The Gambia has been in the news again, and not for good reasons.
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The Gambia has been in the news recently, and not for good reasons. But the latest news is very good, and a brutal, mutilating practice is going to remain against the law in The Gambia.
The issue is female genital cutting, a barbaric tradition practiced widely in northern and western Africa. In The Gambia, the practice is widespread in rural villages, and is often embedded in a "coming of age" ceremony in which girls go off with some of the village's elder women to be taught the old ways, and ... to have their clitoris cut off.
Needless to say, the practice has been opposed actively by educated women, but in The Gambia it was semi-dictator Yahya Jammeh's Moroccan wife who persuaded him to ban it in 2015.
However, the ban was never enforced, until last year, when several women elders were arrested and fined for the practice. Then the backlash began.
A minor Muslim cleric and a little-known Assembly member began advocating to overturn the ban, claiming it to be a Muslim tradition (it is not) and an example of the West imposing its colonial values on Africans. They argued that the government should not impose its will on families' "personal" choices.
The opposition to ending the ban was led by many educated Gambian women, media savvy and well organized. That is partly the reason there was so much coverage about in the Western press. The progressive lawmakers decided to support a vote to refer the matter to committee, which was widely and incorrectly covered in the Western press as a precursor to a repeal of the ban. (Partly the result of the media-savvy women leading the anti-FGM campaign.) Hearings were held, with eloquent testimony against the practice from women who had been victims of the practice. Meanwhile, out of the eye of the press, the EU, US, UN, and other funding groups were making sure that the government knew that their future funding was at risk.
Last week the committee report was issued, and a recommendation to keep the ban and reject the new legislation was approved by a 2 to 1 majority of the National Assembly. This week, an official vote on the proposed repeal was held, and it was also turned down by nearly two thirds of the legislators. Then, in a surprise move, the Speaker declared that since the vote was so lopsided, no second reading was necessary and the move to lift the ban was officially dead.
For some context, It is important to know that in the year 2000, the literacy rate in The Gambia was only 36.8%. Twenty years later it was already 58.7%. When I lived there from 2007-9, Peace Corps' Health program manager would not let his daughter visit his mother in his home village unless he accompanied her, for fear that she would be cut against her will. So real progress is being made, in a short time.
And it is clear that the key to that progress is education. So we are playing and can continue to play a real role in this struggle.
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Meanwhile, as schools began to close for summer, we were racing to get uniforms and books to out-of-school students that we wanted to come back to school when schools re-opened. So as soon as funds came in, we wired funds to buy more cloth, pay more tailors, and to buy more books.
Of course our priority is supporting the several thousand students we are already committed to supporting. But to our delight, we received extra funds from several donors, and also donations from a few new donors, which we used to fund some new scholarships. At Kunkujang Keitaya school, 31 sixth graders from 2023 did not come to seventh grade last fall. They were drop-outs. Nearly all of them were girls. In early July, we were able to get uniforms for all 31; they came to the school to get measured and then they came back to the school to pick up their 7th grade uniforms for September. Our school Coordinator grabbed his phone and asked one of them how she was feeling. If you want a lift to your spirits, this one-minute video will do the trick. (And yes, she said she wants to be a journalist.)
As always, we are so grateful to those who have donated this year, are donating monthly, or are committed to a year-end donation. You are what makes all this possible. If you haven't donated this year, please try to do so in the next 45 days. Better yet, sign up for monthly donations. It cost $38 to change Haddy's life and send her back to school. That's just a bit more than $3 per month. This is GambiaRising: several hundred donors backing a team of Gambians to ensure that as many young people as our funds allow will have the chance that we take for granted: the chance to go to school. It changes their lives. And before too long, it changes their communities. And then their nation.
Mike McConnell
Managing Trustee
GambiaRising
www.gambiarising.org
1500 Park Avenue #503
Emeryville, CA 94608
