Will Kenya’s Maasai’s Declaration against FGM help curb the Vice?

By Dominic Kirui, Kenya

The sun is setting into the beautiful skyline that decorates Kenya’s Narok County as Lilian Saruni brings back her goats from the grazing fields for the night near her homestead at Nkorienito village. 

Clad in a neat white Maasai dress and a red cover-up, she dons multi-coloured beads around her neck, a beaded leather belt around her waist, and beautiful bracelets with small iron plates fastened to them with tiny chains. The bracelets produce a chirping sound as she walks or gestures. 

The 48-year-old mother of seven is the eighth wife to her husband and has two younger wives after her, making them all ten wives to their husband. Like many girls in her Maasai community, Saruni was married off by her parents immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM) to a man she says was way older than she was, and as he ages, the burden of raising children rests with her.

“I was married off at 15, immediately after being cut. What followed was an ordeal to try and raise my children because their father was too old to raise them. He was the age of my father when I got married to him. It has not been easy,” Saruni narrates. 

According to the WHO, more than 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) in 31 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia where FGM is practiced, mostly on young girls between infancy and age 15. It further says that girls are today one-third less likely to be subjected to FGM compared to 30 years ago; however, progress needs to be at least 10 times faster to meet the global target of FGM elimination by 2030.

Saruni remembers too well that fateful morning when she was cut. For the Maasai tribe, they would have a night-long celebration and then the cutting would happen early in the morning when it’s chilly and after the girls have been asked to take an ice-cold shower.

“For me, the cutting of girls in my community used to be something I would hold so dear because we believed that if a girl got pregnant before she was cut, she would just be thrown away and the people would mourn her as though she was dead because she was considered a curse that would kill all the men in that family,” she says.

Until Saruni was educated about the harmful effects of FGM by a non-government organization that came to her area. Here, she had a full turn against it and was lucky to save her girls from going through the cut and has taken them to school, though to university. She now runs a community-based organization called Oltoilo Le Selenkei that is helping rescue girls from undergoing the cut and early marriage; while also taking them to school and facilitating their training for alternative rites of passage. 

The United Nations (UN) terms FGM as a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

The treatment of the health complications of FGM is estimated to cost health systems US$ 1.4 billion per year, a number expected to rise unless urgent action is taken towards its abandonment.

The voices of women like Saruni are seen as an important step in the right direction to ending FGM because when these women and girls speak up against it, then it stands a better chance of being brought to an end.

“My mother is the one who went to my father and told him that it was time for me to be cut because she feared it would bring a curse to his sons (my brothers). So when we change the voices of women to go against FGM, we can end it soon enough,” Saruni says. 

Today, nearly 4.4 million girls worldwide or more than 12,000 each day - are at risk of female genital mutilation around the world. Daughters of FGM survivors are at a significantly higher risk of undergoing FGM compared to daughters of women who have not undergone FGM.

As the world gathers to fight female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) among communities, Maasai elders in Narok gathered in Suswa late last year to make a historic declaration against the vices, vowing to curse those who continue to practice it, and blessing all their girls equally.

According to the UN Women, Kenya’s focus on male engagement has proven instrumental. Through outreach and awareness campaigns targeting men, FGM is gradually being eliminated. These efforts have led to influential dialogues with the Maasai morans (warriors), resulting in a cultural re-evaluation of harmful practices in that community.  

The vice was banned in Kenya in 2011 after the introduction of a Parliamentary Act called the FGM Act, 2011; which criminalizes FGM in the country and sets out serious penalties for anyone found to have violated it. There is progress, however, when it comes to strides made to end the vice. The recent (2022) Kenya Demographic Health Survey (KDHS) by the National Bureau of Statistics found that in Narok County, FGM prevalence has dropped from 78% in 2014 to 51%. 

“That’s still a huge number because it means that 51 out of 100 girls are being cut in Narok County. It’s more than half!” says Viola Ruto, the Program Manager at Amref Health Africa in Narok East.

Her organization has been driving dialogues between couples, mothers and daughters, as well as fathers and their sons to “create a conducive environment for community members to share, ask questions and deconstruct the myths around FGM so that there’s progress towards ending it,” Ruto says. 

The dialogues finally culminated in the Maasai community elders declaring a ban to FGM in their community, a move that Ruto says was made possible due to “respectful dialogues and conversations, listening to each other and making commitments towards ending FGM”.

Kipilosh Lesianton, the Maasai cultural leader for East Africa who formally made the declaration, says that it mainly stopped FGM but not the Maasai culture.

“The declaration we have made is not to stop our culture but only to stop FGM and early marriage. Secondly, we have decided to bless our girls because in most cases, those who have not undergone FGM have missed community blessings due to the fact that they cannot attend traditional manyatta (traditional Maasai village) ceremonies”, he explains.

Bernadette Loloju, the CEO at the Kenya Anti-FGM Board says that the declaration by the Maasai elders adds to a number of other that they have secured before, and paves way for progress in other communities to make declarations against FGM, and bring it to a complete halt.

“We have done the Alale Declaration in Uganda, the Loita Declaration between the Kenya and Tanzania Maasai, the Sabaot Declaration in Mount Elgon, the famous Kisima Declaration for the Samburu of Kenya, and we now have the Maasai Declaration. We are hoping to have the Borana, Gabra, Somali, Kuria, Kipsigis, and any other community that practices FGM, so that all of us can work towards having our elders declare against it and end FGM and child marriage”, she said.  

Speaking during the declaration, Kenya’s First Lady, Rachel Ruto, who was the guest of honour said that FGM and child marriage are not cultural events nor rites of passage but violations and violence, theft of innocence, urgency and life itself.

A few kilometres out of Saruni’s village, Naomi Kolian  recounts her experience growing up at her home in Kajiado County, where she says it was not easy being a girl child in a family of 37 children as her father was married to three wives and in most cases, girls were meant to give wealth to the family through marriage.

Luckily for her, her father liked education and even though he wanted them to go to school, he could not afford to send them there. Naomi ended up getting a scholarship from Compassion International.She was sponsored all the way to high school.

When she sat her primary school exam, she passed but her father was convinced by his friends that his daughter was old enough to bring wealth to the family through marriage.

“They came and told my father that when a girl was through primary school, it was time for her to bring wealth to the family. But because my father has a very good heart,I really convinced him to allow me to proceed with my education and he did”, Kolian says.

Unfortunately, Kolian had already undergone the cut after her primary school studies but was lucky to escape an early marriage to an old man whom she says was the age of her grandfather.

“I was away at my aunt’s home going through school with the scholarship from Compassion International and after sitting my exam, I went home and met a huge crowd of people at our homestead.They had slaughtered a bull for feast. When I asked my brother what was going on, he told me there would be prayers at home that day. That evening, they prayed for me and I was asked to sit outside our hut and they shaved me. That’s when I knew I was in danger and was going to be cut”, Kolian narrates.

And because her mother knew that she did not like undergoing FGM, they made sure that that night she slept in the hut with a few women, including the cutter, until around 5 am.

“They made me stand on a cow skin and forced me to remove all my clothes, and one girl brought some very cold water and poured it on me. That’s when I sat down ,the woman took a razor blade and started cutting me. “From the cut, I was injured on my leg because when I regained my consciousness, I felt weak on my leg and bled a lot. This also affected my career as an athlete because when I later joined high school in February the next year, I couldn’t play football and netball because of the injury”, she says.

For Kolian, the declaration by the elders comes with reprieve and has shone a beacon of hope in her family and community at large because the elders’ word has value. “The declaration is a very important thing and it makes me happy because I know that FGM within my family and community has been brought to an end. In our community, when the elders talk, there will be a way”, she notes.