During my time at COLORS magazine (which was brilliant and is now rubbish), I had to write about all sorts of odd things. A pill that makes excrement not smell (it didn't work). Sex finger toys. How much it costs to bury a corpse in a small town in Italy. What it feels like to nearly die. Why South Koreans don't like having their face touched. Things like that.
It being COLORS - which had the fake tagline “big pictures; few words” - all these things had to be written about in 250 words or less. It's quite difficult to do that. So one of the hardest assignments I had was to sum up female genital mutilation in 250 words. I did. There are too many brackets, in retrospect, but it's one of the (small pieces of) texts that I'm most proud of.
The words were illustrated with a real female genital mutilation tool from Kenya, which our Kenyan stringer bought for 350 Kenyan shillings. This is what a real fgm tool looks like, except one in use would probably be rustier:
(It being COLORS, the facing page was a picture of an electric tongue.)
This, anyway, was the text:
This steel and goatskin scythe is use to “circumcise” young girls of Kenya's Kikuyu tribe. Nobody knows how many girls worldwide are subjected to female circumcision (more accurately known as female genital mutilation*), but in some African countries (including Somalia and Sierra Leone), it's about 90 percent. The procedure, an important puberty rite in these countries, is usually carried out on girls aged 4 to 12. the scythe above (or sometimes a sharpened stone or rusty razor) is used to slice off the clitoris and scrape away some of the remaining labia. In the most extreme cases, the vagina is then sewn together with thorns or thread, leaving a small hole for urine and menstrual blood to pass through. The whole operation is performed without anaesthetic. Many people (including some mutilated women) believe circumcision keeps women pure until marriage (an “uncircumcised” woman often has little chance of finding a husband). Others think it's barbaric: Mutilated women sometimes become severely infected and need to be cut or ripped open to have sexual intercourse or give birth. “The tradition is very strong here,” says our correspondent in Kenya. “It's done in secret in the bush because the government wants to ban it. But so far they've done nothing about it.”
See? Too many brackets. And far too PC. These days, I'd probably be more succinct. I'd write, perhaps, that “slicing off women's genitalia and sewing up vaginas is sick and indefensible and WRONG.” Stuff cultural traditions and important puberty rites.
But Comfort wouldn't. Comfort is the reason I remembered the goat scythe. Last night, I attended the excellent Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize, run by the excellent Justice for Women, and named in memory of Emma Humphreys, who stabbed to death her violent partner, was jailed for “an indefinite sentence”, and who was finally freed thanks to the efforts of Justice for Women, but then died three years later of an accidental overdose of prescription medication. She was 30. The Prize regularly is awarded to a woman “who has, through writing or campaigning, raised awareness of violence against women and children.” Alternatively known as Women Who Rock. Last year, it was awarded to Pauline Campbell, who campaigns about deaths in women's prisons (there have been over 30 since her daughter Sarah died in HMP Styal in 2003) and who regularly gets arrested (she'll appear at Bristol magistrate's court on 5 November, if anyone in Bristol is at a loose end). The year before, a special prize was awarded to Samira Bellil, a fantastic young Algerian-origin Frenchwoman who wrote a book about being gang raped in France, then died of stomach cancer aged 33.
This year, the prize went to Comfort Momoh, a Nigerian/Ghanaian midwife who works at St. Thomas' Hospital. She's the only midwife in the UK who specialises in female genital mutilation. She can reverse one version of the procedure, where the labia and clitoris have been sliced off and the vagina sewn up. She says there are 7000 girls at risk in the UK, and 75,000 girls and women already living with the reality of having no sexual pleasure, plenty of urinary and genital-related infections, and a constant degree of at least discomfort. Comfort was charming and determined, but she never said things like “sick and indefensible” or “stuff cultural traditions.” Instead, she talked about fgm being about informed choice, because she's older and wiser than me. She makes the lives of lots of women considerably less miserable. She is the kind of woman I like.
Congratulations, Comfort.