Will The Gambia be the first country in the world to restore the right to excise its girls? Since the vote by an overwhelming majority, Monday March 18, by the National Assembly, for a bill to this effect to come back before the deputies within three months, the hypothesis of a repeal of the ban female genital mutilation (FGM) is real.
At the end of the examination of the text sent to the Human Rights Committee, it will in fact be submitted again to the vote of the deputies to be adopted or not. “A considerable setback when so much work has already been accomplished within communities and with religious leaders to change mentalities,” is already alarmed by Doctor Isatou Touray, president of the GamCoTrap association which has been working for several years to improve the condition of women in The Gambia. No date has yet been set on the House agenda for the possible adoption of this controversial text.
To legitimize his proposed law intended, he says, “to preserve religious principles and safeguard the norms and cultural values” of the country, MP Almameh Gibba has already affirmed before his peers that the ban on excision currently in force “is a direct violation of the right of citizens to practice their culture and religion (…), the Gambian population being predominantly Muslim”. He is supported in his project by the influential Muslim religious leader Abdoulie Fatty and by the Supreme Islamic Council of Gambia.
Despite the approval of the majority of parliamentarians (42 out of the 47 present), a few voices opposed to the return of this practice were however heard. MP Gibbi Mballow said ahead of Monday’s review that “we must not hide behind Islam or culture to harm our women and girls. On the contrary, religion forbids it. “As responsible people, we will ensure that the proposed amendment does not pass,” Seedy Njie, the vice-president of an Assembly which only has 5 women out of 58 deputies, tried to reassure at the beginning of March. , in the Standard newspaper.
“A patriarchal reaction”
Paradox of the democratic experience: the practice of excision was banned in 2015 by autocrat Yahyah Jammeh on the grounds that it is not prescribed by Islam. At the time, the Assembly voted for the first text providing for penalties of up to three years in prison. But today, freed from the yoke of dictatorship, public opinion has been waging a battle in Banjul for months, mobilizing cohorts of activists for and against. “We are facing a patriarchal reaction which uses women and religion to better control their bodies and, through them, society,” analyzes Isatou Touray of GamCoTrap.
In mid-March, MP Bakary Badjie, member of the National Democratic Action Movement (ANDD, member of the ruling coalition), justified the referral to the parliamentary committee of the repeal project by the fact that the former dictator had imposed it on an Assembly under orders and without national dialogue. He also denounces “sponsorship from the West”, implicitly targeting the Gambia’s international partners, the United Kingdom and the United States in the lead, as well as the United Nations agencies or non-governmental organizations which help the State and local associations to carry out awareness-raising work among populations.
Because despite its criminalization in 2015 and the signing ten years earlier of the Maputo Protocol of the African Union which guarantees women’s right to physical integrity, excision concerns the vast majority of Gambian women. According to 2024 figures from Unicef, 73% of women aged 15 to 49 have been excised there, most before the age of 5, while only three people ? one excisor and two mothers ? have been sentenced since 2018 to fines, paid by religious leaders. “Girls’ bodies belong to them. “Female genital mutilation deprives them of their autonomy and causes irreversible damage”, reacted, on the social network
The health and psychological consequences of FGM, which consist of the partial or total removal of the external genitalia (clitoris, labia majora and minora, sometimes with suture – infibulation), are still largely underestimated by the communities that continue the practice .
“The guilty silence of the head of state”
In an official publication on social networks on March 14, the Gambia’s Islamic Supreme Council contested the term “mutilation” and replaced it with that of “female circumcision”, even going so far as to recommend “only the removal of a thin part of clitoris without total removal of the organ or the labia”. “It is a falsification of reality by the promoters of repeal,” counter-attacked the Association of Women Lawyers of Gambia (FLAG) on X, which does not hesitate to publish drawings of the reality of mutilations practiced in the country.
However, these considerations seem very far from the concerns of the deputies, who focus on the theme of cultural preservation. Feminist activists in the country and the diaspora such as Fatou Baldeh, honored in early March by the White House for her commitment to women and in the local Truth and Reconciliation Commission, are concerned about the consequences of a relegalization of the right to excision. “What we are seeing now is the growth of extremism in the country. Attacking women and their bodies through mutilation is the entry point for these extremists. Because they give them “power” and importance by making women weaker and vulnerable,” denounced the Gambian activist on Wednesday on social networks.
In this context, the words of President Adama Barrow, the embodiment of The Gambia’s transition to democracy, are awaited. “The guilty silence of the Head of State weighs heavily in this false debate stirred up by a minority of retrograde men. They are not representative of the population nor of religious leaders aware of the terrible damage to women, couples and families, explains Dr. Isatou Touray, from GamCoTrap. The mediocrity of the arguments put forward has nothing to do with either the Koran or the Islam that we defend. President Barrow will have to take his responsibilities to ensure that the commitments of the Gambian State, signatories to all international conventions on human rights, are respected. » He has not said anything yet.