Making the Mark

Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting

Miroslava Prazak

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780896804975
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.

In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a riveting account. Though many books have been published on the topic of genital cutting, this is one of the few ethnographies to give voice to evolving perspectives of practitioners, especially through a period of intense anticutting campaigning on the part of international NGOs, local activists, and donor organizations. Prazak also examines the cultural challenges that complicate the human-rights anti-FGM stance.

Set in the rolling hills of southwestern Kenya, Making the Mark examines the influences that shape and change female genital cutting over time, presenting a rich mosaic of the voices contributing to the debate over this life-altering ritual.

1

Trouble with Witchcraft

The initiation season began in November 1998 in an unremarkable way. As the school year drew to a close, rumors cropped up in the marketplaces and in homesteads sprinkled across the rolling hills that this was the year for holding initiation ceremonies. Elders discussed the implications at every chance—over cups of tea, sharing pots of home-style beer, or simply while perched on a log at a kiosk watching a bicycle being repaired. Women vendors chatted about this in their market stalls between customers or with shoppers stopping by to assess their vegetables. Youths coming of age ran around the neighborhoods in high spirits and invited relatives and friends to come participate in their festivities. Mothers prepared for feasting by drying cereals in the sun, grinding flour at the posho mills, and sprouting finger millet for obosara, the much-loved beverage of celebrations. Fathers appraised their livestock with slaughter on their minds. Three years had elapsed since the last initiations were held and potential candidates were many. Free on school vacation and in high spirits, adolescent boys with bells tied around their calves stirred up commotion wherever they went, decked out in the assorted regalia of initiation. And though kept by custom out of public spaces, adolescent girls would be a part of the celebration, too, and enjoy increased attention in their homesteads.

Having received an invitation to attend the initiations and permission from my dean to miss two weeks of classes, I set off to join the festivities. The trip from Bennington, Vermont, to Nyankare,¹ Kuria District, took me from Wednesday to Saturday morning. Reaching Nairobi on Friday, I made contact with many of my urban Kuria acquaintances, hoping for a ride to Bukuria, a distance of some 400 kilometers as the road goes. I was unlucky. Everyone had either left already to participate in the initiations or had their vehicles full. Spurred to action, and fearful of missing too much, I boarded an overnight bus. I squeezed into the last row amidst packages, bags, and too many people on too few seats. I sat, jetlagged but awake, as fellow passengers dozed around me. The moon outside was full, and the night so bright that the zebras grazing along the road on the dusty plains of the Rift Valley were clearly visible. As the bus crawled up the western escarpment in the wee hours of Saturday, we were attacked by bandits. They had piled logs on the tarmac, barricading the road.

December is a dangerous time to travel from the city into the countryside. Returning to their natal homes for the month of school vacations and holidays, many people carry gifts and goods in preparation for Christmas. Most highway robberies take place during this time of the year, and overnight buses are obvious targets. A million thoughts went through my mind in the next minute, as passengers woke up shouting, and the driver lurched the bus off the road. “What will happen to my children? I left them for this experience, and I will die on a stupid bus in the middle of nowhere, for nothing” was prominent among them, as well as “What are the chances of my being passed over, the one mzungu at the very back of a bus filled with Kenyans?”

We were lucky. Thanks to the driver’s vigilance and presence of mind, the worst we sustained were a few bruises and jolted bones. The driver aimed the bus directly at the bandits, who scrambled to escape getting run over. Then he gunned the engine and somehow managed to haul the bus over the piled obstacles. For the next hour or so the bus was animated with relieved chatter. Passengers replayed the scene, taking special delight at the retreating bandits’ faces when their plan backfired. As people drifted off to sleep again, I stayed bolt upright, busily planning how I would alight and save myself if such a thing happened again. We reached Migori, our terminus, after daybreak. I was starting to feel sick with fatigue, not having laid down to sleep since Tuesday night in Bennington. I incoherently but effusively thanked the driver and stumbled from the bus.

I got a ride on the first morning run of a matatu² going to Nyankare. I didn’t recognize any of the drivers, conductors, or passengers—not surprising after an absence of four years, but certainly not an auspicious beginning. The women squeezed in next to me were Luo traders, heading to Nyankare for market day. In the past, people from Nyankare had always traveled to Migori for its market day, not vice versa. I focused inward, savoring my return to a place that had been very meaningful to my life for the past fifteen years. It looked much the same—the rolling hills, the alternating clusters of thick, short trees and bushes, and grasslands—and as we got farther from the paved road, cultivated fields took up ever more of the land. I noted extensive new construction as we drove through areas that had, in the past, consisted of isolated shops. Strips of buildings lined the road and held all types of commercial interests, including restaurants (known as hoteli), hardware shops, retail stores, grain purchase stores, clinics, and posho mills.

The matatu stopped at Kehancha, the district capital. Four years earlier, this rural center had encompassed mainly maize fields and low, one-story wattle-and-daub structures. The capital now sported several multistory buildings (most still under construction), a bank, a gas station, and a busy matatu stage. Hawkers plied their assorted wares up to our vehicle’s windows. My fellow passengers examined the cheap Chinese plastic goods with interest, though they didn’t buy anything other than cornets of groundnuts, artfully wrapped in pages from children’s school exercise books. As we were pulling out of town, we encountered a group coming home from the circumcision ground. It made for an impressive and awe-inspiring sight. An initiate was being escorted by thirty or so adults, many of them draped in branches, shouting, whistling, waving weapons, and surrounding the vehicle, menacing in gesture and word. The Luo traders shrank in their seats.³ I was not frightened, having experienced this numerous times before. I was actually, despite my fatigue, exhilarated to see the force of initiation celebrations unleashed. The pulsing music of the ekegoogo, the resounding gourd rattles, and the shrillness of human voices and whistles all formed an exuberant backdrop to the powder-streaked faces of the initiates, their liminal status indicated by the sheets tied around their necks, draped like wide aprons and stained with blood from their genitals. Members of the entourage flexed their muscles and, in keeping with their duty to protect their charges from both physical and supernatural threats, brandished machetes, rungu, cooking spoons, and other potential as well as real weapons. Some, disguised by foliage to resemble walking bushes, charged in unison, chasing invisible malevolent forces, the spirits of aggression. Protection and jubilation intermingled in a cacophony of sounds. This was what I had come for.

We came across five or six similar groups walking on the road in Bukira⁴ and were brought to a standstill each time. Even though I was tightly squeezed inside a vehicle, I felt the surge of dizzy, contagious exhilaration of the crowds. Sounds, sights, and smells saturated my senses. I felt ready to understand this. I felt far different from my previous exposure to initiation ceremonies.

Of Kuria clans, Abairege live the farthest away from the tarmac road. They call themselves abatuuri ba isaahi, meaning “settlers of the bush.” In their northward quest for pastures and land for cultivation at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had penetrated deep into Maasai country to their north and east. The leopard is their totem, and Abairege fancy themselves brave, fierce, and staunch supporters of tradition. As the dusty red murram road approached the boundary between the administrative locations of Nyabasi and Bwirege, I noticed evenly spaced utility poles alongside the road, signifying a new kind of development. I was stunned that no one had thought to inform me about this, and contemplated the enormous change in living and working conditions it signaled.⁵ Distracted by changes to the otherwise extremely familiar countryside, I felt the remaining stretch of the trip pass very quickly. In no time, we were disembarking from the matatu at Nyankare market. I heaved my tightly packed carry-on, containing all my necessities for the next two months, including a camera, tape recorders, gifts for friends, clothing, and bedding, onto my shoulder and crossed the market to the house of a good friend.

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” I was told. “They built a new home near the police post.” So short a time had elapsed since I confirmed my travel plans that I had notified few people of my return. Only my former assistant knew, but his home was four miles from the market—too far to walk in my fatigued state. I shuffled back into the market square and was approached by a young man who greeted me respectfully and kindly. Samwel Ragita, the son of another good friend, and the spitting image of his late father, told me his mother was home. He invited me to go there with him. Gladly I acquiesced, and during our short walk, I thought about how odd it was to see him grown up, and how happy I was to see him lift my bag without even asking and carry it for me. The four years since I had last been in Nyankare had brought many changes to my life, no doubt etched in my face, but Samwel, at thirteen, was physically transformed. I was glad he was so much his father’s son in appearance, or I would not have recognized him. As we left the hubbub of the market behind, I told him briefly about the processions we had encountered along the way. “So how are the circumcisions going over here?” I asked eagerly. He looked at me, seeming puzzled, and responded, “They have been canceled.”

“How can that be?” The shock of his statement sent ripples of disbelief into me.

“There is too much witchcraft,” Samwel replied matter-of-factly.

“Settlers of the Bush”

From the earliest colonial records, it is evident that migrations of Kuria people were ongoing at the time of the establishment of colonial rule. Writing about 1907 and 1908, the District Commissioner for South Nyanza District notes that “there is a marked increase of huts all along the German border from Mohuru on the Lake [Victoria] to Uregi [Bwirege]. This is most noticeable in Uregi where in March there were only six huts. In August I found 25 and on my safari last month [March 1908] when I collected hut tax there the number had risen to 94” (Kenya National Archives, DC/KSI/1).⁶ By 1911, the settlement at Bwirege had increased to nearly 200 huts (Kenya National Archives, DC/KSI/3/3). The people’s primary identification, then as now, was with the clan (ikiaro). The designation of Abairege as the settlers of the bush (abatuuri ba isaahi) by other Kuria is meant as a pejorative, but Abairege take pride in the designation, stressing those elements they perceive as prideworthy—independence, ruggedness, and a pioneering spirit, as well as their status as the ones who challenge the boundaries of Maasai.⁷ Because their area has, in the past century, been seen as remote, it has been the last affected by contact with outsiders and external institutions, including organized religion, formal education, and the market economy. Whereas other Kuria see Abairege as backward, other Kenyans level that same charge against Kuria in general. Despite the epithets, Abairege and Kuria of other ibiaro are well aware of changes in their lives on many fronts—economic, political, and social, as well as cultural. Though Kuria people were not recognized as a unitary ethnic group, or “tribe” in the colonial parlance, until the late 1950s, a shared history is referred to and cherished by many residents in the area. The importance of the overarching Kuria identity is growing, as is a sense of national identity, of being Kenyan. But since more than half of Kuria live in Tanzania, national identity has been slow to take full hold. Instead, underlying these emerging identities is an important, localized designation reflecting clan and lineage membership—that of the ikiaro, recognized as the maximal unit of affiliation prior to the late colonial era. Its enduring importance warrants examination and delineation.

Major demographic, social, economic, and political transformations on the national level in the past thirty years have not bypassed Kuria District.⁸ Many people living in this rural area aspire to be progressive and rue what they see as backwardness (Prazak 1999). Electricity in the district was limited to sporadic service in the capital until 2012, when even Bwirege became linked to the power grid. A growing number of people have solar panels at their homes, used in the past decade to recharge batteries for mobile phones and, in a few cases, to power television sets. Since 2005, the isolation of the area has been broken by mobile phone technology, and Nyankare market now hosts a phone booster tower, connecting the area with the rest of the globe. Another, just on the other side of the international border, allows people to communicate easily with kin south of the border in Tanzania.

The only paved road in Bukuria, a mere 20 kilometers, runs south of Migori to the Tanzanian border. The murram roads, on which the bulk of humans and cargo are transported, are pitted, potholed, poorly maintained, eroded, and overused. During the rainy seasons, their clay base makes them dangerous or impassable. Large lorries come into the district to remove maize surpluses accumulated and stored in the capacious warehouses of the Cereals Board, which buys up the harvests of Kuria and the adjacent Transmara districts. Lorries also export the tobacco harvest of smallholder farmers supplying British American Tobacco, Mastermind, Stancom, and Alliance companies, which compete for the best leaf to sell on the international and national markets for cigarette making. The only running water is in rivers and streams, and these have become increasingly polluted by runoff from tobacco nurseries, in which seeds are germinated and nurtured prior to transplanting. Girls and women fetch water from these sources, sometimes multiple times a day, to meet the needs of their homesteads.

Kuria widely regard educational attainment as the principal way to get ahead economically, as well as to gain access to horizons broader than the rural countryside. Nonetheless, educational attainment for Kuria men and women is lower than the national average and, perhaps consequently, employment levels are lower as well. Since very few people are able to survive by subsistence farming alone, most resort to multiple strategies to make a living (Bryceson 2002). Though employment options have been more accessible to men than to women, women are also intricately tied into the global economic system through cash-crop production (coffee, tobacco, maize), agricultural labor offered for sale, and petty trade.

In the last few decades, a number of important changes occurred in Bukuria. In the late 1980s, a large-scale in-migration of families placed a new burden on the resource base of these rural communities. The families had been squatting for the previous fifty years in the adjoining Rift Valley areas and were dislocated in the name of majimboism (Klopp 2001).⁹ This influx of peoples, whose livelihood was based on large herds of cattle, reinforced the most conservative elements within Bwirege society (Prazak 2000, 25). This is true, too, of neighboring Abanyabasi, who also squatted in adjoining Maasai areas.

That the initiation season was canceled because of witchcraft seemed impossible. It did not square with the image Abairege and Kuria generally have of themselves as the intrepid challengers of obstacles that stand in their way, an image reinforced nationally by the significant role they took historically and play currently in the police, army, and security industry, including private forces.

But that was the state of affairs when I arrived in the community on December 2. I had received my invitation back in October, and excitedly stayed up nights, preparing for the opportunity to fill this hole in my experience and knowledge. There and then, in the dusty marketplace, my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. After such a long journey, my purpose had suddenly vanished. This was too unexpected to contemplate. Despite the warm welcome of Samwel’s mother, Mogore Maria, and the excited whispering and nudging of her younger children, I felt dizzy and nauseated, hardly believing my bad fortune. It took me into the next day to get over the shock. I went from tears of disappointment, fatigue, and frustration, through a lot of rationalizing, to the beginnings of formulating a new plan and reason for being there. I decided that since I was already there and couldn’t go back home, I was ideally located for the study of witchcraft.

The Challenge of Studying Witchcraft

Studying witchcraft is an intractable endeavor. Raised in a secular humanist tradition, I have little background to help me come to grips with the ideas and reported realities of witchcraft.¹⁰ Like Ashforth, I am not predisposed to find higher or hidden meaning or purpose in the workings of the world (Ashforth 2000, 249). Yet witchcraft is nonetheless a meaningful category of thought and action to Kuria and many other peoples of the world.

Scholarship on this topic has a very long history in anthropology. E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed that if one assumes unseen forces exist in the world and nothing happens to people by accident, then beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft (as well as magic and oracles) are rational (1937). Beliefs and practices resembling Azande witchcraft in southern Sudan, where Evans-Pritchard studied, are found in many societies, and a great deal of work has been done to identify patterns and underlying meanings of witchcraft accusations (see, e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2004; Fisiy and Geschiere 1996; Green 1997, 2003).

How do we understand witchcraft in the context of a circumcision celebration in Nyankare village in Kenya? Currently, a commonplace position of academics is that witchcraft is an idiom through which other realities, such as misfortunes, social stress, strain, unemployment, and capitalist globalization, to mention a few, are expressed (Ashforth 2000, 245). A study in postcolonial Africa in recent decades has recognized that local discourses on witchcraft and sorcery have always centered on power and inequality, on the tension between individual ambition and communitarian control. Fisiy and Geschiere (1996, 194) argue that these conceptions are invoked more of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Families in the Book: Genealogical Charts
• Introduction
• 1. Trouble with Witchcraft
• 2. Boys Lead
• 3. Girls Follow
• 4. Something Different
• 5. Consoling, Feasting, and Coming Out
• 6. Talk, Talk, Talk
• 7. Where Do We Go from Here?
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Bwirege Circumcision Sets
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index