Genital mutilation: "We must finally stop being ashamed!"

She suffered indescribable torments

They promised her a boiled egg at the end. More than that, Rakieta Poyga is not reminiscent of her circumcision, just the egg, she was three or four years old. She knows nothing of the feeling when the clitoris and the labia minora were cut off; from the grease-soaked cloth, which she was supposed to clamp between her legs to keep the scars soft, just as all the girls got after the procedure. And that she, like all girls, soon lost in peeing.

The wounds proliferated and scarred so tightly that just a single finger passed into the exit of her vagina. The number of fingers that fit in is the measure of genital mutilation in Burkina Faso. And always thought Rakieta Poyga, it was the same with all girls. It must be like that.



Until she became pregnant for the first time, at 37, and experienced the most terrible, indescribable pain. Not the birth, but because the scar was cut open again in her abdomen, to the anus, to fetch the child. And then with a nylon thread was sewn, with which you actually repaired fishing nets.

She could not sit, not walk; He did not want to eat, for fear that it would rupture everything after digestion. It was hell. But no woman, not even her mother, had ever talked about it. There was only this proverb: on the day of birth you do not have to be ashamed; there you can scream, as loud as you want. It could have been a warning had she known what it meant.



Nobody tells women that genital mutilation is not the norm

If Rakieta Poyga, 58, had not been friends with a gynecologist, she would not have known for a long time what the pain was. She thought, like her mother, that a birth was like that. But the doctor showed her pictures of births with uncircumcised women. She placed photos of mutilated genitals next to it. Rakieta Poyga understood. And this realization led to an initiative that has led to Burkina Faso's open talk of genital mutilation and circumcision in more and more districts.

You have to think about Waris Dirie when you hear about Poyga's story and the change she has made; to the ex-model from Somalia, the end of the 90s with the book? drew the world's attention to the subject of genital mutilation.



Waris Dirie was a star, she founded a foundation, won prizes, jetted around the world, and sometimes just hid in her hotel room when she no longer had the strength to speak publicly about her abdomen once more.

Rakieta Poyga is pretty much the opposite. An energetic woman, tall and powerful, grounded, unglamorous. When she speaks, then emphatically, even intimate physical things, she does not shame quietly, her eyes never go down. The world does not know her, unlike Waris Dirie, she simply has not heard of her.

In her country, Poyga initiated a rethink

But Rakieta Poyga has a grassroots movement in her native Burkina Faso - 19 million inhabitants, half of them living in total poverty? - does so much for women like no one else. At the end of the 1990s, 99 percent of women were circumcised due to unquestioned traditional norms. Today it is already less than 70 percent.

When Poyga once asked her parents why they hurt her like a little girl, her mother said she did not know the consequences of the circumcision. And the father, that she had never found a husband in her village untrimmed.

For a few days Poyga came to Germany, to Berlin, at the invitation of the women's rights organization Terre des Femmes, which has supported her work for many years. The conversation leads them in polished German; Injury, late effects, education committee, women's solidarity - such terms are easy to over the lips, and at the same time you can hear their light slang that their language is not learned academically, but in practice. She lived in Germany for ten years, in Karlshorst in the east of Berlin, later in West Berlin.



From Burkina Faso to study in the GDR - her only chance for education

She belonged to the group of the first students from Burkina Faso, who were allowed to study since 1984 in the GDR. "I really wanted to make something out of my life," she says. Where Germany was, or that there was a wall, they did not know then. "We flew into the blue, we did not even have a visa."

Rakieta Poyga is the eldest of 16 children her father, a military policeman, had fathered with his three wives.She wanted to be a role model for her siblings and, because she was good at school, took her chance to study abroad. The mother gave her that, ensuring that all of her nine children were at school.



Mother said we should not become like her, but on her own. More important than a man is the job. She herself had to ask my father for everything and beg.

Poyga studied socialist business administration, but after the change, without socialism, the diploma was worthless and the scholarship lapsed. She stayed in Germany, simply because she could not afford the return flight. She went to clean, cared for mentally ill people. She still has a good relationship with her former colleagues; When she is in Germany, once or twice a year, she visits her.

Through genital mutilation, sex was torture

At 34, she returned to Burkina Faso, found a job at the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (now GIZ) as manager of an agricultural project - 80 percent of Burkina Faso's people live on what they grow in their own fields, rice, sesame seeds , Cassava, cashew nuts.



She met a childhood friend again, a biology teacher; Actually, she had not intended to marry, but she realized how little she was considered a single woman, "and because he was still to have," she says that, "we still got married." At 37 then the pregnancy, although the sex was a torture for her.

Circumcised women fulfill their obligation as a wife, but it's hard, you're glad when it's done.

The contractions started at ten o'clock in the morning, and she pressed for hours, in vain. "In a circumcised woman's pressing does not help, the child just does not come through the opening I was cut open, down and sideways, the baby almost fell out." Then she was roughly sutured, on the outer labia, so that her abdomen somehow held together.

The birth and the pictures that her friend then showed her changed everything. Poyga now understood what had happened to her body. And the system that made girls bad. In 1998, Rakieta Poyga began a publicity campaign in a country where sex has never been discussed. It was not brave, she says.

No courage, a must. I studied, I had to do that.

She teamed with six women from her neighborhood, one of them chairwoman of the Mosque's Women's Association - about 60 percent of the people in Burkina are Muslims; Together, they drove north to Rakieta's native village, which belongs to the Kingdom of Ouahigouya. They talked to the king, who was responsible for more than 200 villages, he heard them, officially circumcision in Burkina was banned since 1996.

The king invited the village chiefs, the women explained to them what they wanted: to speak publicly about circumcision, to destroy the myths, to explain to the men what one does to the children. They showed a documentary, "La Duperie? from Senegal, for a long time the only film that showed a complete circumcision, that of a two-year-old. Some left the room with tears in their eyes.

She got the men to pronounce the word "clitoris."

And so began a movement, not with sponsorship programs, events and international press such as Waris Dirie's Desert Flower Foundation, but at the grassroots level, with anti-circumcision committees in every village, with gatherings in the classrooms, to which the men initially only out of curiosity because they had heard that it was about slippery topics. Rakieta Poyga talked to her until she finally got her to say the word clitoris, though mumbled.

What is a clitoris, the men do not know us, they come to their wives, when it's dark, they have never seen the female genitalia.

For every prejudice that haunted the minds of men, she had an answer: A woman who is not circumcised is unclean? Where is that? Not in the Koran! The child of an uncircumcised woman will die? It will die at birth if its head does not fit through the opening! The woman is going around? Tell me, how many illegitimate children are there in your family, even though every woman is circumcised!

Rakieta Poyga puts a big, worn book on the table, her enlightenment book, which she takes to the villages for her work. She beats it, one photo shows a normal vulva, the next a vulva without a clitoris, a third the same region completely scarred, the labia fused. It shows photos of inflammation, growths, they look like war wounds, like lesions sewn together in great distress. It points to a photo, a vaginal opening, thin as a pencil. "That's how it looked to me," she says.

Small loans for "Beschneiderinnen" - a first step against the vicious circle

She also says it publicly, in her campaigns, sometimes on a village square with a loudspeaker in her hand. "Talking about circumcision is how to undress, you should not feel shame," she says. Her life in the West, the greater liberality there did not prepare her, "this is something completely different, it costs a lot of overcoming".Her husband copes with it, "he says, I'm actually talking about health."

She met a woman who had contact with Terre des Femmes, "there are good coincidences for good things," says Rakieta Poyga. Terre des Femmes and its donors have since promoted their association Bangr-Nooma, and also finance small loans for circumcisers who can build a new existence, millet or peanuts buy, store and then sell at good prices again. 300 already participate. "Many of them did not become circumcisers out of conviction, but because they are urged to do so," says Poyga. Her work is considered a social service. Many are relieved if they can stop it.

The association ensures that newborn girls receive a birth certificate and trusted people in the villages monitor their integrity. After 33,000 girls who were no longer circumcised, they stopped counting.

Bangr-Nooma is active in 820 villages and is now fighting not only against genital mutilation, but is also committed to young prostitutes, and for girls who were raped or early pregnant. In her own family, since the birth of her daughter Magalie - three years later, she has had a son, Cedrick - no girl has been circumcised.

Despite all the pragmatism, there are still moments in Rakieta Poyga, which seems so unbreakable. In which one senses that the engine of all that she has accomplished is the pain she has suffered. Such a moment is when she says:

I would do anything to just feel for a moment what it's like to have a clitoris.

200 million. So many girls and women are circumcised worldwide according to WHO estimates. Female genital mutilation is common practice in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the most widespread being in Somalia (98 percent). Traditional circumcisers do not always work with primitive tools. In Egypt (87 percent), every second procedure is performed by a doctor. This guarantees more hygiene, but does not reduce the long-term consequences for women.

Rakieta Poyga was born in 1960 in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso. From 1984 to 1994 she studied economics, first in East Berlin, then at the TU Berlin, to have her GDR diploma recognized. She lives with her husband, a biology teacher, in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou, her children are 20 and 17 years old. Poyga is chairman of the Bangr-Nooma Association against Female Genital Mutilation.

The hour of the girls - an action of Plan International and ChroniquesDuVasteMonde

Help, become a godmother or sponsor of the children's aid organization Plan International.

This opportunity is just a click away: www.plan.de

We Need to Talk About Game of Thrones I Guess (March 2024).



genital mutilation