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Report from MaliSeptember 2001
I have been to Mali five times in the last few years. I chose Mali because of the erroneous reports that they practice infibulation there. On my first day there, I realized my error but decided that regular excision was bad enough, and stayed to work on it. During my fourth trip to Mali, last year, I organized a committee of local people interested in using music in the struggle, and put out a tape "STOP Excision" with 12 songs about women's rights, 8 of which dealt with excision. One member of our committee has a little NGO, Sahel Initiative Third Millenium, so we used his organization as our headquarters. Amadou Gano is shown here with me and alone in the SI3 office. Most of our songs are in Bambara but we also have one song each in Sarakole, Senoufo, Pulaar and Dogon. After we had finished the tape, using a loan from my dad, we got funding from CECI, the Canadian Center for International Studies and Cooperation. The grant covered making the tape and making 8 of the songs into music videos, plus contracts with 12 radio stations to play the songs 4 times a day for six months and money to get our songs played on TV. We haven't done the evaluation yet, but almost everyone I asked if they had heard anti-excision songs on the radio had. The videos are still in process and should be coming out soon.
I went over to Bamako this last time, in January of 2001, to help with the videos and the distribution of the tape. Every organization in the movemet that we are aware of got a free tape to use. A number of NGOs have bought large quantities to use in their work and almost 1000 copies have sold in the market. We recently got a grant to distribute them more widely for free. This will allow us to give a couple to each high school in Mali, with help from the Department of Education, as well as to give them out through the Health Dept. and also to individuals. A few of our songs have come out on TV over there, just with the singers singing in the studio, and we are working on music videos that will hopefully be more interesting. I worked mainly on the video for the song, Anka Fo ' Ante' (Let's Decide to Say 'No, We Refuse'), Kandia Kouyate's song, for which I wrote many of the words. The song begins with a girl crying out for her parents that she's afraid of the exciser and doesn't want to get close to her. So I decided to have a scene where girls were waiting to be excised and one cries out. Neighbors passing by hear her and come in and stop the excision before it starts. At the end, all the people, the family and the visitors, join hands and say "No, We refuse!" In another of our videos, for the Sarakole song, there is a line of girls walking off to the place where they will be cut while their mothers listen to our singer singing against excision. Just in time, the women decide to go stop it and take their girls home, leaving the exiser confused and surprised. In the music video of the song of the Zotto Boys, there is a scene of our singers and others persuading an exciser not to do it. In the video for the song of Neba Solo, we think we'll have a funeral scene for a girl who bled to death after her excision. We have given each music video to a different producer, to try to have them each different from the others. Our artists have expressed a lot of satisfaction with being part of the project. They are proud to be doing a thing that they think is right. But occasionally the pressure is too much for them and they pull back. The singer who was the most out-spoken at first and who wanted to be sure that her song would be made into a video, when we were talking about maybe making just one, for our best song, got enough pressure from her mother that she finally said she couldn't do the video. She said if anyone else had asked her, she would have told them to leave her alone but she had to do what her mother asked. But this is the good part about having a group effort like this. She was out front and now we can afford to let her step back and let others be in front. Our Sarakole song has a strange history. We had a song proposed by someone
who knew our professor at the art school, Barbu, but he told us that she
couldn't sing it because of her family. I saw the husband later and asked
him if his wife really didn't want to sing it and he said, no, it was the
rest of the family. When I asked him if they had asked them, he told me
no. My obvious suggestion was to go ask them, which he was happy to do.
We went and found the "grand freres" (big brothers) and asked them what
they thought of the idea of singing out against excision and they surprised
us all by saying that they were all for it. They would even help craft
the message of the song and play it. So it became a whole family project,
which we thought was great, of course.
The Pledge Against Excision, another projectA big part of what I did on my recent, trip was to start the Pledge Against Excision, a promise that people who were opposed to the practice were invited to sign, that they would never excise a daughter and that they would speak out against it. We got 30 local groups to sign on to the project, as well as a handful of individuals, who actually did most of the work in the early stages. We found that there were some people who really wanted some way to help in the struggle and that they liked getting signatures and having all the conversations with people that are required to get them. We made up a little one-page handout, that was the only such summary, as far as I could see, in use in the movement in Bamako. Our signature gatherers would give them out while the supply lasted and then use them as an outline to talk from when there were no more. We were working with some financial constraints, since I was just using my own money, which was fast running out. It was exciting, though, to see people so mobilized. A good dozen people took the time to fill out sheets of signatures, many of them organizing meetings to discuss excision before inviting people to sign.A person who did maybe more than anyone else for the Pledge is Siaka Traore. He was a friend of Susan's who worked in a shop and was happy to put the poster against excision in his store. He therefore talked about excision to lots of people. So he was in good practice when the Pledge came along. He was the person who got more signatures than anyone else, either himself or the interested others that he invited to help. He is shown here reacting to the fictional death of his wife in childbirth, in our video to "We Can Say 'No, We Refuse!'". In the process of collecting hundreds of signatures, we talked with lots of ordinary people. We also found we were coming across excisers, many of whom signed as well. The first one that we met with agreed to stop excising and also invited us to come speak to a group she promised to convene, including half a dozen women that she had trained to be excisers, though they hadn't yet started to practice. As promised, she provided us with an audience of about 30 women, including these soon-to-be excisers. Two of the people in the group that we had trained to lead sessions, led the meeting, showing slides of complications of excision, and leading a discussion about the problems with FGC. When it was done, almost all the women signed the Pledge and we talked with those who were trained to excise about other ways that they could make a living. We promised to try to help them find some money to borrow to help them start out on a new profession, though we were not able to find such a source. (All the groups in Bamako who have tried this approach have given up on it.) But the main woman who had organized the session told us that she would like to find some money, but that the most important thing for her was to keep up the contact and that we should be like family. We did keep in touch and she seemed to enjoy the attention. We kept telling her how brave we thought she was and how much we appreciated her decision. Her children, who had also been trying to convince her to stop for years, confirmed to us that she really had stopped. The Fifth Person PrincipleThe man who first approached her was the fifth person to ask her to stop. She explained to us that she was mad at the first person, she was still pretty mad at the second but she was beginning to feel a little bothered and so on down the line until she was finally willing to bow to the group pressure when our man, Siaka, came along. She said that she had some people who insulted her for stopping but that she had more people who congratulated her. She told us that her daughter, who was an exciser in a neighboring town, had recently called her saying that lots of people were asking her to stop and asking her what to do. She gave her okay for the daughter to stop if she wanted to, which she did, but she asked her not to tell people she was stopping, just to say that she was too busy. After our large meeting at her house, we asked her if she was ready to tell her daughter to go ahead and tell people that she had stopped and why, and she agreed. She also said that she, our exciser in Bamako, explained to people why she stopped. I think one good way to change the situation in excising countries is simply to encourage everyone to talk to the excisers they know. People don't like to have their neighbors expressing disapproval of what they do.Another aspect of my work this last trip was to meet with people who had clubs against excision and suggest things that they might do. I was surprised they were asking me, but they were. I didn't have a whole lot of ideas about what people should do, though I did have some, so one thing I did was to invite all the people who were asking me what to do, together to meet and get ideas from each other. There was also an NGO that had started clubs in schools in their region, and they agreed to help the clubs. I hope that this group has stayed in touch. They said that they would. Previous trips to MaliI began my work in Mali at the Centre Djoliba, one of the first groups that began fighting female genital cutting thirty years ago, an NGO of maybe 15 people, founded 30 years ago by a French priest, who is still the director. I suggested that I work on making a poster, and they liked the idea. So I proposed a draft and showed it around and found a local illustrator to do a number of drawings and eventually came up with a poster that about a dozen groups were happy to put their names on. We had quite a bit of writing on the poster, and our drawing was hard-hitting. Just before I left that time, I asked UNICEF for some money to make copies of it, and they took it over, changed the picture to a less violent one and removed most of the words (that I had worked for months to get agreement among all the groups on.) My partners at the Centre Djoliba thought it was worth following their lead, so we did. (I still have hopes that we may use the old one yet, since I have been in various meetings of people involved in the movement over there who have said they still like it, and UNICEF says it has put out enough of the posters.) In any case, about 8,000 of these posters, "Arretons d'Exciser," have been distributed around Mali, in 4 languages, with help from the Health Department and lots of organizations.During my second trip I mostly helped with getting the poster distributed, also helping to organize a conference that the Centre was setting up, to coordinate the efforts of different groups working in the anti-excision movement. During my third trip I started working on music against excision and found some people interested and one who wrote a song. This song got funded through the Centre Djoliba and Plan International, but they didn't have a serious distribution effort, so it wasn't really heard much. The situation of the movement and being an outsider in itIt is a strange combination of liability and asset, being an outsider in a movement on such a delicate subject. Often people would say that I should keep a low profile, because they didn't want people to think that the impetus was coming from the outside to stop excision, and I did avoid ever going on TV or being very public in my opposition. But there is also a certain amount of respect that Malians have for outsiders, or white people, and I found that, for some reason, people were quite receptive to my leadership. It's kind of confusing.The movement in Mali these days is gaining momentum. The president was recently convinced, for the first time, that excision is a real problem. The same slides that we showed to our exciser and her people were shown to the president and a few ministers that he invited and he got very upset and said that something had to be done. He then invited the same presentation to be made to the National Assembly, where some of the legislators thought they should legislate right away, but the majority opinion seemed to be that it was best to wait a year or two, while more education could happen. The Demographic and Health Survey will come out soon with recent figures to show how much progress is being made in the struggle. Estimates vary, in the absence of hard data. Some people talk as if there has been quite a bit of progress. I certainly heard a lot of people who say that they don't excise in their family. It's hard to know how much might be people saying what they think you want to hear. One study said that 60% of the people believe it is a bad practice but, strangely, only about 20% say they are ready to stop it. This is one time when respect for elders is a disadvantage. So many young parents don't want to do it but are forced to, or feel they can't go against the wishes of their elders. Sometimes the elders simply take the girl and have her excised when the parents are away. One thing that is a plus, at least these days people can speak about the subject without shocking people. I hope to be able to go back to Mali and continue work on getting the songs heard and seen and getting them sung. I would also like to pursue the Pledge Against Excision, or at least to find some funding to send over there to give to the other people involved in it. Or I might like to go to another country, maybe Ethiopia, and make another album against excision. I understand there is a lot of the worst kind, infibulation there. I am looking for some kind of financial assistance to help me continue my work. I have formed a group called "Healthy Tomorrow" in Boston and our sister group in Bamako is "Sini Sanuma" the Bambara translation. We will be working out of the Amnesty International office, pursuing the Pledge, as soon as we get some money. Yours in the struggle, Susan McLucas
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Some of the best
known Malian musicians sang for us and the album has made quite a splash.
I have met people in Bamako who knew the words to the songs on the basis
of having heard them on the radio. We were surprised how willing the artists
were to sing about this very sensitive topic. Only a very few singers turned
us down. It became more of a problem selecting the people that we had room
for on the album.
