In Kenya, 23 girls fled their village to avoid genital mutilation.
But the tradition's powerful role in their culture makes escape difficult.

By Robyn Dixon
Times Staff Writer
July 3, 2004

ARROR, Kenya — She is so shy that she can only whisper her story, hiding her mouth behind a clenched fist, never meeting anyone's eye.

Dorcas Chelagat, at 13, is one of the most powerless members of her tribe, a child whose value is equal to the dowry price of a few goats and blankets. But shyness sometimes conceals a well of strength.

She tells of her journey with 22 other children who defied their elders and parents, who ignored the risk of ridicule, curses and beatings and turned their backs on their homes. The girls, ages 12 to 16, trekked six hours across snake-infested hills in the darkness, hiding whenever anyone approached, keeping silent all the way. They were determined to escape the ritual of female genital mutilation still practiced almost universally in their Kenyan valley.

Their action in December was so bold that it frightened the grown-ups. Some parents feared dark repercussions. Would they be cursed? To the tribal elders, it was the greatest threat to unity and tradition they had ever seen.

But the Kenyan government, which has outlawed female genital mutilation, quickly sent the girls home to face the certainty of the ritual, forcing those who dared to run away again.

The village of Arror, 110 miles from Eldoret in western Kenya, is nestled in a lush green valley beneath a spectacular mountain. Echoing with bird calls and burbling brooks, the hamlet of 1,200 people seems a world of idyllic tranquillity. Circular mud huts are scattered along narrow trails where women of the Marakwet tribe, wearing cheerful scarves and pretty glass beads and carrying machetes in straw bags, loiter to chat.

Beneath the surface, however, is a world of brutal conformity, oaths of secrecy, dark curses and a suffocating fear so powerful that many mothers feel unable to protect their daughters from the agonizing ritual they suffered as girls.

In the Marakwet community and many other tribes, there is no route to maturity for girls except through genital mutilation.

Some mothers push their daughters into it, promising them gifts. But the most avid supporters are fathers and the tribe's elderly men and women.

"My mother said it was good for me to do it," Dorcas recalled. "She said, 'You'll be a mature person. You'll have a chance to feast with other women.' She said the family goats would be slaughtered for the feast. She said once I was initiated I'd be free to be married, because an uncircumcised girl could not marry."

The first cut, made during an annual public ceremony, is small and symbolic, said Jacob Kibor, a Marakwet pastor who has campaigned long against the practice. Then the girls are taken to a seclusion hut where the major operation takes place, using a knife or blade and no anesthetic to remove the external sexual organs, including all or part of the clitoris and labia.

"Girls are supposed to remain stoic," Kibor said. "But there's only so much a person can take." If a girl does shame her family and scream, the women in the seclusion hut sing loudly to cover it up.

The girls are sworn to an oath of secrecy. Joseph Chebii, who sent his daughter to face the ritual long ago, is still convinced it is a worthy tradition that causes no pain.

"It's not painful. It's nothing," he said scornfully as he hoed a rocky patch of ground.

A World Health Organization paper in 2000 estimated that 2 million girls were at risk of genital mutilation annually, most of them in 28 African countries. It estimated the prevalence at 38% in Kenya, with the highest numbers in rural areas.

The paper said that the initial bleeding and shock could kill and that women often suffered severe lifelong complications in silence.

Ask villagers the reasons for the ritual, beyond initiation into adulthood, and they reply simply that it's always been done.

The ritual is practiced in various forms by other tribes in Kenya and other African countries. In some cultures it is seen as a way of preventing female promiscuity; in others it is seen as aesthetically pleasing.

All the Marakwet elders look forward to the ritual. Each December, goats are killed, there is feasting, a celebration and traditionally brewed beer. When the girls ran off, the whole tribal sense of unity and meaning was threatened. There was shock and anger. A group of villagers went to district officials, claiming they had no plans to make the girls undergo the ritual.

"The elders really like it because there's celebration and feasting. How can they feast, if there's no girls to be circumcised?" said Susana Cheboi, 45, the mother of Belinda, one of the runaways. "I was circumcised when I was a very little girl. I experienced a lot of pain, and I vowed I would not let my daughters go through it."

In 1992, Cheboi tried to save her daughters from it.

"I went and told the elders I did not want my daughters to be circumcised. But they came in the night and took my eldest daughter and my second daughter away and had both of them circumcised," she said.

"I cried a lot."

Cheboi's husband has always been strongly in favor of the ritual. She broached the subject with him a few times, explaining how much pain she suffered during the ceremony, and during the birth of every child, when she had to be cut again. But he brushed aside her complaints.

"He said, 'That's impossible, because it's our culture.' He dismissed me and said everyone had to go through it, so why complain?"

Tina Kamaina, 36, the mother of another runaway, said her husband simply informed her that their daughter Patropa would undergo the ritual.

"When they plan a circumcision, the elders of this area circumcise every girl. You can't say anything," Kamaina said.

"I was afraid of what might happen if my daughter wasn't circumcised. Around this place, if you speak out when girls are being circumcised, you can be chased away or something terrible can be done to you.

"They can put a curse on you. The Marakwets have their culture, and they mean what they say."

She was shocked and afraid when Patropa ran away a few days before the ceremony. But she said later she felt secretly glad her daughter had escaped.

Asked whether she suffered because of her own operation, she murmured, "Too much."

Girls whose parents wait too long to have them undergo the ritual are ridiculed and ostracized. Songs are made up about their plight as eternal children, which ring out whenever they pass.

A few girls have fled from the procedure for years. Here in the Kerio Valley, 17 girls ran away together in 2002 from a village about 45 miles from Arror and sought the support of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Eldoret, which won a court order protecting them from the procedure.

The center's director, Ken Wafula, set up a network of community monitors, who stage seminars in villages at the beginning of the ritual's season to warn girls of possible complications, inform them of their rights and offer encouragement and protection to runaways.

Encouraged by the monitors, 40 girls from villages in this valley district ran away to Eldoret in December, including the 23 from Arror.

When the Arror girls saw preparations for the ritual — the brewing of beer and the appearance in their homes of goat skins that the girls must wear after the initiation — they fled, accompanied by one of Wafula's community monitors.

Darkness was falling. They had traveled only a short distance. A group of suspicious villagers met them on the road and demanded to know what they were doing.

Their hearts racing, the girls pretended they were on their way to a school camp. The villagers returned to Arror, where they ran into one girl's father and alerted him. He gave chase, but his daughter saw him coming and ran into the scrub to hide.

Furious, the man demanded that the other runaways hand over his daughter, but she was nowhere to be seen and eventually he gave up. Then the girls left the road, walking through steep, snake-filled terrain.

"The last thing anyone was thinking about was getting bitten by a snake. We were thinking about getting away from the circumcision," Dorcas whispered. "We were afraid, because it was dark and scary."

After six hours, they arrived at a minibus stop and waited there for four hours. By morning, they were in Eldoret. The next day, an elder of the African Inland Church, Edward Limo, took all 40 girls into his home.

"If you are running from danger, I cannot turn you out," said Limo, 78, a fervent Christian. "I'll take care of them as long as they [wish] to remain here."

As a Marakwet boy, he did not know what school was until he ran away from his village at 13 and joined a mission school. The first Marakwet girl he saved from the ritual was his own sister, helping her to run away in 1943.

But his efforts to rescue the 40 girls in December were not as successful. A few days after the girls fled, Linah Kilimo, a government minister from the Marakwet community, intervened and insisted that they be sent home. Two government vehicles took them away.

Limo said Kilimo, a woman, angrily reprimanded him for harboring the girls. "She said, 'You can't change the Marakwet culture overnight.' "

When forced to go home, "we all cried," Dorcas said. "The feeling was the minister did not want us to stay here, because of politics."

Gladys Chelakat, another runaway, said that when the girls returned, some parents vowed to go ahead with the rituals: "My parents were really angry. They were ready to circumcise me because they said if I didn't go through it, I'd always be a child. But I decided that I'd stand firm whatever happened, so that I could become an example in the community."

Shortly afterward, 33 of the 40 runaways fled again to Limo's house, traveling in groups of two, three or four. He doesn't know the fate of the seven who did not return. This time the government did not intervene.

He kept four girls at his home and sent others to Christian boarding schools. Eleven later went back to their families, either because they were young and missed their mothers or because they could not cope with school. One was pregnant.

The biggest problem the remaining girls and Limo face is what to do about the thousands of shillings in unpaid school fees, mounting term by term.

"By July, I may not be able to hold the girls. I may have to discontinue them," said John Cherviyot, the principal of Kaptagat Prep School, which some of them attend. It's unclear what will happen to them if no one picks up the tab.

The U.N. has opposed female genital mutilation since the early 1950s, but half a century later, millions are still at risk every year. Activists such as Kibor are perplexed as to why decades of campaigning against the practice have failed to quash it.

"One reason is there hasn't been a viable substitute for this custom," he said, adding there must be a way to pass on the good tribal teachings and traditions without mutilation.

Traditionally, girls faced the procedure at about 17, but elders have responded to the campaign against the ritual by targeting girls as young as 8, when they're less likely to resist.

But the recent desertions of dozens of girls at one time pose an unheard of challenge to elders, and their numbers could grow if Wafula has his way.

"If girls keep running away, the tradition will die out," said Chebii, the villager who sent his daughter to undergo the procedure. But privately, some women feel otherwise, saying the community would lose nothing by abandoning the ritual.

Kamaina, whose daughter Patropa is at one of the schools, also wants her other daughters to escape genital mutilation, but asked how, she fell silent.

"I don't know," she finally whispered.

When Belinda ran away, Cheboi once more told her husband about the agonies of the ritual. This time, he did not dismiss her.

"He said, 'I'm listening and I'm learning slowly.' "

Cheboi is determined to send the youngest of her four daughters, Jepkoech, 9, to an uncle's to avoid mutilation.

A hundred miles away in Eldoret, in a quaint sitting room with biblical quotations hanging on every wall, Limo leafed proudly through several dozen school reports, sharing his hopes that his girls could go to college.

Dorcas wants to be a lawyer and help other girls. Limo says she is strong, under the shyness. "She'll do it," he said, smiling.

Later, as the visitors left, Dorcas looked up and met their eyes.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/