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Efua Dorkenoo: Campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM) who pioneered the global movement to end the practice
Efua Dorkenoo, OBE (6 September 1949 – 18 October 2014), affectionately known as “Mama Efua”, was a Fante (Ghanaian) campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM) who pioneered the global movement to end the practice and worked internationally for more than 30 years to see the campaign “move from a problem lacking in recognition to a key issue for governments around the world.”
Early years
She was born in Cape Coast, Ghana, where she attended Wesley Girls’ High School. She moved to London at the age of 19 to study nursing, and eventually earned a master’s degree at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a research fellowship at City University London. She was a staff nurse at various hospitals, including the Royal Free, and it was while training as a midwife that she became aware of the impact of FGM on women’s lives.
Campaigning work against FGM
She joined the Minority Rights Group and travelled to various parts of Africa to gather information for what was one of the earliest reports published on FGM in 1980. In 1983 she founded the Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development (FORWARD), a British NGO that supports women who have experienced FGM and tries to eliminate the practice. She began working with the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1995 and was the acting director for women’s health there until 2001. She was Advocacy Director and, subsequently, Senior FGM Advisor for Equality Now (an international human rights organization). She was close friends with Alice Walker, advising on and featured in the documentary film Warrior Marks (1993) made by Walker and Pratibha Parmar and with Gloria Steinem, who wrote an introduction to Dorkenoo’s 1994 book Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation.
Efua Dorkenoo was acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s. She helped lead a successful 30-year campaign against the tradition of genital cutting of girls and women, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, by casting the practice as a human rights violation.
Ms. Dorkenoo started organizations to battle genital cutting and coordinated the effort more broadly as acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s.
She wrote articles and an influential book — “Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation” (1996) — and lobbied the British government and international organizations. She also knocked on doors in London immigrant neighborhoods and African villages to spread her message.
Jane Kramer of The New Yorker, writing on the magazine’s website, called Ms. Dorkenoo the “warrior in chief” of the struggle against genital cutting of women. “She inspired a generation of feminists across the world to take up the cause of banning the procedure,” Ms. Kramer wrote.
Recently, the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to recognize female genital cutting as a human rights violation. Now, the British government prosecuted it as a crime for the first time, another of Ms. Dorkenoo’s objectives.
And an African-led organization she helped found, The Girl Generation: Together to End F.G.M., Ms. Dorkenoo (Mama Efua to her admirers) was to have led the team, which is based in London and Nairobi.
‘Mother and daughter’. Nimco Ali, who works at the organisation, told the BBC Ms Dorkenoo inspired her to “finally stand up” against the brutal practice.Ms Ali said she had been involved in campaigning against FGM after she survived being cut in Djibouti when she was seven years old.
She said she became close to Ms Dorkenoo in 2010. “Efua was a force and she got all that I was saying, without looking at me like I was crazy.” Ms Ali said she talked to the Ghanaian campaigner about how FGM amounted to violence against women and was rooted in the need for control.
“She got that and for the first time someone that looked like a woman who could have raised me was getting what I was saying. “From there we developed from there a ‘mother and daughter’ relationship.”
“She was funny and a powerhouse of wisdom but also listened.”
‘Unstoppable’. Ms Ali remembers Efua Dorkenoo as being “unstoppable” and says that she would have “worked 24 hours [a day] if she could”.”If I knew how she lived on four hours sleep and managed to do all she did, I would have cloned her.
“Her legacy will continue as she touched and inspired leaders and activists alike, across the world,” Ms Ali said.
Progress in the fight against FGM
Even more encouraging for her supporters, the practice is declining in many nations, the United Nations Children’s Fund reported last year. According to UNICEF, teenage girls were less likely to have been cut than older women in half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated.
In Egypt, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, surveys showed that 81 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s.
Female genital cutting involves pricking, piercing or amputating some or all of the external genitalia. Sometimes the vulva is closed, leaving a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual blood.
The practice is believed to have originated about 4,000 years ago in Egypt or the Horn of Africa. Today it is prevalent in 27 countries in Africa, as well as in Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan and to a lesser extent in communities of immigrants around the world.
Adherents come from a spectrum of faiths, including Christianity, Islam and African religions. The practice is performed on girls, often ages 4 to 8, as part of the pathway to womanhood.
The World Health Organization says female genital cutting has no health benefits and can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and, later in life, cysts, infections and infertility. It is said to be intended to reduce women’s sexual pleasure — and does — and to preserve a woman’s virginity until marriage.
World health authorities say that more than 125 million women living today in the countries where it is concentrated have experienced such cutting.
Honours and recognition
In 1994, Dorkenoo was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 2000, she and Gloria Steinem received Equality Now‘s international human rights award. In 2012, she was made honorary senior research fellow in the School of Health Sciences at City University London, and in 2013 she was named one of the BBC‘s 100 Women.
Dorkenoo’s Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation (1994) was selected by an international jury in 2002 as one of the “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century”.
Dorkenoo died of cancer in London at the age of 65 on 18 October 2014, survived by her husband Freddie Green, her sons Kobina and Ebow, and her stepchildren.
Selected publications
- Cutting The Rose: Female Genital Mutilation the Practice and its Prevention (Minority Rights Group, 1994).
- Report of the First Study Conference of Genital Mutilation of Girls in Europe/ Western World (1993)
- Child Protection and Female Genital Mutilation: Advice for Health, Education, and Social Work Profession (1992)
- Female Genital Mutilation: Proposals for Change (with Scilla Elworthy) (1992)
- Tradition! Tradition: A symbolic story on female genital mutilation (1992)
- As Stella Efua Graham with Scilla McLean (eds), Female Circumcision, Excision, and Infibulation (Minority Rights Group Report 47, 1980)
