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SUNDAY VANGUARD, FEBRUARY 28, 2021, PAGE 21
Scene from a female genital
mutilation session. Inset: Ndep
FEMALE CIRCUMCISION NIGHTMARE:
My sister bled to death
after we were brutally cut
…Dr Ndep, survivor, narrates unforgettable experience
By Morenike Taire & Funmi Ajumobi
The world marked the 2021 annual International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation
(FGM) within the context of COVID-19 under the theme, ‘No Time for Global Inaction: Unite,
Fund and Act to End Female Genital Mutilation’. On the occasion, Dr Antor Odu Ndep, a public
health practitioner, researcher and a Senior Lecturer at University of Calabar, in this interview, speaks
about her unforgettable experience of circumcision twice and the excruciating pain of losing her sister to
the same process.
Cultures
Majority of our cultures perform FGM as a
ceremony to welcome a girl into womanhood.
It used to happen in my grandmother’s time.
She told me the female genital cutting
ceremony was a time to show that you were a
high class woman, seen as higher than other
women. If a girl that is not circumcised is
talking, you can interrupt and that girl will
have nothing to say again. If she tries talking,
you can look at her and tell her, ‘This one that
has clitoris, you have the gut to talk to me?’
Female genital cutting is painted as
something you have to do to belong in order
to be high in the society. Over time, however,
that aspect of you belonging to a different class
wore off because people now start going to
school and could not get the time to spend in
the circumcision home. So they started doing
it during holiday.
The cutting
I was living in Cameroun at that time. I came
home (Cross River) on holiday and that was
the best opportunity to cut me because they
didn’t know when they would see me again. I
was eight years old and my junior sister was
three at that time and few of my cousins that
were around were also cut. They gathered
about seven of us at the backyard and had us
cut. My mummy, as the last born of the family,
had no say in the arrangement. The first born
was the one who proposed to cut all the little
girls in the family and she was old enough to
be her mother. So, she had no say but was just
informed about it and she was also a survivor.
Death
That was the first time that cutting led to a
death in the family. My three years old sister
died five days later. She bled to death. She
was a happy young child who was healthy.
After the cut, her wound was almost beginning
to heal and it had started itching her as a sign
that it was healing up but, as a three years old
girl, she just scratched the place and the blood
that gushed out was like it was coming from
her heart. As the heart was pumping, that was
how it was gushing out. That time, we had just
a dispensary in my village and before they
could get her into the dispensary, she was dead.
Pain
My pain was different because after a week,
they said my clitoris was growing back and
they had to cut me twice and, as the fighter
among all of us because I have big body
from my young age, they had to bring in
my cousins to sit on my chest and others sat
on my two legs and some were holding my
hands. To this day, I’m not close to those
cousins because there is an accusation on
the pain in my life. I recognize them as my
cousins. We greet, talk but I did not nurture
a relationship with them.
Talking about myself now, I carried the
death of my younger sister in my heart for a
long time and I still do because she would
have been a grown up woman probably in
her late 40s now but her life
was cut short over something
that has no relevance to her
life.
Sex only in the head
I grew up like that, got
married and the sexual part of
me which I had very elaborate
idea of how to enjoy sex was all
in my head and not in my body.
The way my mind thinks about
it is not the same way my body
is responding to it. I am such a
person that communicates and
had to communicate with my
partner about my situation
which I told him he has to be
more concerned about me for
me to enjoy my sexuality. There
are millions of women who are
not bold to have such
communication with their
partners and so are living in
silence, suffering.
Public health
That experience I had through genital
My three years
old sister died
five days later.
She bled to
death. She was a
happy young
child who was
healthy
mutilation is part of what brought me into
public health. I believe in working with
families and communities to address female
genital mutilation, but from the point of view
of the community and not from our point of
view as scientists because we are dealing with
the cultural thing. A lot of time in translating
a name from our local languages into foreign
languages, we remove a lot of meaning from
it. There was an international organization
when I was in secondary school that came to
talk about female genital mutilation. In my
dialect, we call it ‘moninkim’ which is not
equal to female genital mutilation.
‘Moninkim’ is a whole institution with so many
other things attached to it and part of it is the
cutting. Then, what WHO did was to call
everything female genital mutilation.
UN people
When they came, they chose Saturdays in
agrarian community to teach the
women and Saturday was the
only day children sit with their
parents to help them. Already they
were not happy to listen to what
they were saying. Then the UN
people came with a white man,
doctors and a nurse who is an
Igbo woman born and raised in
Lagos. A lot of people don’t
understand why I am underlining
that. An Igbo woman brought to
Cross River State to address a
cultural issue will not have the
understanding I have that
moninkim is not female cutting.
What our women were hearing
was that they did not know how
to raise their daughters.
Institution
Moninkim is an institution
where a girl has information on
transiting to a woman. They are taught how
to be women, how to be mothers, how to be
wise, how to carry themselves in the society
where men think all things are theirs, how to
be able to get what you want from a man
without him thinking you are manipulating
him. All these things are part of the education
that girls get during period of circumcision.
So saying that moninkim is bad, then all those
things there would be thrown away. That was
how they left because they weren’t making
any inroad and I knew something had to be
done.
Safehaven
When I met Safehaven Development
Initiative, an NGO working on how female
genital mutilation at the grassroots level will
come to an end, I advised the Executive
Director, Mrs Margaret Onah, on the best way
to go about it to have result. The whole
community was signing up to eliminate the
cutting but not to eliminate moninkim. They
agreed that it is the cutting that needed to be
eliminated and not the institution of moninkim
because the institution is tied into traditional
marriage.
Brides
We come out as moninkim to dance; which
is the first step to show ourselves as brides. So,
if we say we should eliminate moninkim, then
you are eroding a whole part of that culture.
We like to see ourselves well dressed and come
out as brides that have been trained. I will not
want my daughter to miss that part of our
culture during her traditional marriage but
never to be cut.
Father’s intervention
We lost that little girl and my father decided
to take matter into his hands and,
subsequently, my younger sisters that came
after my late sister were not cut. All of us in our
age group were cut when we were little girls
and we have decided that our daughters will
not be cut. When it is time for them to get
married, we are going to put them in the
moninkim house to get that education at the
traditional level. It is by making a room in
your house and preparing a throne for her. It
is expensive because girls can be put there for
as long as six months. In Calabar you hear the
term ‘fattening room’, but it is not the right
name for it. That was the derogatory name
that the white man gave the culture. Of course,
when you keep a young girl for six months
without working and well fed, massaged and
pampered, she is going to put on some weight
but it is not ‘fattening room’ but rather a
preparatory room. It is where we are prepared
for marriage.
Memorandum
Through the Safehaven Development
Initiative, we have entered several
communities in our clan. There are some
communities that, during our traditional
new year or new year festival, girls who
may have been cut in the past come out to
dance for the whole community but for
the past five years that Safehaven
Development Initiative has been working
there, girls still go into that bridal
preparatory room, but no cutting happens
and they still come out and dance because
the kings and everyone in the clan have
signed a memorandum that they are not
going to support anyone who cuts her
girl. We educate our communities that
they don’t have to cut a girl in order to be
able to celebrate her. If their little girls
go to school and graduate, they can
celebrate them. If she is a farmer and she
has a good harvest, they can celebrate and
honour her too. It is all about celebrating
a woman but they don’t have to hurt the
woman in order to celebrate her because
cutting and then turning around to
celebrate her does not make sense. We are
eliminating the cut but we insist that our
girls must be celebrated by their families.