Angela  00:06

Well, one of my playmates, we played together in the neighborhood. And she was taken to the Grebo Bush. And I didn’t know what had happened to her. She just, suddenly she was gone. Today she was playing with us outside. And tomorrow, she was not there anymore.

Amy  00:35

That’s Angela Peabody talking about something that happened when she was growing up in Liberia back in the 1960s. Liberia is a small country on the coast of West Africa, sandwiched between Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. I’m Amy Hill, and this is Episode Two of the Voices Podcast: The Grebo Bush. I want to remind you that this podcast includes frank discussion about what female genital mutilation and cutting is and how survivors can be affected, in terms of their physical and mental health.

Angela  01:12

None of the other girls knew what happened to her. She was my age. She was eight years old at the time. And I asked my mother, “what happened to her? She’s not coming out to play with us anymore.” And my mother said “she went to the Grebo Bush”, full stop. No explanation. And I wanted to know where is this Grebo Bush, but I was never told.

Amy  01:41

Across Liberia, girls between the ages of eight and 14 are taken into jungle and township “schools” run by a secret society called Sande. They’re pinned down and have their clitoris’ cut out with razor blades or knives, without anesthesia. Before we go on, since we haven’t yet gotten into explicit definitions of FGM/C in this podcast, we’re going to do that now.

The World Health Organization has described four distinct types. Type one, or clitorectomy, includes the removal of part or all of the clitoris and the prepuce, which is the clitoral hood, the fold of skin surrounding the clitoris. This is what’s done in the Bohra community you heard about in the introductory episode of this podcast and in Episode One. Type two, or excision, is the removal of part or all of the clitoris, the inner labia, and sometimes the outer labia. If you’re not up on your female anatomy, the labia are the “lips” that surround the vagina. This is what’s done in Liberia, where Angela grew up. These two types are the most common forms of FGM/C. Type three, or infibulation, is the removal of the clitoris and labia and the stitching together of the edges of the vulva to narrow or completely close the vaginal opening until it’s torn open again when a girl loses her virginity. Finally, type four is described as, “all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example, pricking, piercing, incising, scraping, and cauterization.” 

To give some global context, FGM/C is known to occur in 92 countries around the world, on every continent except Antarctica. The WHO estimate that 200 million women and girls have been cut is most likely a serious undercount, because that number is based on only 32 countries with available data. In Liberia, it’s estimated that about half of women and girls have undergone type two. Angela has not. 

Angela  03:47

I don’t know of any females in my family that experienced it. And so it wasn’t a decision that my parents were faced with.

Amy  04:02

Two full years after her disappearance, Angela’s friend came home.

Angela  04:08

But she would not play with us. And I took it personally. Because I thought she didn’t like me anymore. She didn’t, you know, she didn’t want to play with us anymore. And I couldn’t understand it. She was withdrawn, and so that’s why whenever I speak to people, I say, “it’s also the girls who are not at risk of going through it,” because they, too, can be affected, because I know personally how I was affected by my friend not wanting to play with us anymore. And she never did come out to play with us. She just had this sad look in her eyes when we tried to talk to her, like she was far away. Even today it still touches me. So to think about that, now that I know everything about what she was going through at that time. And at that age, so innocent.

Amy  05:22

Before this experience with her friend, Angela had seen other girls come out of the Grebo Bush, she was fascinated by them. And she thought she wanted to be like them. She talks about this in the digital story she made a few years ago with the Voices project.

Angela  05:38

They would parade them around the community, the neighborhood, with the white chalk on their bodies, and they were topless, and they just had something like a bikini on. And they had beads around their waist, their breasts, and their arms and necks. And at that age, I just thought I wanted to do that. At the time, I didn’t know that they were being paraded because when they came out of the Grebo Bush, they were ready for marriage, even though they went in at eight, and came out at 10 or 11. But they were ready for a man to take them as his wife. And so that’s what the purpose of parading them around, so that men could see them, you know, and want to marry them. So when I asked my mother if I could, could I go where they’re going? And could I walk around like that? And she said, “no, you can not” Something that is forbidden or that you cannot have, you want it, at eight years old.

Amy  06:55

The Sande Society initiates girls in Liberia and several other West African countries into adulthood, by rituals said to confer fertility and instill notions of morality. The society supposedly maintains an interest in the well being of its members throughout their lives. Sande has been around for a long time; a Dutch geographer published a description of it in Liberia, based on a first hand account that seems to date from 1628. If you’re wondering about the word Grebo, it’s a reference to Liberia’s Grebo people, who live mostly in the southeastern part of the country. That community doesn’t actually practice FGM/C, but other groups who also live in that region do, so the Sande Society operates there in rural areas. Hence the term “Grebo Bush.”

Angela  07:44

They teach them a lot of different things: basketmaking, they teach them how to be good wives, how to cook, how to keep the house clean, even make market. In Liberia we say, “make market,” but meaning to do business, they teach them all of that. 

Amy  08:05

To this day, it’s all very traditionally gendered, in spite of the fact that Liberia was the first country in Africa to elect a female president, back in 2005. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took office after the bloody reign of Charles Taylor, the warlord who plunged Liberia into the first of two civil wars between 1989 and 2003. He was eventually found guilty of war crimes and is serving out his sentence in a British prison. Those wars brought massive dislocation and significantly disrupted rural life and traditional institutions. Some people believe this resulted in a substantial reduction of FGM/C. But through all the conflict, the Sande Society continued, and it still does. Sande calls what it does to girls female circumcision. This is a term that FGM/C activists from around the world largely reject today.

Angela  08:58

It’s apples and oranges. I tell people after having two boys and raising two boys, and I had both of them circumcised, because my husband said, “it’s either we do that, we have them circumcised, or you and I will have to teach them how to pull that skin back and clean it.”

Amy  09:21

The clitoral hood is similar to the foreskin of the penis in that both are designed to protect vulnerable parts of human bodies. But in terms of nerve endings, the clitoris is thousands of times more sensitive. There are people who say, “well, if circumcision is okay for men, why isn’t it okay for women?” But if a surgery equivalent to removing the clitoris were performed on a man, it would literally involve slicing off the entire head of the penis. Anyway, there is a male version of the Sande Society. It’s called the Poro Society. I asked Angela if this group does a male version of what Sande does.

Angela  09:59

Yes. Coming of age, they do that as well. The boys go in at a certain age and they circumcise them. So that’s the ritual. And they are also taught different things, how to use a sphere and how to hunt.

Amy  10:16

The Sande and Poro Societies hold a lot of power in Liberia, both formal and informal. They’re the trusted custodians of culture and are traditionally believed to instill values and teach skills that contribute to communal harmony and prepare children for life as adults. They also have a spiritual dimension, though they’re not considered religious institutions. Most members are either Christian or Muslim. And just to be clear, even for families who don’t take part in the Poro Society, male circumcision is common in Liberia. 

Angela  10:49

Every male in my family and his family have been circumcised. So we had our sons circumcised, but with the female, there is no reason. So with the male you are removing that skin because of medical reasons, because of cleanliness. There is a logical reason for the male circumcision. There is absolutely no logical reason for female circumcision.

Amy  11:19

Lots of people maintain that male circumcision, just like FGM/C, is unnecessary and harmful. But there is epidemiological evidence from over 40 studies that shows it provides protection against HIV. Circumcised males are apparently two to eight times less likely to become infected. The research shows that it also protects against other STIs. I do need to say, though, that there have been some valid critiques of this research, and that there’s a growing movement worldwide against male circumcision and in support of boys and men’s right to bodily autonomy. But this podcast isn’t about male circumcision. It’s about FGM/C. Many years after her friend stopped playing with her, Angela began a celebrated career as a broadcast television journalist. When Liberia’s first civil war started, she escaped with her entire family to Washington, DC. She became a successful writer, and eventually, she heard about an autobiography called Desert Flower, by a Somali woman, Waris Dirie.

Angela  12:21

I was fortunate enough to fly to London and interview her.

Amy  12:27

Waris fled from a remote nomadic village to Mogadishu, then to London. She eventually became known in nearly every corner of the globe as a famous fashion model and a human rights ambassador for the UN. If you want to know how, you can read her book, or you can watch the movie. Waris writes candidly about what she went through.

Angela  12:47

I read her book, and then I started putting the thoughts together, started researching, you know, female genital mutilation. I was just surprised. And then I started realizing that’s what happened to my friend. That’s what happened.

Amy  13:08

Angela interviewed Waris for a magazine writing assignment. Suddenly, it all made sense. The Grebo Bush, The lost friendship, the fact that young girls were being cut. 

Angela  13:19

I was working at the International Monetary Fund at the time, and I traveled a lot. And I had to fly to Tokyo on a business trip. And I started writing my article. And it was a 14-hour nonstop flight from Washington, Dulles, to Tokyo.

Amy  13:41

She didn’t sleep the entire time. She just wrote. 

Angela  13:45

Everybody in the cabin was sleeping. And I was writing, and the flight attendants kept sending me tea, Japanese tea. And I just couldn’t stop writing. And the more I wrote, the angrier I became, I just kept thinking about my friend. I knew for sure that that’s what had happened to her. And I just got so angry, the passion in me just developed. And I finished the article before we landed in Tokyo. I was handwriting it, because I didn’t have a laptop back then. And after the article was published, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I talked about it to anybody who would listen, I did my own little survey. 

Because I had a long commute into DC every day to work, and I would sit next to a total stranger in the train. And I would say, “excuse me, but have you ever heard of something called female genital mutilation?” And you can imagine the looks I got, but what encouraged me was nobody ever said to me, “go away, I’m sleeping, I don’t want to talk.” It was either, “I don’t know, what is it?” And that opens the door for conversation, or, “yes, but it happens only in Africa, right?” And so I started noting down how many people had heard of it, how many people thought it was only done in Africa, how many people had never heard of it. And I did that for months, just sitting next to somebody. And by the time we reached, either that person or I reached the destination, I had taught one more person about the practice, and I did it going and coming. So I taught at least two people every day.

Amy  15:47

Even as she was absorbed in this teaching, Angela kept thinking about those images of girls returning from the Grebo Bush. She finally admitted she needed to do something bigger. So for the past 25 years, she has been advocating tirelessly to end FGM/C. At one point, she even contacted the Sande Society.

Angela  16:08

I’ve tried to reach out to certain people in Liberia to see if they would be willing, if some of the women who run the Grebo Bush would be flexible. I said, I even offer it that, “we will support you, if we could raise money, if you just leave that out. Do all the other things, teach the girls everything else. But not, just not that. Just don’t cut them.” And I haven’t been successful with that at all. I don’t know about other cultures. But it’s a deeply rooted, traditional practice that they have no flexibility, that until today Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Mali are still the three countries on the whole continent that have not passed any laws against the practice.

Amy  17:19

One problem is that not only does the tradition run deep, it’s a key source of income for the cutters. In Liberia, they make around $300 dollars U.S., per girl, and cut almost 100 girls on a given day. This in a place where the average annual income is only $700 dollars, U.S. Parents save up the money no matter how poor they are, to pay for their girls’ passage to womanhood. As Angela pointed out, do the math. That’s a lot of money for a cutter in Liberia. It’s hard to imagine them finding alternative sources of revenue that would even come close to this amount. Not even Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was able to make progress before she finished her time as president back in 2018.

Angela  18:04

When she was inaugurated, I danced that day. I celebrated. I said, “we have a woman in there now. Maybe she will make a difference.” Because she is a survivor as well, even though she will not admit it. She tried. She came to the UN, and she promised them that she would go back and get it done.

Amy  18:26

Sirleaf has a good reputation globally, but not so much in Liberia right now. Her expectations for what she could accomplish were so high, and the corruption that has plagued the government continued while she was in office. And of course, expecting one person to single handedly end FGM/C is unrealistic. Another problem is that a lot of Liberian lawmakers are themselves members of the Sande and Poro Societies.

Angela  18:53

She put the bill through to them. And they passed everything else in that bill that centered around females, except for female circumcision, they didn’t pass it. it just it was like a dagger stabbing me in the chest that day, when I got the text from some relative of mine in Liberia telling me that they rejected that.

Amy  19:29

After FGM/C was removed from the gender-based violence bill, Angela met with a Liberian senator, to talk about whether he might be willing to push for a separate law. This was about 10 years ago.

Angela  19:43

And he’s a member of the Poro Society. And he was here visiting the states. And I set up a conference call with a couple of my board members, and we got on with them, and we told him what we wanted him to do, to intercede in helping just end this practice, “you have a lot of influence,” and where he comes from, they are one of the biggest practicing counties. So I was trying to get him to work with us and use his influence to stop it. And do you know what he said to us? He said, “you want me to go and tell these women in the Sande bush to stop doing what they’re doing, to stop circumcising girls. And then you want me to turn around and go to them and say later on, please vote for me?” That was his response. And he’s still there. He is still in the senate, until today. So that’s why it’s going to be very difficult, but I’m not going to give up. I just keep hoping. And trying. My dream is to see it stopped in my lifetime in Liberia, and I just don’t know if they will ever do it.

Amy  21:18

Let’s end with your digital story. I’m curious, since you created it, have you been able to share it publicly? And what kinds of responses have you gotten?

Angela  21:32

I shared it with all my sisters.  Yes, and I shared it with my brothers, too. One of my brothers. When he saw my story, he said tears welled in his eyes when he was watching it. Of course all of my sisters said that they had that kind of reaction. They said, “but when we saw your story, you brought it to life. That yes, it could have been us, it could have been anybody we played with.” So then it all, the story brought it all to life. And it helped to open their minds. Some members of my family feel that I just put too much into it. You know, “we didn’t go through it or our family. Why are you so passionate?” And I have to just keep explaining, “no, I didn’t. But because I didn’t doesn’t mean that I cannot have passion.” I put myself in every woman’s own circumstance, every story that I hear. And just because I was blessed and fortunate not to be her doesn’t mean that I will sit and do nothing.

Credits  23:06

To watch the digital story created by Angela and the other Voices’ digital stories, visit our website at voicestoendFGMC.org. To learn more about Angela’s work, search online for Global Women Peace Foundation. Next on the voices to end FGMC podcast, a wedding is derailed and a survivor sits with fear and helplessness. This episode was created by Amy Hill and Mariya Taher, with editorial and production support from Armand Jane and Kristel Mendoza Castillo. Featuring the music of Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Angela and everyone who has told a story in a Voices to End FGM/C digital storytelling workshop.