Cruel Cuts by Elizabeth Obadina

June 2024: Nigeria's First Lady leads the campaign against FGM 

My normally happy baby would not stop crying. She reached out to me from her grandmother’s arms. Her grandmother minutes before had asked me to do a stock check and I had left my daughter with her grand mother whilst I counted bales of newly imported cloth in the storeroom of my mother-in-law’s home. What had caused this sudden infant meltdown? More to the point, why were there threads of red cotton dripping with engine oil dangling from my four-month-old baby’s ears?

“You see, it’s nothing to worry about,” my mother-in-law sought to reassure me. “I took her to the clinic (next door) and had Obalende* do it.”

‘It’ - was ear-piercing, and Mrs Obalende* was a London trained midwife who had returned to Nigeria to provide midwifery services to women in the Lagos neighbourhood my mother-in-law lived in. She was a lovely lady, who ran a spotless clinic nevertheless I had been quite explicit. I had not wanted my daughter’s ears pierced whilst she was such a little baby. My mother-in-law however had other ideas. How was my daughter going to wear the gold earrings she had planned for her to wear at her christening if her ears weren’t pierced?

“Just keep moving the thread and putting on new engine oil until she’s ready to wear gold studs,” my mother-in-law continued and, misconstruing my appalled silence for concern about the method of the ear-piercing, she added, “that’s how we do it. It’s fine and the engine oil is antiseptic.” She handed me a pot of engine oil with my baby. “Use it until I bring the gold,” she said.

My silence could not be broken. If I had spoken out, I probably would have screamed unprintable, unforgiveable things to my mother-in-law. I might have done worse, but I bottled my explosive feelings and forced myself to be ‘sensible’. In 2024 google maps tell me that I could make a 3-day, 2-hour and 45 minutes’ drive, ‘in light traffic’, from Lagos Nigeria, home to Greater London via Marseilles, the Sahara with several Islamic and military insurrections en route, but in 1980 the 4,200 plus miles were even harder to bridge. I couldn’t run home. In 1980 I couldn’t even easily phone home. Besides ‘home’ had been Lagos since 1979 and my unwitting husband wasn’t responsible for his mother’s actions – but he was going to have to ‘do something’.

I was fearful, and adrift in an unfamiliar culture, I saw the ear piercing as the tip of an ugly iceberg of female harm perpetrated by women upon girls in the name of tradition. I had been working with doctors, social workers and UNICEF writing reports about female genital mutilation, glibly dismissed then as ‘female circumcision’. Nigeria is a country made up of over 300 different groups of people, speaking over 300 different languages but some traditional cutting practices united many of them: namely male and female circumcision and facial marking. I knew that the Edo people of the ancient Benin Kingdom practised female circumcision from time immemorial. My mother-in-law was Edo. She kept telling me, “When in Rome …” – a phrase she’d picked up from her British managers whilst working in London – and I feared for my child. I insisted that my husband raise the issue with his mother – there was to be no cutting of my daughter, no cultural misunderstandings at all.

“Of course not!!” was my mother-in-law’s outraged reply – but her caveat was hardly reassuring. “Your husband’s father’s people don’t do that,” she said, which then left me fearful about what the traditionalists amongst my husband’s father’s people did deem permissible regarding cutting babies. My husband’s father, a very modern Yoruba-man from western Nigeria had not married a Yoruba, but an Edo girl with traditional beliefs. Sadly, he had died. He had been a city-man, western educated, Christian, who preferred western fashions, not Nigerian. He had rejected most traditional titles and practices, but he was no longer around to protect his granddaughter. What might my mother-in-law think appropriate for the first-born child of their first-born son? I didn’t know and to be completely fair my husband didn’t either, but what I did know, was that what my mother-in-law thought should happen in order to honour her late husband’s culture, might not be what my late father-in-law would have approved of or sanctioned at all.

Adetutu Alabi - A Yoruba-Nigerian model with facial markings

I did know that many Yoruba people, like many Nigerian people, bear facial markings. Scars which might indicate first born status or royal heritage both of which applied to my baby daughter. I vowed to never leave any of my little children alone with my mother-in-law again. Who knew what facial decoration they might return home with because their grandmother had decided to ‘do the right thing’ by her husband’s people? My husband thought my fears somewhat ridiculous, absurd to say the least. He was OK; his father had rejected such old-fashioned ways, but then, his father wasn’t around anymore. 

Whilst my husband’s work as a journalist made him intimately aware of the politics and economics of Nigeria my work as a journalist had opened my eyes to the more traditional aspects of Nigerian life and in particular the challenges faced by Nigerian women.

Maternal and infant mortality was a major health concern in 1980. It still is. Some despairing mothers kept giving birth to babies who never survived childhood. Such babies, known as ‘abiku’ by the Yorubas and ‘ogbanje’ by the Igbos of western and eastern Nigeria respectively, are now believed to be born to parents probably carrying the sickle-cell anaemia trait which without treatment often killed them. Mothers would do anything to keep their latest baby alive and facial marking was one of those things. Cuts were made to disguise babies from being recognised by their spirit siblings and drawn ‘home’ to the spirit world of death. ‘Disguised’ by their cut faces they would be left alone to live out their lives on earth.

Happily, none of my family carried the sickle-trait, so no babies would receive the ‘protective’ cuts. Facial cutting was also an ancient form of ID – the patterns showing which part of West Africa, North Africa or the Sahel people came from. During slavery days the practice intensified allowing those captured and destined for the Americas to find their own kind – even if, in reality, they never would.

Female circumcision and facial marking were two cutting traditions Nigerian healthcare and social workers were campaigning hard to eliminate. I loathed and rejected both traditions, but the third cutting tradition, male circumcision, was something I took control over. When my sons were born I took on board that virtually all West African men were circumcised, in the 1980s to argue otherwise was to fight a losing battle, but I refused to let my sons be cut by either a North London rabbi who provided an ‘at-home’ kitchen-table service for the expatriate Nigerian community in north London, nor would we go to Nigeria where the boys might also end up in the clinic next door to my mother-in-law. The traditional face cutters known as ‘okola’ also specialised in boy babies’ circumcisions. No way. No. No. No. My boys were cut by qualified NHS surgeons in proper UK hospitals – although I had some persuading to do, as even in the 1980s medical opinion was split on the subject of male circumcision.

Times have changed in Nigeria. Since the 2003 Child Rights Act it has become illegal to harm a girl through female circumcision – now correctly termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM. Carving facial markings on babies is also illegal. But this wide-ranging child protection is a federal measure which has to be ratified by each of 36 state legislatures and whilst the whole of south and central Nigeria has adopted these extensive human rights for children, five deeply conservative Northern states have yet to accept this federal law. In June 2024, Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, lamented that of the 230 million women in the world subjected to FGM, Africa is home to the most - 144 million – and worse, that after a period of steady decline, the practice is beginning to grow again as conservative political forces champion a return to traditional cultural values. Face-cutting too, whilst widely abhorred now in Nigeria’s biggest towns and cities is also having a moment in the spotlight thanks to Tik-Tok posts and Instagram influencers celebrating their ‘traditional’ facial markings.

But the public mood has changed. There are almost 234 million Nigerians now and their median age is almost 18. 42% are youngsters under 14, and 70% of the population is under 30. Most Nigerians are urbanites and in 2024 most urbanites are educated and more influenced by the internet-world than by traditional ideas, even elderly Nigerians. I honestly think the fears of my daughter being cut, that I had in 1980 would sound utterly ridiculous in Lagos in 2024 – except – that in 2024 - one in ten of FGM survivors in the world is still Nigerian and that for the millions of young women who still live in mainly rural, and mainly northern areas where such traditional practices still hold sway those fears aren’t so ridiculous. Their fears are in no way far-fetched, little girls are still being harmed in the name of ‘tradition’ and babies are still having their faces cut, and in 2024 that is still a disgrace. 

*names have been changed

Read more: Female genital mutilation is on the rise in Africa: disturbing new trends are driving up the numbers (theconversation.com)