‘I felt extreme anger’: the FGM survivor ending abuse and giving a voice to girls in Senegal

WWhen Woppa Diallo was twelve, her aunt took her to visit a family friend in a village in northern Senegal. As she entered the house, a girl walked by in tears. Diallo was led into a room where there was nothing but a fruit bowl with knives in it.

‘When I saw that, I knew this woman was not a friend. She held me and held me. She had already closed the door,” she remembers.

Diallo fought to escape. The woman called for help and another woman came in and sat on Diallo’s stomach so she couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe and fainted. In the moments that followed, Diallo was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), in which all or part of the external female genitalia was removed.

“It was a violation of my privacy and it was torture,” Diallo said. “The next three years were very difficult for me. I felt extreme anger towards people.”

Diallo harnessed her anger and channeled it into a life of activism. At the age of 15 she founded Amfe, L’Association pour le Maintien des Filles à l’Ecole (the Association to Keep Girls in School) in Matam, her hometown in northeastern Senegal. She is also a lawyer, specialized in human rights.

Last month, a story she wrote with her husband Mame Bougouma Diene, based on her experiences with violence, won the Caine Prize for African Writing. They are the first couple to win the award since its inception in 2000, and the first winners from Senegal.

A soul of small places, published in 2022, is a coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of African cosmology, where ghosts and humans coexist. Diene, a French-Senegalese American humanist and writer, collaborated with Diallo to create a fictional version of herself. He says: “(The fictional Woppa Diallo) becomes a driving force against the oppression young girls face, with heroic and devastating consequences.”

Diene was inspired to write it after hearing Diallo, 30 – who was not his wife at the time – speak about her work combating gender-based violence in Matam. She talked about how families keep their little girls at home for fear they will be raped. “I remember finding that frightening,” says Diene. “She talked about the impact on victims, the ‘blame the victim’ mentality, the lack of social support, and how geography affects the incidence of gender violence. That appealed to me.”

According to the UN almost a third of women in Senegal are married or in a union before turning 18, and more than one in ten (12.4%) women aged 15 to 49 report having been victims of some form of violence in the past 12 months by a current or former partner.

FGM is widespread in Matam and is performed on 60% to 79% of women. Girls as young as eight get married and are expected to stay at home. When a girl gets her period, she is considered “unclean” and is isolated in a bedroom until she stops bleeding.

Many girls don’t go to school, Diallo says, because they live too far away. In 2014, the region did the lowest literacy rate among girls in the country. “We are set aside to get married and have children,” she says.

Diallo’s activism began after she went back to school a year and noticed that many girls in her class were absent. She asked why and was told they were married and didn’t have time to go to school. She went to the director and asked if she and her friends could set up an organization to support girls. He agreed and gave her some advice on how to get started. Amfe was born.

The first task was to convince the village chief to arrange school accommodation for young girls so that they could stay there during the week and return home at weekends.

Diallo then started organizing events, including one where a successful woman from the Peule community, to which Diallo belongs, spoke to girls and their parents about careers and opportunities.

More recently, she has held community meetings to discuss FGM and dispel myths surrounding its religious and cultural relevance. In Matam, many people believe that the Koran says that girls should be circumcised. People also believe that it has its origins in their culture. Diallo did research to refute this and presented it to her village chief. He ruled that no one should practice FGM within the boundaries of the village.

Amfe now has more than 250 members, most of whom attend high school and college, and a presence in 14 villages. Diallo is involved in the UN Girls Education Initiative, a feminist network committed to gender equality in education

She believes her grassroots organization is more powerful in bringing about change in Matam than large NGOs that carry echoes of “a return to slavery.” She says of their interventions: “It’s as if the colonists came to tell us: ‘What you are doing is wrong; we are here to civilize you. ”

She adds: “My organization is part of the community. We are all nieces, granddaughters, daughters of someone. People are obliged to listen.”