Assita Kanko, a politician in Brussels, recalls when she underwent female genital mutilation as a child in Burkina Faso.
She is sitting in an elegant tearoom in Brussels, Belgium, having tea and cake. But she is talking about the worst experience of her life - the day she was forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM).
"I was screaming out in pain and fear, but nobody bothered to comfort me," she remembers. "That was the worst thing: that people just didn't seem to care."
Pain and betrayal
Kanko was five years old and lived in a small village in Burkina Faso when her mother took her by the hand one morning and said she was going to play at a friend's house.
But she was not taken to the friend and she was not going to play.
"Instead, she brought me to a dirty, derelict house where three or four other girls were sitting on the ground with their legs spread. They were screaming, and soon I was screaming too because I was so scared," she remembers.
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'You think you are not worthy of respect because of what happened to
you. Because you are incomplete,' Assita Kinko on the psychological
trauma that befalls FGM victims [Mona van den Berg/Al Jazeera] |
"There were these old women who pushed me to the ground, who took off my underwear and forced me to spread my legs. And then there was this excruciating pain."
Worse than the pain, Kanko says, was the feeling that her mother had betrayed her. "I started looking at her with different eyes. I started to distrust her. And I felt guilty that I distrusted her because I wanted to love my mother."
Her eyes turn darker as she talks about the loneliness that comes after a girl has been 'cut'.
"I was told not to talk about it to anyone. So I was alone with my pain and I had no idea what had happened to me."
'A new kind of feminism'
Nowadays, Kanko lives in a trendy, multicultural neighbourhood in Elsene, a district of Brussels. At 35, she is a local politician and a writer of two feminist books.
In her latest, titled The Second Half, she calls out for "a new kind of feminism".
She takes a sip of her red-fruit tea and explains: "What we need is a feminism in which all women sustain each other. We need total solidarity among women.
"Because without the collaboration of women, no society in this world would be able to suppress one single woman. There were no men in that dirty house to assist at my mutilation. It's often the women themselves that help to organise and maintain their own submission."
Her experience as a victim of female genital mutilation was a crucial moment in becoming a feminist, she says.
'Because you are a girl'
"But even before that, I knew something was wrong in the balance of power between men and women. At a very young age, I was told to help my mother in the kitchen while my brothers were playing outside. I had to wash my brothers' clothes. I had to carry water from the well while my brothers were free to do as they pleased. I thought this was very strange."
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This scared me. If something as terrible as this could happen to me
because I was a girl, what else would be in store for me, simply because
I was a girl? |
"This scared me. If something as terrible as this could happen to me because I was a girl, what else would be in store for me, simply because I was a girl?"
As young as she was, Kanko rebelled against the rules of a society where the women were subservient to men.
Already at a young age, Kanko felt ambition burning inside of her. "In school I was head of the class, and I always had good notes. I remember one time my teacher said: Assita, you are doing so well, you will certainly become a teacher one day. I turned to her and I said: 'Teacher? I want to become president of Burkina Faso one day!'"
She laughs as she remembers it, but clearly her ambitions have not changed much. Kanko is now a council member in Elsene for the liberal Mouvement Reformateur, but she is planning to run for election to the Belgian parliament in 2019.
Her ultimate goal is to become a minister. "I think defence would be good," she smiles, but there is no doubt that she is serious.
A letter to my polygamous father
Later, during dinner at one of the many lively restaurants in the neighbourhood, she talks about her father.
Coming from an extremely poor background, his great dream was to become a teacher.
"He was 10 years old when he finally got a chance to go to school. But he was determined to reach his goal. And he did," she says.
Her father loved books and reading, and he introduced his clever daughter to the great French novelists and the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment.
"Among his books, I also found the work of the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir," she says. "I have read all her books. Through her I realised I didn't have to accept the fact that I was a second-class citizen."
Her father was proud of his ambitious daughter. "Whenever I had written a good story in school, he would read it to his friends," she says.
But although he read the works of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless conformed to the rules of the community, which demanded that a 'real' man marry more than one woman.
"I was sixteen when his second wife came to live with us. She was pregnant. It was a devastating experience for all of us," she says.
"My father had told us that this new woman would come to help my mother in the house. But she didn't. She spent her days on the couch. She was aggressive towards my mother. I quarrelled with her from the very moment she arrived. From that day on, there was a continuous atmosphere of conflict in the house."
She confronted her father in a letter because she felt it too intimidating to do so in person. "In my letter I quoted writers who wrote about the problems of children of polygamous fathers. I wrote: 'What you have done is totally scandalous.' He did answer my letter. But only to tell me not to meddle with his private life."
She wrote back to tell him that, as his daughter, she was part of his private life. He never replied.
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