Lead Author: MIYAWAKI Yukio
Published by: Springer, Singapore
Year published: 2023
WHO and many African states have tried to abolish FGC by strictly enforcing laws which ban FGC. But such strict enforcement without necessary consideration for local context may often cause fierce resistance among those who continue this practice.
The Yellow Bull is a group of agro-pastoralists living in a peripheral area of Ethiopia. Women undergo type II FGC when they marry at the age of about 20. FGC is meshed tightly with the culture of the Yellow Bull, but interpretations of its symbolic meanings and its significance are different according to gender, generation and locality. For all the Yellow Bull, undergoing FGC is regarded as a ritual process through which a bride becomes a full-fledged woman. But some male elders interpret it as a symbolic murder of the bride by the groom, through which the groom lets the fertility of the bride free. On the other hand, female elders reject such an interpretation, and consider it a woman’s ritual to establish her gender and ethnic identity outside of the interference of men.
The Ethiopian government banned FGC in 2004, and campaigns for FGC abolishment reached the Yellow Bull. One NGO tried to stop FGC in the 2000s, but it resulted in failure. However, some women recognized that type I FGC, which had been recommended by the NGO, was not as invasive as the FGC they had traditionally undergone, and type I FGC gradually spread among them. Then, as FGC had been criminalized in Ethiopia, local government started a stricter campaign to enforce the Yellow Bull to abandon FGC. The male elders, threatened with jail if they could not make women abandon the practice, surrendered to the government while young women who had not undergone FGC yet, and young men who were going to take administrative roles in their local communities, resisted fiercely, and drove back interfering government officials and accompanying policemen. Finally, the local government gave up trying to enforce abandonment of FGC.
The case of the Yellow Bull shows that significance and meanings of FGC held by inhabitants should be carefully considered, and that it is necessary to find an approach that is specific to its local conditions.
