However Long the Night

by Aimee Molloy

  “Yes,” Ourèye said, as the journalist jotted down notes. “For generations the women of my family have held the position of cutter. I inherited it from my mother, who inherited it from her own. For years I have been traveling to the villages of our region performing the operation, and I have cut thousands of girls. All of my life I have believed in this tradition. Like everyone here, I was taught it was necessary and sacred. But then I came to these classes and I learned differently.”

  Molly smiled at Ourèye, unsure of where this was heading.

  “Molly, I’m proud to tell you today that our community has made an important decision. We have been inspired by the courage of the women of Malicounda Bambara. They are our sisters, and they have shown us what is possible. To support them, and for the health of our daughters and granddaughters, the village of Nguerigne Bambara has decided to follow suit. A few days ago, the village chief and imam called a meeting of the entire village after the afternoon prayers, and we’ve discussed this as a community. We, too, have decided. We will no longer practice the tradition in our village.”

  18

  Tànki Jàmm (Feet of Peace)

  For weeks after the meeting in Nguerigne Bambara, Molly reveled in the excitement of what was happening. “All the doubts I’d been feeling had disappeared,” she recalls. “Instead of thinking about what might go wrong or the problems that might arise, I became obsessed with dreaming of the possibilities.”

  Ourèye’s pronouncement about the decision in her village had been followed by something equally significant. A few weeks later, on November 22, 1997, the president of Senegal, Abdou Diouf, gave tremendous support to Tostan’s efforts and the women of Malicounda Bambara in his speech to the Thirty-Third Congress of the international Federation for Human Rights in Dakar. “We must vigorously fight against female genital mutilation,” he announced during the congress’s opening ceremony, in front of nearly five hundred people, including Molly. “Today, this traditional practice can no longer be justified. In relation to this issue, the example of Malicounda Bambara deserves to be cited. In this Senegalese village, the women became aware of the dangers of this practice and engaged in dialogue with their husbands, the imam, and the village chief. Through a collective decision, the community decided to never again practice FGM. I today make a solemn appeal for the Malicounda experience to be followed and to spread throughout Senegal.”

  Molly left the ceremony feeling jubilant. She hadn’t known he was planning on mentioning this, as FGC had been a subject long avoided by Senegalese politicians out of fear of losing the support of their constituents. After all the anguish the women of Malicounda Bambara had suffered, she knew this was just what they needed to raise their spirits.

  Following the meeting in Keur Simbara in August, things had continued to go badly. In October, less than three months after Malicounda Bambara’s declaration, a newspaper in France published an article about their pledge in which the journalist erroneously reported that all villagers performed infibulation on their girls, meaning they were sewn shut after their procedure. The men of Malicounda Bambara had been sent the article by relatives in France. Incensed by the description in the article, they immediately called a meeting of the entire village.

  In the oppressive heat of mid-October, they pulled chairs into a large circle in the village square while the women nervously instructed the children to find something to do with themselves. One by one, the men expressed their indignation over the article, reiterating their frustration that while they had agreed to support the women’s decision, they did not expect them to be so public about it, inviting strangers to come and misrepresent the tradition. They’d had enough, and they were now demanding that the women stop their work. Tene Cissoko, Kerthio’s best friend, answered courageously. “We have learned our human rights,” she said. “Not only do we have the right to make important decisions like the one we made, but we also have the right to voice our opinions. We respect you and are willing to listen to your opinion. But we also know that it is our right to disagree.”

  Kerthio, Maimouna, and the other women met to discuss the meeting, and while they too were unhappy with the language of the article, their dedication to bringing about change remained. Molly knew that the fact that the women were willing to defy their husbands’ wishes was a testament to just how far-reaching the transformation in Malicounda Bambara had been. But she also knew that something needed to be done to bring the men into the process, to include them in these efforts.

  During such moments, Molly often thought back to her experiences with the social movements of the late 1960s, while she was a student at the University of illinois. “I watched the events unfolding around me with interest and observed the different strategies being used to try to bring about social justice and change,” she says. “I could certainly understand the anger and revolt that I witnessed on campus, but I wondered if this would ultimately lead to the deeper social changes we were seeking.” Reading about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., she had been drawn to their peaceful, inclusive methods, which appealed to the deeper values of humanism. “They held firm to their beliefs without blaming, shaming, accusing, or creating an enemy to fight,” she says. “Rather, they were promoting a positive vision for society to which everyone could aspire.”

  She thought back to one particularly memorable experience during her days in France as a college student, when she had attended a political meeting organized by students struggling to change the system. People from the workers’ movement had come in hopes of coordinating activities with student groups. One worker started his speech by attesting to his belief in Jesus Christ, a statement that brought jeers and ridicule from the students. The workers walked out in anger.

  Molly left that meeting sharing their frustration. Placing blame, insulting people’s personal beliefs, or trying to force one’s values on others was not the way to go about solving problems and creating peace and justice. As far as she saw it at the time, if people were out to end the oppression they felt, anger did not seem the best way to go. All anger accomplished was to stop the dialogue, at the moment when dialogue was needed most.

  AROUND THIS TIME, MOLLY relocated the Tostan office from her house to a small, five-room building in the Dixième, a leafy neighborhood in Thiès, on a quiet street lined with large cailcedrat trees and colonial-style buildings, their red-tiled roofs reminiscent of when the city was French-controlled. Inside, the simple offices were sparsely furnished with teak furniture crafted by local artisans, the walls hung with batiks Molly had collected during her travels to other African nations. Not long after the move, Demba Diawara, from the village of Keur Simbara, paid Molly a visit. She’d first met him eight years earlier, while developing a literacy project in his village, and she’d since come to deeply respect him. He was a wise and patient man who spoke beautiful Wolof, rich with proverbs. Originally from Mali, a large nation to the east of Senegal, the Diawaras had once served as Malian kings, ruling over sixty-eight villages. By the late 1800s the land in Mali had become depleted from overfarming, so Demba’s grandfather came to Senegal seeking fertile fields for his peanut crops. He found the earth in Senegal to be rich and generous, and he decided to remain. He built a home among the fields and named the area after his eldest brother, Simbara, who remained in Mali. He married and had many children in Keur Simbara, and was later blessed with too many grandchildren to count, who now populated several villages around Thiès.

  For a man of Demba’s age, the skin on his face was smooth and bright, and his small frame was whittled with muscle, a lingering effect of when, in his much younger days, he was considered one of the best wrestlers in the area. As an adult, he’d made it his mission to represent his family in a way that would make his grandfather and mother, a strong and respected woman, proud. Without any formal education, other than Koranic school as a very young boy, he was known by all to be an extremely intelligent, fair, and generous man.

  Through the years, Molly had come to
depend on Demba as a trusted adviser, and he always seemed to know when she needed guidance. By the look on his face that afternoon, Molly could tell this was likely one of those moments. He accepted the glass of water she offered and took a seat across from her.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about the meeting in my village with the women of Malicounda Bambara a few weeks ago, and Molly, I need to be honest with you,” he began. “I trust you very much. You are part of our community, you have learned our language, and you have always shown us great respect. But this time, my friend, you have gone too far. You are involving yourself with our oldest tradition, and I have come to tell you I think you should stop what you are doing.”

  “Oh, Demba, I’m sorry you’re upset,” Molly said. “I had misgivings about it myself in the beginning. But just as the women have learned so much, so have I. You need to understand. After what the women of Malicounda Bambara and Nguerigne Bambara have done, after what I’ve learned, I can’t just stop. We need to keep talking about this tradition.”

  Demba’s gaze was severe. “But Molly, you are concerning yourself with something you don’t know enough about. If this had happened just ten years ago—if you had come to a village like ours and talked about the tradition so publicly—I’m not sure you would have made it out of the village unharmed. That is how deep our sentiment is around this tradition.”

  Molly hesitated. “Demba, I have to ask you something. Have you ever talked to the women in your village about their experience with the tradition?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why? Why haven’t you asked them about it?”

  “You know men never discuss these things. It is taboo to talk about this.”

  “But do you realize what the health consequences are?”

  Demba was silent.

  “Demba, the information we’re giving to the women, it is all based on facts. For as long as I’ve known you, you have been keen to learn new things. I’m not trying to get you to stop anything. I just want you to be informed. And I want you to do three things for me before you ask me again to stop what I’m doing.”

  “Three things?”

  “Yes. I want you to go talk to a doctor about the tradition, and I want you to speak to imams. Have a discussion with both. Ask them their opinions. When you are done, speak to the women in your community. They respect you, and I think they will tell you the problems they have experienced. Do that, and when you are finished, please come back to see me.”

  ON A STEAMY MORNING a few months later, Demba left Keur Simbara at seven in the morning and began the ninety-minute walk to the Tostan offices in Thiès, where he quietly took a seat in the front lobby and waited in silence until Molly opened her door. He followed her into her office, removed his dusty prayer cap, and took a seat across from her.

  “In life, you’re bound to make mistakes and bring bad things to others,” he said. “That I can accept. What I do not accept is someone who is not big enough to say, ‘I made a mistake and I’m sorry.’ Well, Molly, I’m sorry. After our last conversation, I was ready to shake what you’d said from my ears. But now I know. If I had understood what I do now, I never would have sat in silence. I would have stood up a long time ago.”

  He’d gone first to other religious leaders. “If any of them had confirmed what I’ve always believed—that the tradition was a religious obligation under Islam—I would have stopped right there,” Demba told her. But in every meeting, he was told the same thing: nowhere did the Koran encourage or require women to perform the tradition, and no truly learned Muslim could claim it was a religious obligation. Demba left each meeting feeling bewildered that for so long, for so many generations, his people had held such a deep misunderstanding of what their religion required on this matter.

  He then went to a doctor, who explained exactly what was done to a woman’s body during the procedure, how painful it could be, as well as the potential health consequences. Slowly, and with some trepidation, he then began to engage in conversations with the women in his family. “I had no idea, no idea!” he said, shaking his head. “I have heard unbelievable stories—of girls suffering, and women’s pain and difficulty during sexual relations and childbirth, especially if they were sealed. The women never talked about this, never showed pain, never told us about the problems before. Like me, most didn’t realize this pain is linked to the tradition.” They had, of course, all assigned it to another cause: evil spirits or the will of God. Although Demba had once shared their belief that sickness is often due to the mysterious, invisible forces that exist everywhere, both he and the women were now beginning to understand through the Tostan health module that this was likely not the case. “They were surprised by what they learned in Tostan. They thought all women had the same pain, that it is natural to suffer in this way.”

  “Demba, are you saying your village is going to stop practicing the tradition?” Molly asked when he’d finished speaking.

  “Molly, we can’t. I need to explain to you what you did wrong, my friend. This tradition is a very old custom that no one in our community has ever questioned. To decide to stop it—that is not a decision an individual can make alone. It is not a decision that one village can make alone. Our daughters intermarry in ten other villages. If we stop today, tomorrow our daughters will not have husbands, and no mother would do that to her daughter. That would cause insurmountable problems in a girl’s life. This is why there have been so many problems in Malicounda Bambara. The way the decision was made there is not how decisions are made in this culture. The worst thing you can do in Africa is to pull yourself out of your group, to make an individual decision. That is what the women did, without consulting the larger community.”

  “I don’t understand,” Molly said. “They decided as a village to stop.”

  “Yes, but a person’s family is not their village. The family includes one’s entire social network: their relatives in many surrounding villages, in all of the places they marry, even in far-off countries like France and the United States. If you want this work to continue, if you truly want to bring about widespread change, you must understand something. When it comes to important decisions, they must all be involved.”

  Molly knew immediately that Demba was right. It wasn’t that the decision of the women in Malicounda Bambara was wrong; it was that they had employed the wrong strategy. “I should have known,” Molly said. “What do we do?”

  “I’m going to help you, and if I can, I will work to get more villages—many more villages—to follow the lead of the women of Malicounda Bambara and Nguerigne Bambara. I will go to the ten villages where my closest family members live, and I will speak to them myself. I don’t know how they will respond, but I know we must include all of them and share the knowledge we have learned.”

  “I want to help,” Molly said.

  “Well,” he replied, “I do not want to offer any false promises that I will have any effect. And I do not want people to think I am earning money from anybody. My feet are feet of peace, and they alone will carry me far.”

  THE NEXT WEEK, DEMBA began to walk. From village to village, with nothing but the clothes he wore and his prayer cap, he walked. Some days he walked five miles, other days as far as fifteen, returning home only a few nights at a time over the next month. Arriving in each village with an aching back and skin slick with sweat, he was greeted warmly by his relatives and offered food and a place to sleep. These initial encounters were always cheerful and warm until, after a meal had been shared, Demba called the people of the village together to explain why he had come. Many looked at him with disbelief, others with anger, that he—an elderly man, no less—had the audacity to speak aloud about something so intimate and private.

  In the first village he visited—a small, remote community of about eight hundred residents called Diabougou—a few women rose from their chairs and left the circle as he spoke. As a respected elder, Demba was not accustomed to this treatment. “Come back. Sit down,” he said calml
y to the women, concealing any signs of his quickly beating heart. “I’m not saying you have to change your behavior. I’m simply asking you to listen.” But the women kept going. In another village, he was seriously challenged by one of his nieces. “Just try to tell me to stop,” she said when he’d finished speaking. “Not only do I refuse to ever give up this tradition, if I hear of a girl who hasn’t been cut, I will take her and cut her myself.”

  “I understand you’re upset,” Demba said to his niece. “But I also understand there are three parts to life: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Most of us live wholly in the first two parts, and we have trouble envisioning tomorrow. To do that requires a lot of introspection and thought. You are angry now, I understand. I was too when this issue was first brought to me. But we must not react. Rather, we must pause and think. We must envision tomorrow.”

  Again and again—in Samba Dia, Sorabougou, Soudiane—his message was met with anger, but he remained patient when he spoke, pausing to touch a knee when he wanted someone to pay closer attention, to deepen their understanding of what he was saying. At the end of each evening, when the discussion had waned and the people of the village were ready to retire, Demba thanked them for their time, inviting them to meet again the next day. In a few instances he was politely asked to leave, but his resolve remained. He quietly explained he had come in peace, and while he respected their request, he preferred to stay another night so that in the morning they might continue the dialogue.