debate it.
When the 1997 joint statement was released, Tostan founder Molly Melching says she was surprised when Senegalese women stood up against FGC on their own accord. “They learned their human rights, and they learned the health consequences, and they were able to associate what happened to them.”
How do human rights square, however, with cultural preservation? Over the last decades, many men have used FGC as a means to defend their culture from outside influence — including anti-colonial leader Jomo Kenyatta, who went on to become Kenya’s first president in 1963. In his book Facing Mount Kenya, he held up FGC as a pillar of a traditional past that should be protected, embraced even, against Western missionaries’ efforts to eradicate it in the name of progress.
Kamau’s petition echoes his arguments: she states that “all cultural beliefs are equally valid and that truth itself is relative, depending on the cultural environment.”
But then, she changed her mind.
TThe first hearing for Kamau’s case was held last November. The court room was inundated with organizations clamoring to oppose Kamau in court. The vast majority of them were anti-FGC groups that focused on child rights, like Samburu Girls Foundation and Msichana Empowerment Kuria. After all, close to 70 percent of FGC cases in Kenya are performed on girls between the ages of 5 and 14.
But as parties filed their submissions, Kamau began saying that their arguments were invalid. “She said, ‘I’m not even talking about the girl child,’” Rajab-Leteipan remembers, struck that Kamau had suddenly added this important information — perhaps upon seeing the sheer number of girls’ rights organizations who showed up.
Afterwards, Kamau officially amended her petition, changing “young women” to “adult women,” “willing women,” or “adult women capable of giving consent.”
At the following hearing on January 17, Kamau told Kenyan television station KTN, “I’m not interested in the girl child. Girls have to be protected in their decision-making and should not be forced to do something that they’re not prepared for.”
All talk of freedom to practice culture, which comprised her entire petition, disappeared. She had now pushed the conversation to a more ethically complicated matter: adult women’s right to do whatever they choose with their bodies. “Once you reach adulthood, there should be no reason why you cannot make the decision now,” Kamau told KTN. “If women can decide to drink, to smoke, women can join the army, women can do all sorts of things which might bring them harm or injury, and yet they’re allowed to make that decision…for this decision of female circumcision, a woman can make that decision, yes.”
The conversation had suddenly evolved. While the written petition argued for communities’ rights to practice their culture, when Kamau opened her mouth to speak, she argued for women to have agency over their own bodies.
It’s quite possible that Kamau shifted her argument out of convenience or fear. It’s difficult to know for sure, as she has refused to speak to anyone before the April 19 hearing. But the rapid evolution of the conversation reveals how many complicated issues — gender, culture, consent— collide messily in FGC.
Dr. Njoki Ngumi, a physician and member of the Kenyan arts collective The Nest, warns against making FGC too theoretical. After all, she says, we’re not just talking about piercings or small nicks on skin; anatomically, the male analogy to severe forms of FGC is amputating the tip of the penis and the scrotum.
Kamau’s petition skirts around defining FGC. Or rather, it treats all forms of FGC — from a symbolic pin-prick to nearly sewing the vagina shut — as the same, advocating for all to be legalized. “When we [know] how cultures take everything between a woman’s legs and sew it shut for ‘manners,’” Ngumi says, “to refuse to legally define it, especially in the name of constitutional access, is very problematic.”
Ethical conversations may happen in intellectual vacuums, but the law (or its repeal) will happen in the real world.
Forced FGC among adults is nothing new in Kenya, according to Lynn Mugure of Msichana Empowerment Kuria. Women who marry into a community that practices FGC are often unwillingly cut, usually on the consummating night of marriage or while they are giving birth. “As a feminist,” says Rajab-Leteipan, “my biggest issue with this case is, ‘Are women giving consent?’ It’s a loaded word, and I struggle with it.”
In communities where FGC is practiced, the majority of women are cut, and those who are not are ostracized. Women, regardless of age, do not have an individual choice to opt into FGC. The social pressure is tantamount to exclusion from participating in society as a full person. On the other hand, to use the Western comparison of vaginoplasty, only a small minority of women choose the procedure, and their ability to participate meaningfully in society — to cook for others, farm, engage in conversation — is not compromised by that choice.
Notably, Kamau does not define “adulthood” nor “consent” in either version of her petition. “I’d want to know what Dr. Tatu says to the men who agree with her in the name of sexual discipline for women,” says Ngumi.
A“At first I was against the law,” says Molly Melching from Tostan, on anti-FGC legislation in Senegal, “because I did not believe that a law would lead to an abandonment of the practice.” She thought criminalizing the practice delivered a message of state judgment, invasion, and aggression that would provoke backlash — which it did. Many defended their cultural values with arguments similar to Kamau’s.
But Melching came to see that, in Senegal, the law supported women who were spreading the word about ending FGC in their communities.
Mugure saw the same thing in Kenya. “Previously all you could do was advocate for abandonment and teach women,” she says. “Now girls are protected. Now the law supports us.”
One question that remains is who Kamau is defending, which is hard to know because her supporters remain closeted and her arguments continue to evolve.
After the last hearing in January, Kamau made international headlines, taking the brunt of public scorn. She stopped giving interviews. There was no longer a debate. Notably absent from this case are any women themselves who want to be circumcised. But then again, given the criticism heaped upon Kamau, who would dare to speak up?
Just as Melching had feared about the law provoking defensiveness in FGC supporters, perhaps this case is a missed opportunity to have a complex public conversation.
As the last hearing in February adjourned, the Maasai and Samburu anti-FGC activists streamed out of the court and stood defiantly before large banners that decried cutting. Reporters and photographers flocked around.
Minutes later, Dr. Tatu Kamau quietly exited the courtroom and headed towards her vehicle, waving away journalists. She was still alone.
BRIGHT Magazine is made possible by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. BRIGHT retains editorial independence.
