Front Page Africa on Thursday described a new wrinkle in Liberia’s ongoing struggle with female genital mutilation (FGM): “traditional leaders” of tribal communities who saw an opportunity to abduct children and demand ransoms to release them without mutilation.
FPA quoted county officials who estimated at least a hundred girls are currently being held in “bush schools,” which are hidden enclaves licensed as centers of traditional learning by the Liberian Interior Ministry. The leaders of the bush schools are known as “zoes.”
The bush schools are administered by a centuries-old female secret society called Sande, an extremist group with enough political influence to prevent the Liberian parliament from outlawing the schools, and enough street muscle to credibly threaten human rights activists and journalists with kidnapping and murder. Liberia is one of the few countries in West Africa that has not outlawed FGM.
Higher-ranking members of the organization keep their identities secret, wearing masks during their infrequent public appearances. There is a similar society for men called Poro.
Sande is not exactly a religious cult, as many of its members profess to be Christians or Muslims, but it does claim paramount authority to initiate girls into womanhood. Graduating from a bush school supposedly prepares girls to become good wives.
One of the “secret rituals” of the Sande is female genital mutilation — an extremely painful and frequently unsanitary procedure that some zoes perform with a simple razor blade. Not every girl who attends a bush school returns alive.
Some of the women who survived bush schools have spoken out against their mystique, angrily charging that the zoes teach nothing of any value. Instead, the zoes amuse themselves by tormenting the girls in their charge.
“We did not go through any training there. We never saw them teaching anyone how to make mat, baskets or whatsoever! We suffered in that bush. They used to beat us, put green leaves on our backs and made us lay in the hot sun until the leaves got dry on our backs. According to them, they were training us,” one survivor complained.
Front Page Africa reported that many of the girls presently held in bush schools were kidnapped from their families, even though Sande leaders ostensibly declared a three-year moratorium on bush schools in February to address mounting complaints. A high-ranking society member named Mamie Zoe said the FGM practices and abductions might end if the Liberian government provides more money for the schools to teach other things.
“I told them that if we open the bush, they should help me to give caustic for those children to learn how cook soap. They should bring something them so the children can learn how to sew the country cloth. And they say they were going to do it. They don’t do it,” she said.
Mamie Zoe said she did not want to discontinue FGM, but would prefer if the cuttings were performed “in a more medically safe environment and when formal schools are closed for a break.”
Other bush school administrators told Front Page Africa they would only consider halting FGM and other objectionable practices if “cold hard cash comes their way.”
Supposedly, this would be funding to establish vocational training centers in place of the bush schools, although Front Page Africa was skeptical that zoes were “interested in learning new skills to make money,” as envisioned by the U.N. Women initiative to phase out bush schools.
Bush school operators were fairly explicit in their threats to return to the old ways if they do not receive the funding they anticipate, along with other benefits:
Massa Kandakai, the head of over three hundred FGM practitioners in Montserrado County, says she along with her women have fulfilled their part of the bargain with UN Women by closing all bush schools in Sonkay Town and Todee in Montserrado. Kandakai says UN Women should uphold the agreement by continually supporting them – with monthly salaries, access to cell phone networks, fishponds and processors for making Farina or flour from cassava and potatoes. The women say they will revert to the practice if their requests are not met.
“What all they told us, we heard it but what they supposed to do for us, they are not doing it for us,” says Kandakai. “What I want from them to get rid of this thing here is: firstly, my women, let them put my women on payroll, let my women be taking pay.”
Some reformers, such as U.N. Women goodwill ambassador and FGM survivor Jaha Dukureh, believe it would be possible to retain the “positive aspects” of African cultural traditions while persuading and inducing the traditionalists to abandon mutilation and child marriage.
Dukureh argued it would be “nearly impossible for us to come into communities and tell people they should abandon their traditional beliefs,” but Liberian Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor countered that FGM can only be stopped by outlawing the practice because traditional leaders never quite get around to keeping their promises to stop.
“It has to be into law. The ban that has taken place by the traditional council is an attempt to say, ‘Yes, over the three years hopefully much more will be done to provide culture centers where our daughters can go and learn our culture and learn what it is to be an African woman without female genital mutilation’. So we hope the political will from the legislature will allow us pass this law,” Taylor said.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) estimates there are over 200 million women alive today who have been subjected to FGM in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
W.H.O. warns there is “evidence suggesting greater involvement of health care providers in the practice,” a trend known as “medicalization.” W.H.O. categorically rejects statements like those made by the zoe in Front Page Africa’s article who thought FGM would become safer if performed in medical clinics, and urges healthcare providers to avoid performing the procedure under any circumstances.
“FGM has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in many ways. It involves removing and damaging healthy and normal female genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of girls’ and women’s bodies. Although all forms of FGM are associated with increased risk of health complications, the risk is greater with more severe forms of FGM,” W.H.O. said in its latest bulletin.
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