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Just like millions of Somali girls before me and since, I went from one day to the next in my little room, separate from the world and from humanity. Every day, I heard women from the neighbourhood drop in to tell my mother, ‘Congratulations, Marian, your daughter has been purified.’ What they were purifying an eight-year-old girl from I have no idea. In time, I grew accustomed to turning over gently and to urinating, even though it still hurt horribly. After seven days, the women undid the bindings from my legs and slowly parted them, causing fresh pain. They removed the thorns to see if the wound had fused together, and thank goodness it had – probably thanks to my father’s medications. Then they tied my legs together again to keep it from coming undone. They got me to stand up, still bound, and helped me to move about a little one baby step at a time. I felt very dizzy – I had lost a lot of blood and had been lying down for a week. One thing I still remember vividly was the horrible smell of sweat, urine and dried blood that emanated from me, as I hadn’t washed for ten days. And this was called purification?
The women who were minding me kept saying, ‘Inan baad tahay, Edna’, which means, ‘You are a young woman now.’ I was no longer an aruur, a child. By this they meant that I had been prepared and was ready to be considered for marriage, even though in our culture girls do not generally marry until they are around fifteen (although there are exceptions). As a ‘cleansed’ virgin, I would be trained to be shy and obedient, respectful and domesticated – the perfect Somali wife.
Eventually the wound mended some more and I was allowed to gently wash myself. They let me sit up, took off my leg bindings and helped me to take a shower. They told me I was healed. Psychologically, I was far from healed. Only then did I understand why the other girls in the neighbourhood had disappeared for three or four weeks and had emerged pale and silent. Just as they must have been, I was terrified that the wound would reopen. Feeling completely alone, I didn’t want to see anyone or go out. When I eventually ventured outside, the neighbourhood women constantly reminded me, ‘Watch out, don’t do too much because if it comes undone we will have to do it again.’ You can bet I was careful after that.
Tomboy Edna who’d been such a carefree, rebellious kid had gone for ever. In her place was a frightened little girl who was instructed not to talk about what had happened, which only made me more aloof. While my friends of both genders were playing and singing, laughing and joking, I felt so different. Every time I walked, sneezed or coughed, I remembered the warning that filled me with dread: ‘We will have to do it again.’
My grandmother Clara had always been such a comfort and an ally to me, so I longed to see her and have her hold and reassure me, but she was in Borama. By the time she came to visit, my wound had healed and I was already indoctrinated into never speaking about what had happened to me. Later I came to understand that Clara too would have considered my mutilation to be completely normal. From that day on, I regarded all the women in my family with something akin to suspicion, even contempt. They had conspired against me, lied, and disfigured me permanently. How could I ever forgive them?
***
I have never written or spoken about my own experience with female circumcision in any detail before. It isn’t easy, but it is time because this mutilating trauma has to stop. Every Somali woman has to live with the memory and then with the physical consequences. It remains with you for life.
Of course the wound heals and gradually you learn to behave normally again. Eventually even the fear that something might happen to undo it subsides. But it takes years to trust people again, or to grow accustomed to the new way of living and urinating. Many teenagers suffer frequent infections and pain. Some even need surgery while menstruating because of blockages, and this has to be done in a certain way and then be certified to prove that the girl’s virginity is still intact or she and her family will be dishonoured.
I knew what had been done to me was wrong, but I had no idea what to do about it. Almost every female I knew had gone through the same experience, and virtually everyone younger than me was going to have it done. It took me decades to pluck up the courage to ask questions about the practice, and many more years before I decided to speak out against it.
I wanted to know where and how it started and was astonished to discover that this paganistic ritual pre-dates Islam and Christianity, going back to the fifth century BC and the time of the Pharaohs. In some countries, it is still referred to as ‘Pharaonic circumcision’.
The River Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt and the story goes that the god of the river was considered to be the most powerful, and had to be appeased. The most beautiful virgins were chosen for sacrifice and thrown into the river to drown. It was considered an honour to the family of a girl to be so favoured by the Pharaoh in order to ensure the survival of her people and the punishment for refusal was severe. If the river ever dried out or flooded the fields then it was presumed that the girl chosen hadn’t been a true virgin, which had somehow angered the god. To ensure that all future ‘gifts’ would be appropriate, girls were circumcised and sutured and taken to the temples to be guarded by eunuchs until it was time for them to be killed. In time, the practice was adopted as an initiation ceremony by most of the people who lived along the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows north to Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, joining the White Nile from Burundi. The custom travelled across the equatorial belt through the Nubian tribe to the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Somalis, and sixteen other countries in Africa as well as a few in Asia. Female circumcision is largely an accident of geography.
Later, slave traders adopted its use to keep their female ‘goods’ from getting pregnant (they also earned more money for virgins), and nomadic herders also accepted the tradition for population control or to ‘protect’ their women from rape. It is still widely practised by African Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, west of the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, as far south as parts of Kenya and Tanzania. In some instances it is the local blacksmith who performs the cutting rather than a birth attendant. Nations on the other side of those two seas don’t do it at all, or only so that it sheds a symbolic drop of blood. In truth, it is not a religious obligation required by any faith, but primarily a cultural tradition from a time when people believed in river gods.
Thanks to ignorance and fear, female circumcision is now a widespread practice that is still carried out on an estimated three million girls between the age of five and ten every year. In my country it is estimated that the most severe form, as practised on me, affects 76 per cent of the female population, a trend that is down from the 100 per cent of my youth and the 98 per cent prevalence we found two decades ago. Because of migration, the practice is also emerging among the refugee communities of Europe and North America, and British hospitals currently treat around 9,000 cases every year.
For now I want to send comforting thoughts to the terrified eight-year-old me who was so bewildered and confused by the heinous thing that was done to her that she still weeps at the cruelty of it.
***
When I returned to Djibouti City at the end of that summer I could tell from the look in my Aunt Cecilia’s eyes that she knew what had been done to me. Not that she said anything – not even ‘sorry’. As I was fast learning, to say nothing about FGM is the considered wisdom among my people.
It was years before I realized that my mother and aunt, as Somali girls from a highly respected family, were also cut but would have been spared the most radical infibulation like mine, and that in French Somaliland Cecilia was free of the social and cultural pressure to have her own daughters ‘cleansed’. Rita, Madeleine and Gracie were all untouched, so I was the first daughter of my generation affected. My sister Asha was born in 1948 while I was away at school, and I hoped she would be spared. No such luck.
I now know that families are very often shamed into it, with friends and relatives warning them that their daughters will be spinsters because ‘Any husband would expect it.’ This is what happened to my mother, who had married young and moved to an environment very different to her childhood. She desperately wanted to fit in and be seen as a good Muslim wife who’d done the right thing for me. As the eldest child of Adan Doctor I had to be of impeccable moral standing.
The pressure to conform doesn’t only come from adults. Children pick up on the language and often tell an ‘uncut’ girl, ‘Keep away from me. Mummy says you still have your shame. You’re not halal.’ Without even knowing what the procedure involves, girls beg to be ‘cleansed’ so that they can be just like their friends. It is a mystery to them but a natural response from innocents who also want to fit in. And as in every country where female circumcision is practised, religion plays no part because it happens to all girls, be they Christian, Muslim or from a pagan background. There is little chance of escape.
CHAPTER FOUR
Djibouti City, French Somaliland, 1947
Settling back into my parallel life in a place far from home was all part of the healing process and I embraced my schooling with new fervour. I was there from 1946–1952 and I loved every minute, even though I had the bittersweet knowledge that when I returned to Somaliland my education couldn’t be continued.
My brother Farah, who I hardly knew but who joined me at my Aunt Cecilia’s when he was eight years old, became my daily companion as we held hands each morning waiting for the school bus. He also embraced our new life in French Somaliland and, in time, we became very close.
We still went back home each summer, spending time with my parents and then holidaying with my grandparents in the country. As soon as school broke up, Farah and I would be driven from Djibouti City to wherever Dad was working, a journey of three or four days. He was usually too busy to pick us up himself, so would send a relative who might also collect other children. For us the journey was the greatest excitement of all, as we passed trees festooned with goats nibbling at the branches, as well as camel herds and donkey caravans in every kind of landscape. One trip home took nine days because of heavy rains. A distant aunt had secured us seats in a truck heavily laden with commercial goods that then became stuck in the mud. There were no phones or other cars on the road to ask for help, so everyone had to help dig it out. Our family knew we were en route but when we didn’t show up as expected they were very worried. The only foods we had were onions, salt, tamarind and sweet potatoes, which we roasted. It was on that trip that I learned that peeled bark from an acacia tree could be boiled to make a tea called asal. It was cold at night so we drank it to keep warm. Asal is also good for cleaning wounds and sterilizing vessels – a fact I logged for later use.
My brother and I didn’t mind being stuck in the middle of nowhere because it felt like a free holiday. The truck was carrying so many interesting people from different tribes all riding on the top, which was heavily laden with goods. My aunt paid extra for us to sleep in the cab at night for safety from wild animals, but Farah and I longed to be up on the roof where our fellow passengers hung off ropes on the sides telling poems and singing songs. There were arguments and running battles, there was love and jealousy and friendship. All of life was there.
Desperate to join them, Farah and I would seek out an old woman or a mother and child and offer them our seats. My aunt praised us for our kindness, never quite appreciating that we did it only so that we could swap places and climb up under the stars to inhale the sweat and the tobacco smoke and listen agog to all the stories.
Life as a child in Africa was such a big adventure.
I always loved reconnecting with my father who’d occasionally take time off to bring us home. I remember him driving us back once and letting me hold the steering wheel while sitting on his lap. Mother was screaming from the back seat, ‘Don’t let Edna drive, Adan, she’ll kill us all!’ Dad just laughed and promised to go slowly, letting me steer the car for miles down those bumpy roads and sparking my lifelong love of driving.
Those first summers after my ordeal were when I first started going with him each day to the hospital in Erigavo, the northeastern capital where he was living and working on yet another two-year rotation. I would walk him to the door as I did when I was small but now I’d carry on inside, chattering away and willing to offer my assistance. I was always much happier rolling bandages or washing Dad’s medical instruments than peeling potatoes for Mum and – after several catastrophes in the kitchen – she accepted that it was probably better that I didn’t help her after all. If we had people coming and I asked if she wanted me to do anything, her answer would be, ‘No, no! We have guests today’, which told me something about her opinion of my domestic skills. All her life I think Mum believed that my father had gained a daughter in me but that she never really had one. Whenever she told me crossly, ‘You’re just as bad as your father!’ she had no idea that it was the best compliment anyone could pay me.
When Dad came back from work for his meal, I’d be the first to greet him and would occasionally volunteer to make him something he liked. Goodness alone knows what it tasted like, but he always pretended it was delicious and made a big fuss of me. The one thing he especially liked during Ramadan was labania – custard made from rice. It was my job to make it – a process that took an entire day, as there was no custard powder back then. First I had to soak grains of fat rice until they expanded, then I had to drain them and scatter them onto a tray to dry in the sun. Then I’d have to pound and sieve it repeatedly until it was powdered, before slowly adding water so as not to make it lumpy. While it was cooking, I’d add cardamom, sugar and milk and then pour it onto little saucers and put them on the windowsill to set, as we had no refrigerator. Dad would taste it, grin and say, ‘Hmmm, this is soooo good, Shukri! Only my daughter could have made this. Did you make it? I knew you did!’ He made me feel like I owned a million camels.
***
I was twelve years old during the Year of Red Dust, our country’s worst drought in years, when I became indispensable to my father at the Erigavo hospital. He not only appreciated my help but also came to rely on it, especially when the drought and famine gave him so much extra work.
There are so many more people to deal with in bad times, and not just those dying of hunger and thirst. Animal carcasses litter the roads and attract flies that carry more disease. Starvation compromises the immune system, which gives people a lower resistance to diseases like TB. Dark hair pales through loss of pigmentation, skin wrinkles and ankles swell. The children especially suffer from protein calorie malnutrition, also known as kwashiorkor, or fluid retention in their bellies as their spleens and livers enlarge. The British-organized military response teams and the Somali Army set up huge camps in the desert to hold 30-40,000 destitute people. Dad and the Army nursing officers would travel back and forth to bring the most desperately ill to the hospital for treatment. Mostly they needed water and food – a little at a time or they’d die of diarrhoea. We fed them a kind of gruel or boiled white rice and watered-down milk. If their veins hadn’t collapsed, we could give them saline through a drip. If they had we were to administer subcutaneous injections daily so that their bodies could absorb it.
Every morning Dad would ask me to help him with something else. ‘Come with me today?’ he’d plead. ‘There are too many patients for me to deal with and I need your help with the dressings.’ Or, ‘Have breakfast early tomorrow, I want you to assist with a procedure, so dress up and meet me on the ward.’ He knew he could trust me that if a surgical instrument needed washing I would do it properly, and that it wouldn’t be stolen. We were so short of supplies that the families of patients would be requested to bring in their own sheets, as well as old ones they had no further use for, which I would cut up for dressings. I’d sit in a side room with piles of striped sheets of every colour, ripping and cutting them into every size Dad might need. Every outpatient would also wash their own bandages and bring them back so that we could boil them all up again and issue them with fresh ones. The brand new custom-made bandages from England were kept back for surgery.
My father’s single-storey hospital had a male ward, a female ward, a medical ward, a surgical ward, outpatients and a maternity ward. There was room for forty patients. Babies slept with their mothers in their beds as there were no cots and an incubator was unheard of. The staff was largely illiterate and not very conscientious, but the whitewashed building was clean – if a little tired – as it was still inspected by the British once a year.
Dad was run ragged delivering babies, performing minor operations and rehydrating patients. Often he was hampered by the unwritten custom in our country that any surgery or lifesaving procedure on a woman has first to be agreed to by their closest male relative, or the one who is financially responsible for her. Seeking that consent from nomadic families scattered in remote places was often difficult and sometimes impossible to get. He was also much hindered by a lack of supplies, as whatever the British provided was never enough and in times of crisis the demand trebled. He was constantly sending telegrams pleading for extra saline drips or needles, more paraffin, wicks and lamps. In desperation, he would sometimes put on his best clothes and go in person to see the District Commissioner to ask for what he needed.
I was only permitted to help my father on the outpatient’s ward and never near the delivery room. God forbid a Somali girl is let in on the secrets of the female body. If Dad was away visiting the nomads, I was then allowed onto the other wards to supervise those he was most concerned about, help the auxiliaries, and follow the numerous instructions on his list.
My mother objected vociferously. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital again, Edna? What do you know about patients? You’ll kill people!’
‘I’m not going to kill anybody. I’m just going to make sure the staff are doing what they should be doing.’
‘How do you know what they should be doing?’
‘I follow what Dad tells me on the piece of paper he left me.’
It never occurred to her to help him, too, or to get some other job. She was a bright, educated woman who’d grown up in a different country, spoke several languages, and could easily have worked as an interpreter or translator. Yet she chose to stay at home to be influenced by her Somali girlfriends about how a wife should be.
***
When my schooling in Djibouti City ended after six years, I returned home proudly to Somaliland with my Certificat d’Études Primaires. I had done very well, but at fourteen years old I couldn’t help but wonder what was in store for me next. Formal education in Djibouti didn’t extend beyond primary school, so there was no reason for me to stay and some pressing reasons for me to go home.
Most Somali girls are married between the ages of fifteen and eighteen and if they are still single much beyond that then they are considered not only unmarriageable, but also unlucky. Marriages are often pre-arranged between families, rather than purely for love. Tribal influences are still important and girls are either wed into their own tribe or into a compatible one to establish new alliances. As a naïve teenager, I had no thoughts about marriage and no idea about sex. Anything relating to my private parts was abhorrent to me after my cutting and I couldn’t countenance the idea of intimacy of any kind. I enjoyed the weddings of my cousins and other family members with their various ceremonies, dances and feasts, but was puzzled by the notion that Somali men can take up to four wives when I had grown up in an unusually monogamous household.
Instead of boys, my focus was on perfecting my languages. Although I was fluent in French by then, my English was poor – especially my pronunciation – so Dad hired a teacher to show me the correct way to say things by having me study diction and read out loud. Armed with this skill, and with my father’s encouragement, I happily jumped at the offer to work for six months as an interpreter for a British doctor named Dr Ashe in the Ruth Fisher Clinic in Hargeisa. This women-only facility had been opened by the Governor’s wife in 1945 with an all-female staff designed to encourage Somali women – banned from seeing a male doctor – to attend hospital whenever they were ill or pregnant.
Dr Ashe was an obstetrician married to a fellow doctor and she was very kind to me. I was conscripted into interpreting for her during the morning outpatients’ clinic for sick women and children. I didn’t know the medical terms for the different medical problems and neither did the patients, but I’d describe their symptoms and the doctor would say, ‘Ah, yes, that sounds like cellulitis to me’, or, ‘I think you may have eczema.’ In every case, if she required surgery, each female patient needed to obtain the permission of the male head of her household, which often delayed and complicated treatments, so I had to help with that too. Very often Dr Ashe would be summoned for a difficult delivery so I would also be called. I was usually kept well back but I still witnessed my first births that way, and there was no time to feel squeamish about it. What struck me most of all was how respectful and professional Dr Ashe was and how she worked very hard to keep the mother and baby alive. It was working alongside her that I first learned that the two main killers of pregnant women in my country are poverty and ignorance. A poor nomadic woman who may have started having babies in the bush as a young teenager and could be on her twentieth child by her late thirties has never had any proper medical supervision or social justice. If she starts to bleed out during yet another pregnancy then the chances are that she will die unless her relatives can get her to a hospital.
I was working with Dr Ashe one day when a woman was brought in who’d got into difficulties giving birth at home, which was the first we knew of her – as is often the case. She’d delivered her baby but was haemorrhaging badly and left a sticky trail of blood right into the waiting room. Dr Ashe stayed calm but announced that we had to get her to the operating theatre in Hargeisa Hospital urgently. In spite of transfusions and other measures, this young mother died. Dr Ashe was very upset but still respectful and thanked me for helping her try to save the mother’s life. She made me feel important in the equation and she whetted my appetite for even more health work.
When the first boarding school for girls opened almost two hundred kilometres away in the town of Burao in February 1953, Dr Ashe surprised me by recommending to my father that I be sent there as a pupil teacher. ‘Edna shouldn’t be wasting her time following me around as an interpreter,’ she told him. ‘She has the making of something better. She can live in the teachers’ accommodation and continue her secondary school education.’ There were two British teachers at the Burao school, neither of whom spoke Somali, and one Somali assistant teacher who spoke only limited English. They needed someone with both languages, so I was selected as one of the two pupil-teachers appointed that year. The arrangement was that the staff would give me tutorials after school hours. It was the only option open to me if I wanted to go any further.