How women led a dramatic about-face on FGM in Gambia

For generations, the women of the Bah family didn’t hesitate. They sent their daughters to be cut, just as they had been cut as young girls. 

As the Bahs understood it, cutting – a practice known internationally as female genital mutilation, or FGM – was a core tenet of their religion and their culture. Not doing it would be as unthinkable in their village as not teaching a child their own language. 

But when Penda Bah gave birth to a daughter three years ago, she made a decision. She would not subject the girl to the painful practice, which in Gambia is usually done before the age of 5 years old. Ms. Bah’s mother and aunt agreed. The cycle had to end. 

“We have stopped it completely because we understood the difficulties women face,” explains the aunt, who asked that her name not be used in this piece because of the sensitivity of the subject. Cut herself as a child, she says she now knows that much suffering women had been told was “normal” – from difficulties urinating to painful intercourse to excruciating labor – were actually a result of FGM. 

Nearly three-quarters of all Gambian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have been subjected to the practice, one of the highest rates in the world. However, Ms. Bah’s daughter was born at a fortuitous moment. In 2015, Gambia had banned FGM. 

Then this year, in a global first, the legislature considered overturning that same ban. But on July 15, members of parliament voted resoundingly to keep the law in place, sending a strong message to families like the Bahs: Their girls were safe. 

“I am just very happy and will recommend the country take full enforcement of the law,” says Ms. Bah.

A long fight

The decision to uphold the FGM ban came on the heels of months of intense campaigning by women’s rights activists in Gambia. When the bill was first introduced in March, 42 of the 47 legislators present voted to overturn the FGM ban. But in the final vote Monday, they pivoted sharply, voting 34 to 19 to keep the ban in place. 

The fervent advocacy that forced that change is the latest chapter in a fight against FGM with a long history here. 

“FGM is deeply rooted and shrouded in secrecy,” says Isatou Touray, former Gambian vice president and health minister, and executive director of Gamcotrap, an organization that works to end FGM and child marriage. 

Still, she says, Gambian women have long spoken to each other behind closed doors about the excruciating pain and lasting health consequences they experienced as a result of being “cut,” a procedure defined by the World Health Organization as any “partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” 

In 1984, in an effort to take those conversations public, Dr. Touray and a small group of other activists founded Gamcotrap. 

But they had to fight against a deeply ingrained moral teaching. Gambians were told the practice was part of Islam, the religion practiced by 96% of the country’s population. Efforts to ban it were billed as attempts by the West to destroy African culture. 

This messaging is prevalent in most of the two dozen or so countries where FGM is regularly practiced, but the procedure predates Islam. There are Christian communities that practice it, and many Muslims who oppose it. It is not mentioned in the Quran.

In Gambia, activists spent decades spreading this message and educating people about the health effects of FGM. They slowly chipped away at resistance by forming alliances with traditional leaders, former cutters, and other influential figures. 

That work appeared to pay off when, in 2015, the country’s then-president, Yahya Jammeh, outlawed FGM. 

However, although the new law prescribed fines and jail time, FGM continued essentially unabated. This was in part because people associated the law with Mr. Jammeh, a brutal dictator, and in part because many Gambians still viewed the practice as a religious duty. 

“We are just advocating on the side of the religion. We are not forcing anyone to do it,” explained Abdoulie Fatty, an influential imam, when Monitor journalists met him in Banjul, the capital, before the ban was upheld. “It should be a choice; let people practice it when they wish and let others go by as they wish.” 

For Dr. Touray and other activists, that logic feels hollow for many reasons, chief among them the fact that most girls in Gambia are cut as infants or toddlers. These are “children who have absolutely no decision-making in the process,” she says. “This is about misogyny.” 

In August last year, she and other activists welcomed the news that for the first time since the ban went into effect eight years earlier, the law was used in a successful prosecution. Convicted were a traditional cutter and the mothers of two baby girls. 

Mr. Fatty, however, was incensed. He told local media the conviction amounted to an attack on Islam. He raised money to pay for the fines – about $220 for each woman – and encouraged Gambians to pressure their lawmakers to overturn the FGM ban once and for all. 

From there, the momentum grew. In March of this year, Almameh Gibba, a lawmaker and longtime supporter of FGM, introduced a bill in parliament to reverse the ban. Outside the legislature in Banjul, Mr. Fatty and hundreds of other pro-FGM activists celebrated, chanting “Female circumcision is my religious belief” and “Gambia is not for sale.” 

Opponents of FGM “are not Muslims,” Mr. Gibba told the Monitor before the final vote to uphold the ban. “Nonbelievers are interfering in our climate and our traditional beliefs.”

(In a statement after the ban was upheld, Mr. Gibba wrote that he would continue to fight against laws that “enslav[ed]” Gambians by forcing them to go against their “religion, traditional practices and Cultural origin.”)

“Culture is not static”

Gambia’s debate over its FGM ban took place at a precarious time for the global movement against the practice. 

Over the past three decades, some 20 countries have recorded drops in the rate of FGM, many of them dramatic. In the West African country of Burkina Faso, for instance, the percentage of teenage girls who have been cut has fallen from 83% to 32%, according to UNICEF.

And in several of the approximately two dozen countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East where FGM is widespread, public support for it is eroding. For example, in Ethiopia, where two-thirds of women have been cut, more than three-quarters of the population now opposes the practice. Meanwhile, 51 countries have explicitly criminalized FGM, including 28 in Africa. 

But progress has been uneven, particularly in Africa, the region where FGM is most common. In Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Mali, Egypt, and Sudan, more than 85% of girls and women are still subject to FGM. 

In Gambia, FGM rates have slowly begun to fall, but support for the practice remains stubbornly high. Only a third of Gambians oppose FGM, according to UNICEF. 

Meanwhile, women’s rights activists across Africa watched the situation unfolding in Gambia with deep concern, fearing that the government there could set a dangerous legal precedent. 

Before the vote, Nafisa Binte Shafique, UNICEF representative in Gambia, wrote in a statement to the Monitor that overturning the ban could “pave the way for further regressive measures, such as lowering the age of marriage and condoning domestic violence, all under the guise of cultural and religious practices.” 

Although the decision to uphold the ban has put those fears on ice for now, Dr. Touray says the fight is not over. She and other activists say they must continue to fight to increase popular support for the FGM ban, making it harder to build support for another campaign to overturn it. 

In part, she says, that is a matter of convincing people that being true to Gambian culture doesn’t have to mean supporting an outdated practice harmful to its women. 

“Culture is not static,” she says. “It is on a continuum, and it changes with time.” 

Nyima Sillah contributed reporting from Sintet and Banjul, Gambia, and Kizito Makoye contributed reporting from Musoma, Tanzania.