in a sample of Nuer communities clustered south of the confluence of the Sobat River with the White Nile in Jonglei Province, and I did participant observation in the village of Ayod, a Nuer community in Jonglei Province.
For the Sudanese Ministry of Social Affairs, I led a survey team to study the utilization of health and social services in Sudan’s premier area for irrigated agricultural development and cotton production, Gezira Province (located south of Khartoum in the peninsula formed by the Blue Nile and White Nile), and I conducted community case studies in Wad Sagurta and Abdal Galil villages. That 1977 research, together with archival research before and after it and additional research visits to Abdal Galil village, contributed to my dissertation on the impact of the Gezira Irrigated Scheme on health and health services in Sudan (Gruenbaum 1982).
In 1976–77, I also participated in research in two villages on the Rahad River, east of the Blue Nile, where my husband, Jay, and a colleague were studying economic organization and labor migration. The villages of Urn Fila and Hallali afforded a rich opportunity to compare ethnic differences in female circumcision practices, as well as patterns of family life (Gruenbaum 1979).
I went to Sudan for a short period of follow-up field research in 1989 that included work in the cities of Khartoum and Wad Medani and the villages of Abdal Galil in Gezira Province and a new village, Garia Wahid, where the families from Urn Fila and Hallali had been resettled for a development project, the Rahad Irrigation Project. Although I was only able to spend a few hours at the old Um Fila site with the families who had declined to relocate, the weeks of research in Garia Wahid afforded valuable insights into the process of change and the interethnic influences that were taking place.
In 1992, I returned to Abdal Galil in Gezira and Garia Wahid in the Rahad and also spent brief periods in the cities of Khartoum and Wad Medani. Although the time was short, just a little over a month, I was able to note the changes and to focus on interviews with people already well known to me.
Whenever possible, I have taken opportunities to continue discussing female circumcision and change efforts with Sudanese and other African women in international contexts. Most memorable was the Beijing Conference in 1995, when I had the opportunity to spend many hours over several days in the company of both northern and southern Sudanese women representing the whole political spectrum, including progovernment factions, internal dissidents, and exiles.
Taboo Subject?
It was not my intention to study the topic of female circumcision originally. In fact, I did not know about these surgeries prior to my decision to go to Sudan for the first time in 1974. It was not until the last few weeks before my husband and I were to depart that I learned of pharaonic circumcision. The wife of one of my graduate school professors, who had spent three years in Sudan in the 1960s, shocked me with the news. At our going-away party, she told me that most Sudanese women had undergone genital surgeries during childhood, that midwives removed the girls’ clitorises and all or part of their labia and then left them sewn shut, except for a very small opening for urination and menstruation preserved by insertion of a piece of straw during the healing process.
Kenana grandmothers with baby, Garia Wahid, Sudan.
A stark image. I recall feeling vaguely nauseous. Could she be mistaken? What a horrendous secret! Why hadn’t I come across this before? I had no reason to doubt her information, but I found myself unable to believe it completely, wondering if—and hoping—that it might by then be a thing of the past.
It is perhaps a similar experience of shock upon learning about female circumcision that has led outsiders to label this a taboo subject that cannot be discussed (e.g., Hosken 1982). After all, we wonder, why isn’t a fact of this importance generally known? One might conclude it has been kept secret, making the term “taboo”—associated with forbidden or secret activities—seem particularly apt.
But female circumcision is not a secret at all. In Sudan everyone knows about it. In 1994, I discussed this concept of circumcision as a secret or taboo with Sudanese legal scholar and change supporter, Asma M. Abdal Halim, who agreed: “It’s not a secret; we celebrate it!” (personal notes, Sisterhood Is Global Conference, Bethesda, Maryland, September 1994).
Why might a visitor conclude the topic is “taboo”? Probably because the subject is not likely to be brought up in conversations with outsiders. People have been reluctant to speak of it. First, it relates to sexual anatomy and sexuality, neither of which is a common conversation opener with people from outside one’s culture or social milieu. Indeed, sexuality is not a frequent topic of conversation among women in my Sudan experience and in the accounts of others. It is rarely mentioned in mixed company, though it is not suppressed among friends and in environments where people feel safe. Second, among people where circumcision practices and the reality of being scarred is part of everyday existence, it is unremarkable, taken for granted, and therefore unlikely to be spoken of among casual acquaintances visiting from foreign countries. In the United States, where until recently the circumcision of infant males was so general that doctors often performed it on newborns without even bothering to ask the parents, the fact that men are circumcised scarcely merits comment. Upon meeting a visitor from another country, an unlikely conversational gambit for an American to offer would be, “Oh, by the way, in our country we cut the foreskins off male babies. What about in your country?” Probably not. Does that mean it is “taboo”? I don’t think so. It is more or less the same for people from Sudan, Somalia, and other countries in which female circumcision is common.
There is another reason the subject has seemed hush-hush: the fear of outsiders’ condemnations. People dealing with foreigners were well advised to keep their female circumcision practices quiet or, when discussed, downplay their extent. Certainly during the colonial period (roughly the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries), the attitudes of missionaries, colonial administrators, and medical workers were highly negative. European and North American attitudes that viewed many even less harmful indigenous customs in Africa as “barbaric” or “uncivilized” were not based on universally accepted values but are now understood to have been ethnocentric and often calculated attempts to justify actions and attitudes that were racist, ethnocentric, and exploitative. Were European activities in conquering and militarily “pacifying” African peoples, installing European-owned plantations and mines on their lands, destroying their cultures, and importing a new religion always beneficial to Africans? It would be naive to think so, though at the time these “white man’s burden” and “civilizing mission” ideologies were used successfully to gain support in Europe for conquest and exploitation.
From a contemporary, postcolonial perspective, such attempts at justification are transparent and can be confidently criticized. It should not be too surprising that external condemnations of female circumcision, like the old colonial ideologies, might be similarly criticized as being unjustified and offensive. In short, African societies have experienced European/North American ethnocentrism in its most cynical and destructive forms, and it should be no wonder that practices that diverge so markedly from European/North American values have not been advertised to Europeans and North Americans.
Where female circumcision is practiced, it has not been some hidden ritual of which people are guiltily ashamed, as some writers seem to suggest. Dr. Nahid Toubia has pointed out that critics have tended to mystify the whole subject and assume that female circumcision is “something inherited from an untraceable past that has no rational meaning and lies within the realm of the untouchable sensitivity of traditional people” (1985:150). In her interview by Terry Gross on the radio program Fresh Air (recorded in 1996), Toubia noted that the subject of female circumcision “is not taboo,” rather, “it is painful.” When women feel they are in a safe environment, they are “desperate to talk about it,” she has found.
The view that
