Forced to undergo circumcision at childbirth

“Don’t leave me! I’m begging you, please don’t leave!” The young woman screamed amidst gasps for air as the waves of pain around her womb grew worse and drifted closer to one another.

Florence Sinet, 24, had gone into labour a few hours earlier while at her house in Loodokilani, Kajiado. When her waters broke, she asked her husband to take her to hospital, but her husband, in his late 50s, insisted that she deliver the child at home, the traditional way.

He called the local traditional midwife who arrived within minutes and started attending to Sinet. The midwife examined the labouring woman and immediately realised that this was going to be a difficult birth. The baby had not descended properly and needed to be turned before it could be delivered.

Good thing that the sexagenarian already had dozens of home births under her belt, a good number of which had similar, if not worse, complications. She had only lost a few babies and even fewer mothers. However, when she examined Sinet, she suddenly rose to her feet and stumbled backwards, a horrified look on her face. She then turned and ran out of the room.

The father-to-be paced back and forth outside the bedroom, anxiously wringing his sweaty palms. That’s when he heard his wife’s pleas.

“Please don’t leave!” whimpered an exhausted Sinet.

Sinet’s husband grabbed the midwife’s arm as she exited the bedroom and demanded to know what the problem was.

“Your wife is not a woman! I cannot bring into this world a child born of a girl. It will be an abomination, especially since the child is a boy,” the midwife replied.

Please, I will undergo the cut once I have recovered after the birth

She had discovered while examining Sinet that she had not undergone the cut, and according to Maasai tradition, it was anathema for the traditional midwife to assist in bringing to the world a child by a woman who was not circumcised.

Time was running out. Sinet’s husband, torn between reacting to this new information and saving the life of his yet-to-be-born son, asked the midwife what options they had.

“We have to cut her right now. Only then can we deliver this child without attracting a curse,” she replied without skipping a beat.

By this time, they were back in the bedroom, standing over the young woman, moaning and writhing in pain. When she was told what was about to happen, Sinet tried to negotiate.

“Please, I will undergo the cut once I have recovered after the birth,” she said. But the midwife would hear none of it, and the husband could not risk the wrath of the gods. Florence Sinet underwent female genital mutilation (FGM) at childbirth. She passed out from the excruciating pain. She lost so much blood that she needed a transfusion. She would spend three weeks at the Kajiado County Referral Hospital before she could go back home to her family.

Sinet, now 26, has always considered herself the lucky one. Born in a remote village in Loodokilani Ward on the western side of the vast and sparsely populated Kajiado County, Sinet was one of few girls in the village to go to primary school.

“I was the third child in a family of five girls. Though the boy child is considered more valuable than the girl in the Maasai community, having girls also comes with its set of advantages. My sisters and I guaranteed that my father will never be poor because we would all bring in vast wealth in terms of cows and money when we got married off,” says Sinet.

Growing up, she did not want to get married, maybe much later. It is no news that many girls in the wider rural Maasai community are ripe for marriage as soon as they undergo FGM at around the 10 to 12.

Though Sinet’s parents had enrolled her to Elangata, a primary school in her home area, she knew that only a small fraction of the girls who begin this basic level education ever complete it.

“However, I learnt through my interaction with other children in the school that I could say no to my parents and my community regarding FGM. I remember two friends of mine, whose parents were a teacher and a doctor, who had escaped the cut, and I wanted to be like them,” she recalls.

She could oppose the cut. What she did not know, however, is that no single person, let alone a woman, could stand against the force of a patriarchal culture and escape unscathed.

In fact, she would be lucky to escape with her life. But Sinet dared take a stand anyway. She told her parents that she did not want to be cut. She made a desperate case, using examples of her peers in school and other older girls who had missed the rite of passage and seemed to be doing well for themselves.

“My pleas fell on deaf ears. My father had already identified the man that would marry me as soon as I underwent the rite of passage. I was desperate for a way out, so I turned to an aunt whose children had also avoided the cut,” she says.

The aunt devised a plan that had previously worked for her own children. She spoke with the woman who performed the ritual on the girls in the community and, for a small fee, the woman agreed to take Sinet through the rite of passage without the actual mutilation. She agreed to keep her secret.

NORMAL LIFE

The plan worked. Sinet went through the ceremony when she turned 13. She went back to school and finished her primary school education. She even enrolled into a local high school. She had managed to stave off marriage so far. Her life seemed quite normal. She even started dating a young man from a nearby boys’ school.

Then the plot thickened: “When in my final year of high school, I was 18 then, I discovered that I was pregnant. I told my parents about it and said I intended to marry the father of the unborn child. However, my parents, especially my father, would hear none of it because my boyfriend was not from the Maasai Community.”

Always the fighter, Sinet decided to run away from home and moved in with her boyfriend. They travelled to Mombasa where the young man had got a job after high school.

That’s when the call that would change her life forever came through.

“My father called through my boyfriend’s phone and ordered me to return home. He said that if I didn’t return in the next three days, he would speak a curse on me,” says Sinet.

“Of course I didn’t even think about it. I was determined to stay with my boyfriend. But then strange things began to happen. The day after the deadline, my boyfriend and I were walking on the beach and we got arrested for no reason at all. We spent a night in jail. A few days later, we were on a boat and it almost capsized,” she recounts.

This was followed by a series of about a dozen other misfortunes, none of which had happened before, a factor that convinced Sinet that her father had spoken the curse. She also began to suspect that the lie she had been living with about undergoing FGM was now catching up to her.

The connection, she was convinced, was clear. Sinet returned home. She found her father waiting for her in the company of another man who seemed as old as he was. Sinet had no choice but to marry the 58-year-old man. A few weeks later, she gave birth to a baby girl at a local health centre.

However, Sinet’s second birth would not be as uneventful as her first. When she settled into her marriage, she was forbidden from engaging in any meaningful work, which meant she could not earn any income or afford to sneak off to a local health centre for the delivery.

She was fully dependent on her husband, not just for her basic needs, but for her sense of identity and purpose in the community.

This is why she had no choice but to give in to the demands of her husband and the local midwife.

Sinet is still living under her husband’s roof – she figured she might as well stay since the worst was over. Since she could not save herself, she made it her mission to speak and fight for girls who will be confronted by the ritual in her own community. Her firstborn daughter, now seven, is fast approaching the date when she will have to face the cut.

That is why Sinet has been taking up odd jobs here and there to gain some financial independence and possibly save enough money to safeguard her daughter’s future when the critical time comes.

According to a 2016 baseline study by the “Yes I Do” Alliance (Yida) on child marriage in Kajiado County, many underage girls continue to “opt into” FGM not simply because they are forced into it, but because they long for acceptance and a meaningful existence in their own families and communities.

The “Yes I Do” Alliance, consisting of Plan International, the Network for Adolescent and Youth of Africa (Naya), Ujamaa Africa, the Centre for the Study of Adolescence Kenya, and Amref, has extensively investigated the interlinkages between child marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting and teenage pregnancy in Kajiado County.

In each study, the sense of meaning, purpose and belonging in the cultural practices and traditions emerges as the most compelling reason why the practice persists despite gains in legislation against FGM and education on the health risks associated with the practice.

Ending FGM is not as simple as eliminating the physical cut

Dominic Kimitta, an anti-FGM programme officer with Naya in Kajiado County acknowledges that the stigma that girls who avoid FGM face in their own families and communities is the greatest obstacle he faces in his work.

“Ending FGM is not as simple as eliminating the physical cut. The practice is embedded in a deep-rooted culture in which members of a community find their worth, value and dignity. This means that when a girl avoids the cut in a culture where women are already seen as inferior to men, that girl is regarded as worse than even the other women.”

This paradox, argues Kimitta, is why many women give in to the practice even when they know about its harmful health effects.

“They understand that those who are here to save them today will leave and they will be left in the same community to face the stigma of defying their tradition. They will be shunned and ostracised.”

These are not problems that are easily addressed by banning the practice through force of law. This is also why President Kenyatta’s recent vow to end FGM by 2022 is easier said than done.

Education has played a key role in breaking these bonds of retrogressive cultural practices.

Sinet, who is now an anti-FGM advocate in her community, has seen this shift in her own life and in that of other women from the community who are now in profitable careers.

“When girls, whether they are cut or not, go through school and pursue profitable careers, they are able to return to their communities and help their families out of poverty,” she observes.

“They are no longer chained to dependence on the men in that society. Suddenly they are seen as champions, heroes rather than victims. Such women are better placed and can speak with more authority than any girl who was simply saved from the cut but left to fend their way in a community that shuns and shames her.”

“This is why the fight against FGM is one that will not be won in the next five years or even in this lifetime. It will take generations because that’s how long it takes to change a culture,” a cautiously optimistic Kimitta notes.