example, a feature article in Kenya’s popular newspaper the Daily Nation from the late 1980s discusses the time for boys to graduate into “manhood” in the following terms: “In the olden days, boys became men by undergoing traditions circumsicion [sic]. They were expected to demonstrate courage through withstanding the severe pain inflicted on them by the traditional surgeon. Times have changed however and the ritual is now rather outmoded due to the physical risks involved. Besides the risk of Aids [sic], the candidate stands the possibility of losing his manhood” (Sipakati 1988, 14).
More recently, in the Daily Nation, Beth Mugo, a member of parliament and an assistant minister of education, wrote an editorial titled “FGM is Barbaric and Retrogressive.” She condemned forced circumcision of schoolgirls in the northern parts of the country, reminding politicians representing those areas that they had voted for the Children Act of 2001 and thus had a duty to protect children (Mugo 2005). As the language of condemnation shows, the outsider/insider dichotomy of perspectives is without a doubt too facile in a world where information and opinions flow easily even between geographically distant locations. To understand initiation practices, an outsider needs the insiders’ understanding and perspective. Most particularly, outside of practicing societies, discourse on female genital operations tends to ignore the other aspects of the ritual complex of which it is an element, including the fact that in societies where females undergo genital cutting, males do as well. In many of those cultures, the two are constructed as equivalent rituals, both seen as achieving a similar cultural end: adult membership in the society and its structures.
Male and Female Genital Operations
In Kuria society, genital cutting is seen as a requisite step toward adulthood that prepares both genders (there are only two among Kuria) for marriage. Kuria people are well aware of the international condemnation over the genital cutting of girls. Male genital cutting is not seen as problematic by most Western societies and is usually left out of the discussions on genital cutting practices in Africa, indicating that it is not genital cutting per se that infringes human rights (we don’t hear of “male genital mutilation”). This is the case whether it is the American practice of using medical practitioners to cut away the foreskin of infant boys’ penises in routine postnatal surgery, or the religious practice in Jewish or Muslim communities where specialists cut the foreskins of infant males as a rite of inclusion.
Male and female genital cutting are rarely related in Western analysis, largely because male circumcision is regarded as more superficial than the operations performed on females and consequently less dangerous, while also conferring health benefits. Some opponents of circumcision argue that genital cutting should be understood largely in terms of male control of female sexuality, and therefore, male and female genital cutting are not comparable (Caldwell, Oroubuloye, and Caldwell 1997, 1188). Further, genital cutting in sub-Saharan Africa is embedded in a ritual context where scarification and other bodily alterations may also be undertaken to prepare the candidate for initiation. Genital cutting does not occur as an isolated phenomenon. For Kuria youths through the 1950s and 60s, genital cutting was preceded by the cutting and stretching of ear lobes and the filing of incisors.
Circumcision of Kuria males involves the cutting and removal of the foreskin of the penis. Female genital cutting in Kuria involves clitoridectomy, defined by WHO’s classification system as involving partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce: Type I (Oloo, Wanjiru, and Newell-Jones 2011, 6). In Kuria communities, as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, health concerns led to changes in genital cutting practices, especially in various forms of medicalization. Genital cutting was increasingly performed in hospitals and clinics. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, young men who underwent circumcision in clinics and hospitals were met with derision and exclusion from the events of the seclusion period. Then, as the stigma against clinical circumcision dissipated somewhat, a local church mission set up a genital cutting clinic for girls in the center of the community. In the initiation seasons of 1998 and 2001, that clinic successfully attracted a small number of girls until it was shuttered following opposition from traditional circumcisers and an international group called Catholics Against Circumcision campaigning on the Internet, and reevaluation by activists and policymakers, national and international. Thus, after the 2001 season, medicalized operations were no longer available locally to girls. Medicalization was hotly debated. Feminists, human rights advocates, and others saw that making the operations safer for the youth would simply perpetuate the practice. For them, the objective was to eradicate genital cutting, especially that of females, not simply lower the risks by changing the venue. At that point, the interest of the international NGOs concerned with the eradication of female genital cutting became focused on alternative rites of passage.
Emphasizing that genital cutting of girls was wrong, Christian, medical, and media discussions portrayed FGM as a sign of being backward, out of step with development and progress (see, e.g., CCIH 2004). The risk of the exchange of blood in traditional ceremonies was considered to be a potential locus for the transmission of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) virus. These elements began to shake the unquestioning conviction with which everyone had previously undergone the rituals and gave support—especially to young girls—to take a stand in opposition to the practice. In, say, the year 2000, no one in Bwirege would admit to not being circumcised or to not having had his or her offspring circumcised for fear that it would be done by force. By 2014, however, there were families known to have children who would remain uncircumcised.12
In ways often perceived as contradictory to discourse against FGM, the media and activists began the discussion of male genital cutting in Africa in earnest in 2006, in the context of recognizing circumcision’s potential role in slowing down the transmission of HIV in countries with high prevalence rates.13 Because Kuria widely believe that HIV (and venereal disease more generally) is spread by women, the actual connection between genital cutting and HIV remains obscure.14
Though Kuria people view and describe the practice of male and female circumcision as equivalent and use the same word (esaaro) to describe both, they are well aware that this view is not shared by others. Scholars and activists have made concerted efforts to differentiate the two practices, creating several lines of argument. The first focuses on the extent of the cutting, and the position is that for females, cutting is usually much more extensive than for males. This is not currently the case in Bukuria, where cutting is more extensive for males than for females. The second focuses on what is removed, and the implications that has for future well-being. For males, only skin is removed; for females, the clitoris or a piece thereof is removed. The consequences are not equivalent. For observers, does regarding the practices as equivalent offer better insights than regarding them as incomparable? For policymakers and activists, what position helps build the momentum to end FGC? And though a few scholars argue that male and female genital cutting should receive equal treatment and opposition (see, e.g., Caldwell, Oroubuloye, and Caldwell 1997; Darby and Svoboda 2007), most academics take the position that the two are fundamentally different, and that focus should be placed on female genital cutting (Ahmadu 2000; Hernlund and Shell-Duncan 2007; Shweder 2013).
Opposition to Genital Cutting
Female genital cutting attracted missionaries’ attention early in the history of colonialism in Kenya, and led to the passage of resolutions as early as 1918 (Murray 1974, 101). Medical men, missionaries, and administrative officers were aware of the custom in many parts of the colony, but they each had different interests with regard to it. Administrative officers’ ethnographic interests led them to collect material and publish articles on the custom as early as 1904: “Their interest was detached and academic, and genital cutting had not yet arisen as an issue of contention between the missionaries and the Africans” (101 and footnote 4). Some of the earliest controversy, in 1911, was not actually about the physical operation, but about the rites surrounding it, especially the dancing. At heart were basic issues of individuals’ social acceptance in their community, of missionary versus “tribal” authority, and of parents’ rights over their offspring enrolled in a mission institution (103). In one form or another,
