‘When you’re cut you won’t be a slut looking for men like a prostitute’: An utterly horrifying encounter with the FGM cutter women who butcher young girls’ genitals with a razor blade
“Has your daughter fed the ants?”
This is not an ordinary question. Behind these words lie a brutal and horrifying truth that many young women from Africa know about.
Millions of young girls are being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) against their will during the cutting season.
A girl is dragged from her own bed and taken to a “woman cutter”. Her own mother and relatives pin her head, arms, chest, and legs as the woman cutter forces her thighs open. She’d put millet flour on the girl’s private parts so she can hold it firmly…
Before, Anna-Moora Ndege uses a flattened six-inch nail to create a makeshift flat blade
Now, she uses an ordinary blade to cut a young girl’s most sensitive part without anesthesia
This is usually performed in unsanitary places.
They’d use the millet flour to stop the bleeding after they’ve circumcised the young girl.
As part of tradition, the severed clitoris is put on the ground for the Safari ants to take away
Asking a mother if her daughter has fed the ants…
…is a way of asking if the little girl has already been circumcised.
Supermodel Waris Dirie actively campaigns against the practice.
She suffered the same fate when she was just 13 years old.
“I was mutilated as a little nomad girl in the Somali desert. I almost died from blood loss, shock and an infection after this brutal torture. I suffer from nightmares, flashbacks and chronic pain.”
In Dirie’s autobiography entitled Desert Flower, she wrote:
“I felt my flesh, my genitals, being cut away. I heard the sound of the dull blade sawing back and forth through my skin. It’s like somebody is slicing through the meat of your thigh, or cutting off your arm, except this is the most sensitive part of your body. I passed out. When I woke up… the worst part of it had just begun. The Killer Woman had piled next to her a stack of thorns from the acacia tree. She used them to puncture holes in my skin, then poke a strong white thread through the holes to sew me up.”
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