World Trouble Spots

When I was a girl of ten, I was told to be brave and not to cry, that I'd be a big girl after the ordeal. But when I saw the half-blind old woman with her razor, I bolted. My mother and aunts held me down and spread open my legs. Suddenly, I felt excruciating pain. She sliced off my clitoris and now it lay in her gnarled hands. She then sliced my inner lips until there was nothing left. There was blood everywhere, but by now I felt no more pain, not even when she stuck a thorn from the acacia tree into me to keep the wound closed."

The Somalian woman who gave this account was describing a rite undergone by more than 80 million African women. Female circumcision -- the mutilation of the external genital organs -- is a centuries-old rite of passage, intended to ensure that young women become desirable wives. It frequently causes life- threatening blood loss and infection. It can also lead to painful intercourse, infertility and difficult childbirth. While often erroneously linked to Islamic scripture, it is not mandated by any religion and is practiced by people of many faiths in some two dozen black African nations, Egypt and the Sudan.

There are three degrees of the procedure: sunna (traditional), which involves cutting off the tip of the clitoris; excision, the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora; and infibulation, the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and labia majora. With infibulation, the pubic area is stitched up after the genitals are removed, leaving only a single small opening for urination and menstruation.

Midwives, village healers and elderly female relatives perform the ritual without anesthesia, using unsterilized razor blades. Parents look upon it favorably, on the grounds that removing the clitoris purifies their daughters and deadens their interest in sexual pleasure. Ironically, the frigidity or infertility caused by the mutilation leads many husbands to shun their brides.

Doctors throughout Africa recognize the harmful effects of female circumcision but feel powerless to stop a practice so entrenched in custom and tradition. Many organizations are campaigning against it, and the new African Charter on the Rights of Children includes items condemning circumcision. Governments in Sudan and elsewhere have passed laws against it, but they are seldom enforced.

It will take education, not just laws, to halt what Africans view as a symbol of their culture. Asks Birhane Ras-Work, president of the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices: "How do you eradicate a tradition that is more powerful than a legal system?"