The unkindest cut
Richard West
Who could have guessed, even as little as a year ago, that female circumcision was to become the latest liberal cause? Until recently one would have thought that abortion and sex education (for) with smoking, alcoholism and South African rugby (against) were still the campaigns to rally the good and true. Then, in Paris, early this year, I noticed that Le Monde was running a series of front-page articles on the subject of female circumcision, complete with maps showing the prevalence of the custom in different parts of Africa. A few months ago, our contemporary, the New Statesman, carried a long denunciation of female circumcision, followed later by 'Living', the women's page of the Observer. I would hazard a guess that similar or the same articles may have been published as well in the United States, Since clitoridectomy is a gruesome practice sometimes resulting in death, one should I suppose welcome these articles on simple grounds of humanity; but 'could not suppress some puzzlement at finding this cause advanced in the liberal and left-wing press. The custom of female circumcision has long been referred to by white people in Africa as an example of black barbarity and therefore of unfitness to govern. I have heard it described on innumerable occasions — in Kenya where female circumcision is widespread, in Rhodesia and even in South Africa, where such a salacious topic is mentioned only in private, and not in front of the opposite sex. But they talk about it all right, `Ach man, do you know what the Kaffirs do to their women to make them faithful?'
The arch-negrophobe, Richard Burton, wrote about female circumcision in Two Trips to Gorilla Land. Regretting that the 'delicacy of the age' did not allow him to be explicit, Burton nevertheless gave a vivid account of the customs in Pongo-land, which he visited in 1861: 'The operation is performed generally by the chief, often by some old man, who receives a fee from the parents: the thumb-nails are long, and are often used after the Jewish fashion: neat rum with red pepper is spurted from the mouth to "kill the wound".'
In his commentary on the Arabian Nights and other banned and salacious books, Burton described the practice of female, circumcision in Africa and elsewhere. With the relaxation of laws on obscenity, the custom has once again proved useful to novelists. In Call Jr Rhodesia, published in 1966, Mr W. A. Ballinger kicks off with a lurid account of the goings-on in the Bundu Bush. The hero, Strong, one of the Pioneers of Rhodesia spies on the initiation of two dozen girls: 'The slender, coppery bodies were quite naked save for a single string of cowrie shells around the waist. The young breasts were ringed brightly with concentric circles and about the pubis a triangle in red . . . each body was a moving text-book of sex. And this was the lesson that the girls had been learning in theiong house. How to attract men and then to hold them.' The Bundu mother approaches with a phallus stick. And so on. The girl whom Strong rescues explains that in the operation 'the clitoris, the prime sense organ of pleasure, was cut out to ensure the faithfulness of wives.'
Books like Call it Rhodesia, which also contain some raping of nuns in the Congo, appeal to the prurience of the white reader, while leaving him with the thought that Africans are violently sensual and cruel. This mixture of fascination and fear in connection with sex, explains much of the attitude of the whites in Rhodesia and South Africa. Female circumcision, because It revolts our sensibilities, has long been an obsession.
The present campaigners against clitoridectomy may not know of the much wider campaign that was waged exactly 50 years ago, in Kenya, then a British colony. The Kikuyu tribe who had lost much of their land to the whites were then in a state of some unrest, which was to explode 20 years later in Mau-Mau. To make matters worse, the Scottish missionaires in Kikuyuland, although popular for the schools which they had established, had tried to suppress the custom of female circumcision. Their main objection, it seems, was not so much to the physical operation but to the very erotic dancing and lessons in love play that went beforehand — the sort of things described in the Ballinger novel. As early as 1914, in Thogoto and Tumutumu, several girls had been encouraged to have the circumcision performed in a mission hospital, under the eyes of European doctors. The doctors objected and so, of course, did the Africans who disliked this clinical version of what to them was a holy rite.
About 1919, the missionaries started a new campaign to present the ritual of circumcision. They claimed it was dangerous, that the wounds could fester and cause the girls' death. The custom also discouraged the girls from becoming Christians and getting married in church to one of the numerous male converts. The young Kikuyu political leader, Jomo Kenyatta, travelled in the same year to London to win support for his land reform programme, but he found that people were much more interested in female circumcision. His biographer, Jeremy Murray Brown, writes: 'In London, female circumcision, or clitoridectomy as the fastidious called it, became the talk in advanced circles, and Kenyatta was sought after by hostesses at tea-time discussions.'
Early in January, 1930, all Kenya was horrified by the news that a woman missionary in Kikuyuland had been murdered by persons unknown who had forcibly circumcised her, and smothered her with a pillow in the attempt to stifle her screaming. This crime is still part of the sinister folk-lore of all whites in Africa, although it is no doubt forgotten in Britain. The present Dame Margery Perham arrived in Nairobi a few weeks after the murder and gallantly spent a night in a hut in Kikuyuland in order to demonstrate to the white her faith in the Kikuyus. But the clitoridectomy rumpus continued throughout 1931 when a conference was held in Geneva under the auspices of the Save the Children Fund. Plus ca change.
The The campaign died away, largely because Jomo Kenyatta defended the practice of female circumcision in Facing Mount Kenya, an anthropological study of his own Kikuyu people, (This simply and beautifully written book, incidentally shines by comparison with all the insensitive jargonridden guff on Africa written by modern sociologists.) Kenyatta's chapter on circumcision explains how the actual operation is only a ritual part of the preparation of girls for marriage and motherhood, and how the Kikuyu sexual instruction, far from encouraging licence, teaches young men and women how to control their passion. He denies that the operation is cruel: 'A woman specialist cuts off the tip of the clitoris. . no other part is affected. She has been doused with very cold water. . . It is only when she awakes after three or four hours of rest that she begins to realise that something has been done to her sexual organ.' Some of the modern feminists, especially in America, believe that the clitoris is the sole organ of sexual pleasure, a theory proclaimed in a famous book, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.
Kenyatta did not believe that clitorideetomy robbed women of sexual pleasure, and he spoke with authority on that matter; nor did he have much time for the sexual habits of some of our women's liberationists: 'Masturbation among girls,' he wrote, ‘15 considered wrong . . . It may be said that one of the reasons, is probably the motive for trimming the clitoris, to prevent Pis from developing sexual feelings around that point. Owing to these restrictions, the practice of homosexuality is unknown among the Kikuyu.' Clitoridectomy may be brutal and poss; ibly dangerous. That it degrades women, doubt. The Kikuyu may have something. t,c) learn from Western feminists but I think' that the opposite also applies. 1 pit rnoree trust in Facing Mount Kenya than in 712 Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.
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