By Umaru Fofana
In what FGM campaigners say is an unprecedented move and a potential game changer in the fight against the practice, some 70 young initiates over the weekend underwent the Bondo secret society ceremony in Port Loko District without the circumcision ritual.
The alternative rite of passage was preceded by dozens of cutters – or Soweis – handing in their knives and replacing their red-and-white head ties with blue-and-yellow ones. They signed a declaration that they would never again practise FGM.
Lawyer and human rights activist Yasmin Jusu-Sheriff referred to the initiation as “Bondo without blood”. Delivering the keynote speech at the official ceremony graced by hundreds of people including dozens of Soweis, Yasmine emphasised the “influence of Bondo women leaders” such as during the crowning of chiefs.
“Bondo without blood is a wonderful thing” she said, amid applause from the audience including the head of UN Women in Sierra Leone, Dr Mary Okumu.
“This initiative will take over the world and will give chance to women” she said, encouraging the former Soweis never to return to the trade.
Yasmin, whose grandmother was a Sowei herself, urged thus: “You must end it here and match this disarmament with action”. She said her father separated them from their grandmother because he did not want them to go through the ritual.
All aged 19 years and above because the organisers say they want the initiates to be able to give their consent themselves, the new initiates were put through the first phase of the ritual in the early hours of Sunday morning. They later emerged from the shrine at sunrise in Mathaska, some two miles from Port Loko town, wearing white paint on their faces.
“This is a very special day to me and to Sierra Leone as a country”, said the brains behind the initiative, Rugiatu Neneh Turay-Koroma who founded and heads the Amazonian Initiative Movement.
Speaking to Politico at the entrance to the shrine or Bondo Bush, the lifelong FGM campaigner said it had been a “very difficult task to talk about ending FGM in this country. Seeing this thing happening now I feel happy, excited and fulfilled”.
She said her campaign was all about “eliminating the harmful part of the Bondo Society…the removal of the clitoris”.
She said that for more than 19 years she’d been working on this and had engaged communities, religious leaders including men, young people and parliamentarians.
“We are not against tradition…All what we are looking for is that our women are well protected. And we have realised that going through FGM causes a lot of pain”, Rugiatu said.
She continued: “What we are doing here is to ensure that we separate FGM from Bondo…We are working hard to maintain our culture, and what we are doing here today is bringing back the [good] things that had been happening but they stopped doing them”.
The campaigner, a former deputy minister of gender and children’s affairs, said “people always look at Bondo as if it is all about FGM [so that] for as long as the girl is cut she has undergone Bondo. That is wrong!”
She continued: “I went through [FMG], I know what I went through when I was initiated. But what affected me was the cutting. So we need to let parents know that the cutting is dangerous for women”.
In a challenging way she said, “We want to make sure people value the Bondo society. It’s not valued anymore. All what it is used for is politics”.
She said they had mobilised women and men in Tonkolili District, Karena (in Bombali) and in Port Loko to “maintain the culture and tradition while ending those practices that are harmful”.
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