Opinions of Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Address FGM Frontally!
A little over a decade-and-half ago, this writer had a bitter confrontation with an older African-American graduate-school classmate. This acquaintance, who had briefly sojourned in Nigeria, having also earned a first graduate degree in African Art at a major university in that country, had the temerity to presume that Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) was a wholesale practice in the West-African sub-region. I had to promptly remind him that while, indeed, the practice was quite widespread, or prevalent, it was not every ethnic nationality that indulged in it.
The thrust of my classmate’s observation verged on the imperative need to immediately stanch this “barbaric practice,” to which I unreservedly agreed. What annoyed me, however, was the fellow’s rather cavalier suggestion that, somehow, I was in a deliberate state of denial, even after I had painstakingly explained to him that until very recently, historically speaking, that is, even the practice of male circumcision was virtually unknown among the Akans of Ghana and elsewhere. After this bitter confrontation, our relationship was never the same again.
I was reminded of the foregoing event by a disturbing news item that was posted on Ghanaweb.com on July 27, 2007. The article which originated from the Ghana News Agency, was titled “9-12% of Ghanaian Women Underwent FGM.” And it was quite disturbing because while, indeed, this writer was well aware of the grim fact that it existed in some Ghanaian communities, largely non-Akan, he had smugly been of the quite mistaken view that the practice of FGM in Ghana had become, with time and modernity, so marginal as to be readily considered vestigial or virtually a thing of the past, as it were. This was why I was quite taken aback, particularly when one recalled the “Jihadic” fervor with which the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) had assailed the practice of what its “missionary” and “revolutionary” leader termed as “certain senseless and outmoded cultural practices that ought to be eradicated forthwith.”
On second thoughts, perhaps, I ought not to have felt so discombobulated; for what with the unprecedented resurgence of the heinous practice of Trokosi, a cross-generational practice of ritual and practical enslavement that is known to have been central to the maternal culture of “Mr. Probity and Accountability,” the imperious prelate of the so-called June 4th Revolutionaries?
Matters have also not been helped by the fact that recently, when the penal aspect of the practice was brought before Ghana’s parliament for debate, a quite controversial member of this august House whose name yours truly cannot readily recall, appeared to trivialize the seriousness of the issue by arguing for the significant reduction in the sentencing of prospective criminal convicts of this execrable practice, and actually appeared to have carried the votes and, with the latter, the day. The net effect on the keen and critical reader, as well as observer, was the fostering of the peculiar impression that thoroughly extirpating the practice was, after all, not such a good idea. And to be certain, it was just about this time that I decided to dumb down my interest, morally speaking, and move on to other more far-reaching issues of national interest.
Interestingly while, indeed, practitioners of FGM are spread across the country, largely all over the zongos of Ghanaian municipalities, towns and villages, still, it would have been far more relevant and effective if the workshop on the issue had been held somewhere in the northern-half of the country by Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), the non-governmental (or NGO) host of the workshop. For then, media practitioners, the primary target of the workshop, would have gotten a first-hand experience of the issue from the proverbial “Ground Zero,” the frontlines of criminal execution of FGM (Ghanaweb.com 7/27/07).
The GNA story also curiously and gapingly failed to list Nigeria among the neighboring countries where FGM is widely known to be practiced. And it goes without saying, and from this writer’s personal and primary experience, albeit vicariously, that FGM is practiced in Nigeria and among members of major cultural and ethnic sub-nationalities than almost anywhere else in the West-African sub-region.
Interestingly, this heinous practice does not appear to have been fore-grounded among the items on the agenda of the recently-concluded Ninth Summit of the African Union.
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