to prepare the candidate for initiation. Genital cutting does not occur as an isolated phenomenon. For Kuria youths through the 1950s and 60s, genital cutting was preceded by the cutting and stretching of ear lobes and the filing of incisors.
Circumcision of Kuria males involves the cutting and removal of the foreskin of the penis. Female genital cutting in Kuria involves clitoridectomy, defined by WHO’s classification system as involving partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce: Type I (Oloo, Wanjiru, and Newell-Jones 2011, 6). In Kuria communities, as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, health concerns led to changes in genital cutting practices, especially in various forms of medicalization. Genital cutting was increasingly performed in hospitals and clinics. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, young men who underwent circumcision in clinics and hospitals were met with derision and exclusion from the events of the seclusion period. Then, as the stigma against clinical circumcision dissipated somewhat, a local church mission set up a genital cutting clinic for girls in the center of the community. In the initiation seasons of 1998 and 2001, that clinic successfully attracted a small number of girls until it was shuttered following opposition from traditional circumcisers and an international group called Catholics Against Circumcision campaigning on the Internet, and reevaluation by activists and policymakers, national and international. Thus, after the 2001 season, medicalized operations were no longer available locally to girls. Medicalization was hotly debated. Feminists, human rights advocates, and others saw that making the operations safer for the youth would simply perpetuate the practice. For them, the objective was to eradicate genital cutting, especially that of females, not simply lower the risks by changing the venue. At that point, the interest of the international NGOs concerned with the eradication of female genital cutting became focused on alternative rites of passage.
Emphasizing that genital cutting of girls was wrong, Christian, medical, and media discussions portrayed FGM as a sign of being backward, out of step with development and progress (see, e.g., CCIH 2004). The risk of the exchange of blood in traditional ceremonies was considered to be a potential locus for the transmission of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) virus. These elements began to shake the unquestioning conviction with which everyone had previously undergone the rituals and gave support—especially to young girls—to take a stand in opposition to the practice. In, say, the year 2000, no one in Bwirege would admit to not being circumcised or to not having had his or her offspring circumcised for fear that it would be done by force. By 2014, however, there were families known to have children who would remain uncircumcised.12
In ways often perceived as contradictory to discourse against FGM, the media and activists began the discussion of male genital cutting in Africa in earnest in 2006, in the context of recognizing circumcision’s potential role in slowing down the transmission of HIV in countries with high prevalence rates.13 Because Kuria widely believe that HIV (and venereal disease more generally) is spread by women, the actual connection between genital cutting and HIV remains obscure.14
Though Kuria people view and describe the practice of male and female circumcision as equivalent and use the same word (esaaro) to describe both, they are well aware that this view is not shared by others. Scholars and activists have made concerted efforts to differentiate the two practices, creating several lines of argument. The first focuses on the extent of the cutting, and the position is that for females, cutting is usually much more extensive than for males. This is not currently the case in Bukuria, where cutting is more extensive for males than for females. The second focuses on what is removed, and the implications that has for future well-being. For males, only skin is removed; for females, the clitoris or a piece thereof is removed. The consequences are not equivalent. For observers, does regarding the practices as equivalent offer better insights than regarding them as incomparable? For policymakers and activists, what position helps build the momentum to end FGC? And though a few scholars argue that male and female genital cutting should receive equal treatment and opposition (see, e.g., Caldwell, Oroubuloye, and Caldwell 1997; Darby and Svoboda 2007), most academics take the position that the two are fundamentally different, and that focus should be placed on female genital cutting (Ahmadu 2000; Hernlund and Shell-Duncan 2007; Shweder 2013).
Opposition to Genital Cutting
Female genital cutting attracted missionaries’ attention early in the history of colonialism in Kenya, and led to the passage of resolutions as early as 1918 (Murray 1974, 101). Medical men, missionaries, and administrative officers were aware of the custom in many parts of the colony, but they each had different interests with regard to it. Administrative officers’ ethnographic interests led them to collect material and publish articles on the custom as early as 1904: “Their interest was detached and academic, and genital cutting had not yet arisen as an issue of contention between the missionaries and the Africans” (101 and footnote 4). Some of the earliest controversy, in 1911, was not actually about the physical operation, but about the rites surrounding it, especially the dancing. At heart were basic issues of individuals’ social acceptance in their community, of missionary versus “tribal” authority, and of parents’ rights over their offspring enrolled in a mission institution (103). In one form or another, these issues have remained at the core of controversy.
In the words of Jomo Kenyatta,15 “the custom of clitoridectomy of girls . . . has been strongly attacked by a number of influential European agencies—missionary, sentimental pro-African, Government, educational and medical authorities” (1965, 125). Kenyatta describes the 1929 attempts by the Church of Scotland Mission to break down the custom among Gikuyu—attempts that led to the issuance of an order demanding that all followers and those who wanted their children to attend schools pledge not to adhere to or support this custom, and not let their children undergo the initiation rite. This order led to a great controversy between the missionaries and the Gikuyu, and to the establishment of schools free from missionary influence, both in educational and religious matters.
The following year, the question of whether the custom should be outlawed was raised in the House of Commons in England. A committee appointed to investigate concluded that the best way to tackle it was through education, not by force of an enactment, leaving the people concerned free to choose what custom was best suited to their condition (Kenyatta 1965, 126). Kenyatta’s voice was one of the few African voices heard within the controversy at the policy-, strategy-, and decision-making level (Murray 1974, 285ff). In 1931, at a conference on African children held in Geneva under the auspices of the Save the Children Fund, several European delegates urged that the time was ripe for the “barbarous custom” to be stopped, and, that like all other “heathen” customs, it should be abolished at once by law. It was seen as the duty of the conference, for the sake of the African children, to call on the governments under which customs of this nature were practiced to pass laws making it a criminal offence for anyone to practice clitoridectomy (Kenyatta 1965, 126-27).
The “female circumcision controversy” of 1928–31 was not the only era during which genital cutting was banned in various parts of the colony (Thomas 2003, 82). In fact, many of the issues at the forefront of the debates at the beginning of the twentieth century are also at the forefront of debates at the beginning of the twenty-first century.16 In the 1920s, a key issue was the struggle for influence between the administration and the missionaries. Each had its own agenda and priorities. For the missionaries, the problem was how to control the relationship between parents (the heathens) and their children (the converts). The administrators grappled with whether to pass laws or achieve change through education. Further, clitoridectomy became a potent realm of state intervention in the 1930s, because various Africans and Europeans viewed it as a basis for broader political concerns. While Africans understood it as sustaining two pillars of political order—gendered personhood and generational authority—Europeans claimed that it threatened “tribal” and imperial health, perpetuated the subjugation of African women, and confounded colonial rule (Thomas 1998, 137).
Another important moment in the circumcision controversy took place in 1956. Thomas (2003, 81) demonstrates that Meru women and girls responded energetically in support of circumcision following the Meru African District Council ban that year, reflecting the continued importance of female initiation for remaking girls into women and transforming adult women into figures of authority within the community (Thomas