Newsletter May 2025
Who controls girls’ bodies? The battle over female genital mutilation in The Gambia
In 2024, the Gambian National Assembly came uncomfortably close to reversing the country’s ban on female genital mutilation (FGM). Two staunch conservatives, imam Abdoulie Fatty and member of parliament Almameh Gibba, led a highly-publicized effort to overturn the law, with Fatty’s supporters regularly chanting “female circumcision is my religious belief” in front of the Assembly.
Fortunately, Gambian feminist groups, UN agencies and international donors reacted swiftly and were able to persuade parliamentarians not to proceed with what would have been a significant setback to women’s rights under the law. It would also have given The Gambia the dubious distinction of being the first country to overturn a FGM ban.
This was a temporary reprieve, it turns out, because the Gambian Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case (Almameh Gibba et al v the Attorney General) challenging the FGM ban as a violation of the rights to practice one’s religion and culture enshrined in the Gambian constitution. MP Gibba is not giving up! He is the lead plaintiff, along with groups like the Islamic Enlightenment Society and Gambian Women Are Free to Choose [FGM, that is]. The case will be heard later this year.
FGM in The Gambia
Female genital mutilation is a serious violation of women’s and girls’ rights, as well as a danger to their health and well-being. The World Health Organization defines it as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs, for non-medical reasons.” There are different types of FGM, from cutting off the clitoris (type one), the clitoris and labia (type two), all the way to cutting the clitoris and labia and stitching them together to create a narrow vaginal opening (a process known as infibulation, type three). Other mutilations such as cauterization and scraping are re-grouped as type four.
A note on the lexicon: Some commentators and lawmakers use “female circumcision” (notably but not only those who support FGM) and that is in fact the expression used in Gambian law, but it is now discouraged, as it suggests a false parallel with male circumcision. Female genital cutting (FGC) is also used by international bodies in circumstances where non-judgmental language is considered useful as an entry point, but as whole, mutilation is preferred to convey the true harms and complete absence of any health benefit. In common conversation however, Gambian activists often use “cut” and “cutting,” and this will be reflected in the quotes.
In The Gambia, an estimated 73 percent of women have undergone FGM, most of them type one and two. It is usually performed on young girls (aged 0-5) by an older female traditional practitioner, in dubious sanitary conditions. Research carried out in The Gambia found that girls and women who have undergone FGM are likely to suffer long-term health problems (vaginal or vulvar pain, painful menstruation, urinary tract infection, scarring and cysts, incontinence, painful sexual intercourse, absence of sexual pleasure), and are much more likely to suffer complications during childbirth (obstructed labor, perineal tearing, stillbirth, maternal death). Their newborns are also four times more likely to suffer from complications such as fetal distress and swelling of the fetal head. This is of course in addition to the immediate injuries suffered by the girl at the time of the mutilation, including infections of all kinds (tetanus, staphylococcus, HIV…), uncontrolled bleeding, shock, psychological trauma and even death.
The Gambia is located on the coast of West Africa along the river of the same name, and is wedged within its neighbor Senegal. It is a VERY young country, with 55% of its people aged 19 and below. The population is majority Muslim (96%), with a variety of ethnic groups, notably the Mandinka, Fula, Wolof and Jola, that are also found across the border in Senegal. The Gambian economy is reliant on agriculture (70% of the workforce) and tourism. The World Bank considers it a least developed country (LDC), with widespread poverty and food insecurity, especially in rural areas, and high unemployment. Women have few opportunities to earn their own incomes and very few own the land they cultivate. Polygamy is commonly practiced.
The Gambia may be the smallest country on the African continent, with only 2.7 million people, but it is a microcosm of larger issues. According to UNICEF, more than 230 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM, with an estimated 144 million in Africa.
Earlier this month, I travelled to The Gambia to learn from the feminist activists, lawyers, researchers and UN staff engaged in this struggle. The country feels a bit quaint and neglected, with the (Chinese-built) two-lane paved road from the airport to the seaside capital, Banjul, only a year old, and the University of the Gambia and its medical school only established in 1999. It’s also not very easy to reach, unless one flies in on a tourist charter from Europe. The daily propeller plane from Dakar on Air Senegal is perennially late, often by 5-6 hours (fancy spending a night at Banjul airport?).
Banning FGM on paper
Female genital mutilation in The Gambia has a fraught political history. It was unexpectedly outlawed in November 2015 by then Gambian president (1994 to 2016) Yahya Jammeh; an amendment to the Women’s Act was quickly adopted by the National Assembly to enforce his presidential decree. Jammeh was a brutal dictator and had previously called feminist campaigners against FGM “enemies of Islam.” Abdoulie Fatty was in fact Jammeh’s very own Presidential imam. Jammeh’s surprising move against FGM is believed to have been “intended for the international gallery rather than a genuine commitment to women’s rights and democracy," said Satang Nabaneh, a Gambian legal scholar at the University of Dayton, Ohio, and the founder of young feminist group Think Young Women. Jammeh also presided over the adoption of laws on domestic violence and on sexual offences, efforts that were also seen as attempts to shield his abusive regime from international pressure.
“We had been campaigning to ban FGM, going to the communities for many years before that, so we welcomed the ban, although not the way it came about!” noted Yadicone Njie Eribo, Coordinator of girls’ education group FAWEGAM and the Chair of TANGO, a Gambian civil society umbrella group on gender and development.
While the 2015 law against FGM provided for prison sentences and fines, it was (perhaps predictably?) never enforced—that is, until 2023, when a 96-year old traditional cutter and two other women were arrested and sentenced after a denunciation by GAMCOTRAP, a group focused on ending harmful traditional practices. GAMCOTRAP is led by vocal advocate Isatou Touray, a former Vice-President of The Gambia under current President Barrow.
What happened next was unexpected. Imam Fatty stepped in to pay the fines on behalf of the three women, and launched his pro-FGM campaign.
The debate over the law raised many questions that are relevant anywhere there is an effort to combat FGM:
Are girls entitled to bodily autonomy and integrity, or can their parents and community decide for them? Can culture or religion justify cutting a girl’s genitals? What are the fundamental drivers of FGM? Are health arguments persuasive to end the practice? Can turning over the practice to trained health personnel mitigate the harms? Does criminalization of the practice actually work to reduce FGM? If not, what does?
The battle in parliament
When the bill to repeal the FGM ban was tabled by MP Gibba in March 2024, the National Assembly quickly voted 42 to 4 to send it to a joint parliamentary committee for review, a VERY worrisome signal. Proponents of the repeal invoked Islamic law to claim that FGM was a religious obligation. They claimed FGM as a key element of their culture and tradition. Some even denied FGM had any negative health consequences. Only five of The Gambia's 58 parliamentarians are women, and the debates on the bill were dominated by men.
But by early July, when this joint committee issued its Report on the Bill to Repeal the Ban on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), the situation had changed dramatically. The Report urged no repeal of the ban. Based on the input the Joint Committee had received during its consultations, it also called for: effective enforcement of the law, stronger legal and medical support for survivors, continued research and data collection, broad awareness and education campaigns, and a ban on attempts to medicalize FGM.
During the bill’s second reading in July, 34 members of parliament voted against repealing the ban while 19 voted for repeal, with no abstentions and five MPs not voting. The vote was clearly along party lines, with all members of the ruling party, President Barrow’s National People’s Party (NPP), voting against repealing the ban. The President himself had also come out publicly against repeal, an important if belated step. The Speaker of the Assembly ruled that continuing the proceedings would be futile.
“We had a serious scare,” said Rose Sarr, the Representative of UNFPA (the UN Population Fund) in The Gambia. “But the Gambian case can be a learning experience for other countries given the global backlash against women’s rights.”
How was this hard-fought victory achieved?
“Many parliamentarians didn’t know much about FGM at the beginning,” Sarr told me. “It was, frankly, ignorance. Survivors came to testify about the harmful effects of FGM, the suffering they have endured.”
Pointing to men’s glaring lack of knowledge, Fatoumata Tambajang, another former Vice-President under current President Barrow, bemoaned the fact that some MPs even claimed there is no type two [removal of the labia] or type three [infibulation] FGM in The Gambia. “They don’t even know what’s going on.” The health personnel I met during a visit to the Bundung Maternal and Child Health Hospital near Banjul were astonished by this lack of knowledge. These doctors and nurses deal regularly with severe cases of type three (infibulation), which result in lifelong complications for their patients’ sexual and reproductive lives. “These men are married. Do they even know what their wives look like down there?” one of them wondered aloud.
"When we organized a dialogue with religious leaders and parliamentarians," said Njie Eribo, “the religious leaders were angry about the pictures and videos we showed. But we said this IS the reality, so you have to see what it is.”
Young feminists and advocates (Think Young Women, Girls’ Agenda, Safe Hands for Girls, WILL and others) joined forces with older leaders and advocates such as TANGO, GAMCOTRAP and Female Lawyers’ Association-Gambia (FLAG). Position papers by local groups and agencies including the National Human Rights Commission were submitted to the Joint Committee, and activists had one-on-one meetings with parliamentarians, peeling off support for repeal. “Advocacy was key between the two readings of that bill,” said Touray, “we even mobilized community chiefs to call their members of parliament. The chiefs and the Council of Elders also called the Presidency.”
To address the question of Islamic law, the Joint Committee, supported by the UNFPA/UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM, civil society and government, organized a study trip to Cairo to meet judges and civil society activists, as well as professors at Al-Azhar University. About 40 members of Parliament, staff and researchers heard firsthand from the scholars at this prestigious center of Islamic learning. “This trip made a big difference. The Islamic scholars told us: FGM is not in a sunnah [the Prophet’s sayings and practices], and the sunnah that Gambians point to is ‘weak.’ So that was helpful and persuasive,” said Njie Eribo, who was on the trip.
Egyptian health professionals were also clear about the need avoid medicalization of FGM, explained Njie Eribo. Medical FGM became the norm in Egypt in an attempt to avoid the immediate health consequences of traditional cutting methods. Yet it causes the same long-term health problems and still is a violation of women’s bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive rights.
The Gambia depends on international assistance for its development, and major donors, including the U.S., the European Union and various bodies of the United Nations, expressed their concern privately and publicly about this potential rollback of rights. “International solidarity was key in 2024, and still is,” noted Touray. Tambajang and Touray independently praised UNFPA’s commitment and support throughout the process.
There was also strong solidarity among women’s groups at that moment. “When we came together, we defeated patriarchy!” exclaimed Fatou Baldeh, the founder of young feminist group Women in Liberation and Leadership (WILL). “This wasn’t just about imam Fatty or MP Gibba. This was about a whole system. For example, when we went to the Assembly to attend the MPs’ debate, the security guards started picking on us: 'If you’re wearing trousers, if you're wearing a vest, you can’t come in!' Those were security guards, who had nothing to do with the debate. You see how patriarchy works? I went around looking for women who had long dresses and wraps and handed them out to others so we could all enter.”
What drives FGM in The Gambia
Still, FGM persists. The Gambia is a patriarchal society, dominated by elders. In many cases, FGM goes together with child marriage (23% of girls are married before age 18), said Njie Eribo. It is a strong cultural norm, and women who haven’t been cut are seen as impure or unclean, said Argentinian-Spanish researcher Adriana Kaplan, who has worked for decades in The Gambia and leads research group Wassu Gambia Kafo. “Men will not eat their food or drink their water,” she added. Uncut women are isolated in the community. This is true even when a woman from an ethnic group that doesn’t practice FGM, like the Wolof, marries into a community that does, such as the Mandinka.
But the people who are the most determined to maintain FGM are men, said Njie Eribo. “Why are they so obsessed with cutting women?” When the debate erupted on social media in 2023 after the three women’s arrest, men’s true concerns emerged, explained Njie Eribo: “It was all about: we need to tame the women! We need to control them! Keep the women from cheating. Since that didn’t look good, they then switched to saying it’s a religious obligation.”
“Ultimately, we know this is about control of women’s sexuality. The power of the mighty clitoris!” said Baldeh. “The stories you hear about the clitoris when you go to the community!… One of the girls in our leadership groups told us she wanted to get cut because she had heard that if you aren’t cut, the clitoris keeps growing, and when you are pregnant and having a child, they have to tie it and put it out of the way.” The clitoris touching the emerging baby’s head and killing it is a common belief in The Gambia.
FGM is also tied to marriageability, and it’s men who decide who they will marry. “That’s why we work with young men in the communities,” said Baldeh, “so that we have men who will say: ‘I will marry a girl who has not been cut.’ That is very powerful. Otherwise, mothers worry: ‘Who will marry my daughter?’ In a community with poverty, where many girls drop out after primary school, marriage is seen as a source of security for their daughters.” Kaplan noted that, while men point to their mothers-in-law as upholders of the practice, it is in fact the men who decide: “When men say no, girls don’t get cut. It’s as simple as that.”
Baldeh is a survivor who has been willing to speak publicly about her ordeal. She and other girls her age were cut at her uncle’s house when she was about seven. She remembers the smell of that house on that day, a “trauma memory” that has stayed with her and is revived everytime she goes there. Baldeh was told never to speak about what happened, or the “old woman would cut her again." Baldeh concluded: "What society is teaching girls, is a culture of silence. Even with my best friends, we never spoke about it. You’re not allowed to revisit that space.” The practice is also, at the same time, presented as a normal part of womanhood, “something that beautifies you, makes you complete, a rite of passage,” added Baldeh.
When Baldeh went to university in the UK, she heard about FGM and thought it sounded similar to what took place in The Gambia, but she dismissed the thought. “[What happened to me] was culture, I thought, it was religion, it was not violence, it was not something bad. I found myself excusing FGM, in a way.” The lightbulb went off during her graduate studies focused on sexual and reproductive health, when Baldeh learned about the high rate of severe obstetric complications experienced by African women living in Scotland who had been subjected to FGM. “I interviewed several women for my research, saw the pattern, read the studies, and that’s when I understood. One of my close friends told me she had suffered a third-degree tear during delivery because she couldn’t ‘open.’ That was the realization.”
Baldeh also noted the impact of FGM on other aspects of violence against women and children. “When you take a young girl at that age and you put her on the dirty floor and you cut her, you are telling her: you are nothing! And you tell her: don’t speak! So when I grow up and I experience domestic violence, you’ve already told me that this is my life. That I shouldn’t talk about violence. That people close to me can do anything to my body and it’s OK.”
Does criminalizing FGM work?
Reflecting on whether the defense of the anti-FGM law had been worth the effort, interviewees thought repeal would have been “a very bad precedent” for women’s rights across the board.
“This is about religious extremism. They see FGM as an entry point into our community, our society, because they know many segments of our society still support it. For them, this is power. If they had succeeded in lifting this ban, child marriage, girls’ education, contraception were next,” said Baldeh. A regression of this kind would also have had a negative impact on neighboring countries, many felt.
Yet just about everyone I spoke to also thought that the law against FGM hadn’t been very effective at reducing FGM’s incidence. Kaplan expected future population surveys to show a slight decrease overall, although she noted that girls are increasingly getting cut at younger ages, possibly to circumvent the law. “The girls are now sometimes as young as a week old,” noted Njie Eribo. The law has driven the practice underground, with large public ceremonies a thing of the past. But this has also made it harder to report cases, since reporting would have to be done by an insider. “Reporting your own mother or grandmother isn’t likely to happen,” said Kaplan.
On the positive side, having the anti-FGM law in place opens up a space to work on the issue at community level. “It does mean we can approach communities without getting hounded out,” said Kaplan with a chuckle, speaking from past experience. Baldeh agreed: “It creates a platform for accessing our communities and have a conversation on the issue, freely and openly, using the law as a backing. I see a huge difference from ten years ago. People are speaking more about it.”
There is a growing movement in feminism to re-think “carceral” approaches that seek to uphold human rights through law enforcement, criminal law and imprisonment, so I asked interviewees whether that was a concern. “Carceral feminism” is particularly prominent in efforts to combat gender-based violence such as FGM or child marriage. But non-enforcement of the law was instead of the minds of activists: Nabaneh, Musu Bakoto Sawo (also of Think Young Women) and Njie Eribo independently expressed disappointment that the court in the 2023 case of the three women had applied a discretion they did not actually have under the law and set the fine at 15,000 Gambian Dalaisis each (about $USD 220) when 50,000 Dalaisis for each offender is mandated. “This gave imam Fatty the opportunity to pay the fines,” said Njie Eribo.
“As long as they can practice FGM and nothing happens, they’ll continue to do it. We need an example, one or two cases,” argued Njie Eribo. Yet she also grappled with the fact that “FGM is done for the men and paid for by men,” but it would be the women who’d be imprisoned. “Locking up a pregnant woman or a breastfeeding woman [the two young women in the 2023 case met that description] would not be good,” she added. Sawo, who is a lawyer, felt that the anti-FGM law was an important tool, but that litigation was not the most useful approach given how deeply ingrained in culture FGM is. She pointed to community conversations and other forms of persuasion as better suited to change culture.
Next steps
"The debate over the repeal forced us as a society to talk about FGM," says Baldeh, "even the shopkeepers asked me about it! And we could speak about it at home freely with our families." “It was a blessing in disguise,” agreed Njie Eribo, “we broke the silence, and that was good. It was very hard, but I think it was good.” Touray concurred: “Let’s be clear: The whole debate happened because feminists have been disrupting the status quo. This happened as a result of feminist thinking, strategizing and mobilizing. I’m happy that all of this blew up. We learned a lot and understand more, it opened up the debate and changed perceptions. That was important.”
The law alone is not enough, said Baldeh, “we need community sensitization, we need to go back to the grassroots.” Several of the organizations that joined forces in 2024 are active at community level to improve women’s and girls’ lives and help empower them, from grassroots Mothers’ Clubs helping women earn income (FAWEGAM) to community sensitization and mobilization efforts (GAMCOTRAP) to girls’ support groups (WILL) and advocacy and coalition-building on sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence (Think Young Women).
Tambajang emphasized the need to use panel discussions on radio and TV, for social media and influencers to break through to younger people and give them a platform to engage in progressive discussions. “Young activists are often silenced or told to speak last in meetings, and yet young feminists’ involvement was critical in 2024 during the debate. This needs to change,” she added. She pointed to Saudi Arabia, which has a full channel on television in The Gambia, their own radio and many social media accounts that spread conservative religious views to young people.
The percentage of women who think that FGM should end is higher than before (47%), noted Kaplan and Touray. Njie Eribo is “hopeful that FGM will end with this new generation coming up. The work we are doing with youth is making a difference. But patriarchy is hard to overcome.” Baldeh agreed: “We will see a drop, I’m quite sure. Because girls are cut younger, this won’t show right away since the UNICEF multi-indicator cluster surveys deal with girls and women aged 15-49, but it will show.”
As for the Court case, Anna Njie, a lawyer and the Chair of FLAG, remains confident the Court will reject the plaintiffs’ claim and maintain the ban: “The Court is very aware of the importance of this case, and they expected it would come, no matter what the outcome was in parliament.” She expects the 2021 decision by Kenya’s High Court in Dr Tatu Kamau v The Attorney General and Others upholding the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2011 to be influential. Dr Kamau, a medical doctor, had challenged Kenya’s FGM ban on the grounds that it violated adult women’s right to practice their religion and culture by prohibiting them from freely choosing FGM.
Kenya’s High Court ruled that the practice of FGM violates a woman’s right to health and her human dignity, and in instances when it results in death, her right to life. It also found that the practice contravenes international human rights standards to which Kenya has adhered, notably the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa and the African Charter of People’s and Human Rights, instruments to which The Gambia is also a party. The Court found no violation of religious freedom, since no religion mandates the practice. On the question of the right to one’s culture, the Court found that culture could be expressed in many ways, and that it was permissible to ban specific manifestations of culture that violate other constitutional rights (such as the right to life). As for the argument that anyone 18 years and older can choose to undergo FGM voluntarily, the Court analyzed Kenya’s context and found this assertion to be “far from reality, especially for women who belonged to communities where the practice was strongly supported… as there was social pressure and punitive sanction… from the family, clan and community.”
Health arguments will also weigh heavily, said Anna Njie, as will The Gambia’s international and regional obligations. Banjul is the seat of the African Court of People’s and Human Rights, and it would not be good for the country’s status to rollback its FGM ban, said Tambajang.
Meanwhile, the Gambian feminist movement is grappling with how to come together on a sustained basis. Resources and opportunities in this small country are always scarce, and this can fuel competition rather than collaboration amongst groups. The massive U.S. and European cuts to development aid and to gender and human rights work currently being rolled out will make this even harder. Some groups had yet to receive any donor support four months into 2025. While Gambians are used to moving forward without much, predictable and flexible funding for feminist groups would make a huge difference. Baldeh, Touray and others hoped that the "very strong women of The Gambia" I had the privilege of meeting can join forces in a true movement that goes beyond responding to right-wing attacks. The events of 2024 showed that this is, in fact, not only possible, but essential.
As I left The Gambia, feminist groups, human rights groups and FLAG’s women lawyers were busy strategizing on “friends of the court” (amicus curiae) briefs for the Supreme Court on the health consequences of FGM, Gambia’s international obligations, Islamic law and more. A luta continua!
In solidarity with Gambian and other African feminists,
FG