Kenana grandmothers with baby, Garia Wahid, Sudan.

      A stark image. I recall feeling vaguely nauseous. Could she be mistaken? What a horrendous secret! Why hadn’t I come across this before? I had no reason to doubt her information, but I found myself unable to believe it completely, wondering if—and hoping—that it might by then be a thing of the past.

      It is perhaps a similar experience of shock upon learning about female circumcision that has led outsiders to label this a taboo subject that cannot be discussed (e.g., Hosken 1982). After all, we wonder, why isn’t a fact of this importance generally known? One might conclude it has been kept secret, making the term “taboo”—associated with forbidden or secret activities—seem particularly apt.

      But female circumcision is not a secret at all. In Sudan everyone knows about it. In 1994, I discussed this concept of circumcision as a secret or taboo with Sudanese legal scholar and change supporter, Asma M. Abdal Halim, who agreed: “It’s not a secret; we celebrate it!” (personal notes, Sisterhood Is Global Conference, Bethesda, Maryland, September 1994).

      Why might a visitor conclude the topic is “taboo”? Probably because the subject is not likely to be brought up in conversations with outsiders. People have been reluctant to speak of it. First, it relates to sexual anatomy and sexuality, neither of which is a common conversation opener with people from outside one’s culture or social milieu. Indeed, sexuality is not a frequent topic of conversation among women in my Sudan experience and in the accounts of others. It is rarely mentioned in mixed company, though it is not suppressed among friends and in environments where people feel safe. Second, among people where circumcision practices and the reality of being scarred is part of everyday existence, it is unremarkable, taken for granted, and therefore unlikely to be spoken of among casual acquaintances visiting from foreign countries. In the United States, where until recently the circumcision of infant males was so general that doctors often performed it on newborns without even bothering to ask the parents, the fact that men are circumcised scarcely merits comment. Upon meeting a visitor from another country, an unlikely conversational gambit for an American to offer would be, “Oh, by the way, in our country we cut the foreskins off male babies. What about in your country?” Probably not. Does that mean it is “taboo”? I don’t think so. It is more or less the same for people from Sudan, Somalia, and other countries in which female circumcision is common.

      There is another reason the subject has seemed hush-hush: the fear of outsiders’ condemnations. People dealing with foreigners were well advised to keep their female circumcision practices quiet or, when discussed, downplay their extent. Certainly during the colonial period (roughly the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries), the attitudes of missionaries, colonial administrators, and medical workers were highly negative. European and North American attitudes that viewed many even less harmful indigenous customs in Africa as “barbaric” or “uncivilized” were not based on universally accepted values but are now understood to have been ethnocentric and often calculated attempts to justify actions and attitudes that were racist, ethnocentric, and exploitative. Were European activities in conquering and militarily “pacifying” African peoples, installing European-owned plantations and mines on their lands, destroying their cultures, and importing a new religion always beneficial to Africans? It would be naive to think so, though at the time these “white man’s burden” and “civilizing mission” ideologies were used successfully to gain support in Europe for conquest and exploitation.

      From a contemporary, postcolonial perspective, such attempts at justification are transparent and can be confidently criticized. It should not be too surprising that external condemnations of female circumcision, like the old colonial ideologies, might be similarly criticized as being unjustified and offensive. In short, African societies have experienced European/North American ethnocentrism in its most cynical and destructive forms, and it should be no wonder that practices that diverge so markedly from European/North American values have not been advertised to Europeans and North Americans.

      Where female circumcision is practiced, it has not been some hidden ritual of which people are guiltily ashamed, as some writers seem to suggest. Dr. Nahid Toubia has pointed out that critics have tended to mystify the whole subject and assume that female circumcision is “something inherited from an untraceable past that has no rational meaning and lies within the realm of the untouchable sensitivity of traditional people” (1985:150). In her interview by Terry Gross on the radio program Fresh Air (recorded in 1996), Toubia noted that the subject of female circumcision “is not taboo,” rather, “it is painful.” When women feel they are in a safe environment, they are “desperate to talk about it,” she has found.

      The view that female circumcision is simply an irrational tradition suggests that the practitioners are somehow less rational than people in “modern” societies and justifies a heavy-handed approach that strives to teach (or preach to) people who are seen as “ignorant.” In my view, an elitist and ethnocentric attitude does not offer much hope for productive dialogue and mutual understanding. Female circumcision is neither a taboo subject—the fact that “we” didn’t know much about it does not mean it was secret—nor is it done without thought.

      That said, I must also note that some people with insider status who are ardent activists against the practices do accuse those who allow complacency of succumbing to a taboo. For example, Somali activist Raqiya Haji Dualeh Abdalla comments, with reference to “the ancient custom of genital mutilation of women”:

      Almost no one, so far, has had the courage to speak openly about it because of the taboo attached to sexual matters.

      This taboo and secrecy surrounding the continuation of this brutal practice, the unwillingness of those involved in it to face reality, and the excuse that cultural practices are sacrosanct, are no longer convincing to many Somali women today. (Abdalla 1982:2)

      Abdalla writes to motivate action, and the use of this word taboo seems intended to jolt her Somali sisters into action, lest they be branded as backward thinking. Others refer to female circumcision as a “silent issue.”

      The Khartoum Context

      After I moved to Khartoum in 1974, it took me many months to develop a perspective on my own horrified reaction to female circumcision. During those first months in Sudan’s capital city, the subject rarely came up with my Sudanese colleagues or students. The elegant Sudanese women at the university wore Western dresses covered by sheer, white, wraparound veils called tobes that modestly covered their heads and bodies nearly to the floor but did not conceal their hair, forearms, or faces. Women students in Khartoum generally spoke softly, carried themselves gracefully, walking in twos and threes, seldom alone, their high-heeled shoes or sandals clicking on the tiled corridors. Many wore bouffant hairstyles that lifted their tobes into impressive crowns framing their faces, and most wore some jewelry.

      Their modest elegance was in stark contrast to women’s styles at the U.S. universities I had attended (Stanford and the University of Connecticut); I was used to jeans and sweatshirts or dressing up in pants suits or miniskirts. My friends and I seldom wore earrings, and my jewels in those days consisted of “love beads” left over from California in the 1960s. Our feminism emphasized health, outdoorsy looks, and a strong, witty intellectual style, with relatively little interest in, and