Egypt clinic helps women reclaim bodies scarred by genital mutilation:
Intissar was only 10-years-old when she was forced to undergo genital mutilation, but 30 years later, one clinic is offering help for some of the millions of Egyptian women affected by the still-rampant practice.
Intissar, a journalist who like other women cited here spoke under a pseudonym to protect her identity, recalls having spent 30 years “completely deprived of pleasure, without any connection to my body”.
Her story closely resembles that of millions of Egyptian women and girls who have gone through female genital mutilation (FGM) at a young age, despite state-sponsored efforts seeking to curtail the practice.
But for three years, one clinic has sought to change the reality of many of these women.
In 2020, surgeons Reham Awwad and Amr Seifeldin became the first to offer clitoral reconstruction surgery in Egypt through their clinic, Restore FGM.
Surgery is “the last resort”, Awwad told AFP in her Cairo clinic.
A common first step in the clinic’s treatment is psychosexual counselling coupled with plasma injections, which Awwad said “can reduce the need for surgery by 50 percent”.
The plasma injections allow for the regeneration of damaged tissue without subjecting women to new, invasive procedures.
Nourhan, also using a pseudonym, described chronic pain and a severed sense of pleasure in the two decades since she underwent genital mutilation at 11.
Now in her 30s, the suffering has given way to “completely new sensations”, Nourhan told AFP eight months after going under the knife again for reconstruction surgery.
But more than the physical effects, Nourhan said she finally felt “in charge of my body again”.
Holiday peak
Intissar recounted the day that her grandmother took her – with the consent of her parents, a doctor and a principal – to perform the harmful practice.
When she cried, her grandmother “would tell me this was for my own good, that I was better this way”, she told AFP.
Under the grandmother’s care, she spent her summer vacation recovering.
Now aged 40, the prospect of undergoing reconstructive surgery offers her renewed hope.
Lobna Darwish, gender officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, urged “prevention campaigns in schools right before the holidays”, citing seasonal peaks of FGM during those periods to allow time for recovery after the procedure.
In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country with a largely conservative society, 86 percent of ever-married women aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM, according to the latest official figures from 2021.
Most commonly, they are subjected to the partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, which according to the World Health Organisation can cause pain, bleeding, infections, painful sexual intercourse and complications during childbirth.
The practice – misguidedly meant to reduce libido and preserve women’s chastity – has been illegal in Egypt since 2008, and is regularly condemned by both Muslim and Christian religious authorities.
Yet it remains widespread, not only in Egypt but in multiple other African countries and beyond, often cutting across social classes.
Egypt marks its national day for the elimination of FGM on June 14, and every year, government-sponsored TV advertisements list its dangers.
While experts say the awareness campaigns have largely scared off parents from what they were told was a dangerous procedure performed by suspect midwives in rural backrooms, a rebranding has kept FGM alive.
Parents began opting for what seemed like a safer option, with official figures now showing three-quarters of procedures in Egypt are done by doctors.
Intissar, who has studied the practice, said it was being promoted for its “aesthetic” value.
When Nourhan and her then eight-year-old sister were recovering, she recalled how the women in their family praised not just the religious and moral virtues of FGM, but how “it was better and cleaner”.
In reality, Intissar said, FGM aims “to disconnect women from their bodies and their pleasure”.
Self-discovery
Egypt has regularly toughened penalties on both doctors and parents over FGM, but both Darwish and Awwad described an uphill battle against ignorance.
“We need proper sex education in schools, and to raise awareness of the dedicated hotline” created in 2017, Darwish said.
Awwad noted that “at no point… do doctors learn about reconstructive surgery”.
And women are scarcely given the chance to get to know their own bodies. At every first consultation, the surgeon gives her patients a mirror so they can look at their genitals — often for the first time.
Intissar was shocked and furious.
“Up until that point, I thought they had only removed a small piece of skin. But then I found out they had taken the entire labia and part of the clitoris,” she said, recalling how right then she had decided to reclaim her agency.
But the decision takes time and money.
Nourhan fundraised for a year to be able to afford the surgery, which costs 40,000 Egyptian pounds (around $ 1,300) — 10 times the country’s average monthly salary.
“Authorities need to… offer reconstructive surgery in public hospitals,” she argued.
In the meantime, Nourhan managed another personal victory: banding together with her mother to save her two nieces from undergoing FGM.
© Agence France-Presse
Only 32% of adults read books regularly, survey finds:
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga this week encouraged parents to get books for their children to stimulate a culture of reading from a young age, after a survey found only 32% of adults in South Africa read books regularly.
Motshekga was speaking at the launch of the Nal’ibali Trust’s national reading barometer, which surveys the adult reading culture and the broader reading ecosystem in South Africa.
The data for the survey, which was collected in late 2022 and early 2023, included questions on reading practices, motivation, access to materials, reading with children, digital reading, language preferences, libraries and demographics.
“It was uncovered when we read the report that two-thirds of our children arrive at the schools without owning a children’s book,” Motshekga said.
“I think the pride of having your own book [as a child] is something we must also raise consciousness of among parents […] because just the pride of just saying ‘this is my book’ [is important].”
In May, the education department released the results of the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which showed that only 19% of grade 4 pupils could read for meaning in any language. This represented a worrying 3% decline in literacy rates since the previous assessment in 2016.
One of the National Reading Barometer survey’s encouraging findings is that 52% of adults who live with children read with them, up from just 35% in 2016.
“Positive attitudes towards reading and reading with children have increased significantly since 2016,” the study noted.
Motshekga said the survey highlighted the urgent need for children and adults to have access to reading materials.
More than 4 000 adults, aged 16 and above, participated in the survey and the results show that 83% of the participants “read in some way” — such as magazines or on cellphones — either for pleasure, to learn new things or to communicate with others, while only 32% read books regularly.
The survey shows adults still face significant difficulties in accessing reading material, with only 58% saying they were able to get books from local libraries.
Kathrine Morse, who works on Nal’ibali’s national reading-for-enjoyment campaign, said: “Libraries remain important places for reading but only 8% borrow books.”
The survey also showed that South Africans have unequal early learning outcomes and extremely poor school literacy. Provinces such as Western Cape have more libraries than, for example, Eastern Cape.
The National Reading Barometer project will be repeated in 2026 and again in 2030.
Sudan’s war leaves its history and culture in ashes:
Last month, as armed groups fought on the streets of Omdurman and its sister city Khartoum, the library of the Mohamed Omer Bashir Centre for Sudanese Studies was consumed by fire.
The collection was destroyed, and with it a significant repository of Sudanese history and culture.
The fire was no accident, although no one knows for sure who set it. The surrounding area is controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group fighting the Sudanese armed forces for control of the state.
“We notified them, but they did not care to respond,” said Al-Mutassim Ahmed Al-Hajj, the head of the centre, which is housed in Omdurman Ahlia University.
It was “a systematic act designed to harm the private university, which is highly symbolic as a beacon for private education in the country”, he said.
The loss is incalculable and irrecoverable.
“The library represented a vital conservation institution for Sudanese heritage,” said Osman Shinger, an author and former head of the Sudanese Writers Union.
It had taken decades to build up the collection, which included original volumes and documents on Sudan’s politics, history and culture, all of which are now in ashes.
The fighting began on 15 April this year, and is now in its eighth week, despite a number of attempted ceasefires. Bloody street battles have been fought in Khartoum and Omdurman, with residents caught in the crossfire; fighter jets have dropped bombs on the capital; soldiers have robbed and occupied homes.
The rest of the country has not been spared, with the most serious clashes happening in Darfur in the west, where cities such as Geneina have become battlefields amid reports of civilian casualties.
The war is destroying Sudan’s present. The latest confirmed death toll is 865, although this is probably much higher, and more than a million people have been displaced.
The war is destroying Sudan’s future. Even if the fighting stops today, it will take years, and billions of dollars, to repair the damage and recover all that has been lost.
And the war is destroying Sudan’s past. “Museums are now without guard … to protect them from looting and vandalism,” Sara Abdalla Khidir Saeed, director of the Sudan Natural History Museum in Khartoum, said in an open letter.
She believes that all of the animals that were in her care are now dead. “I asked everyone who can pass through the university to break the locks of the cages and allow the birds and monkeys to come out but nothing happened. We lost animals that are rare to find now in their natural habitat.”
The National Museum, also in Khartoum, was occupied last week by the RSF. Fighters were filmed inside the museum’s Bolheim Bioarchaeology Laboratory, where ancient human remains are stored and analysed, including some mummies that are several thousand years old.
The priceless exhibits had been thrown open. One fighter erroneously describes the ancient skeletons as recent victims of former president Omar al-Bashir, and pledges to seek justice for their deaths.
“To start with, I did not believe what I was seeing,” said National Museum director Ghalia Gharelnabi, in an interview with The Guardian. “Now I am worried about where else they might have gone in the museum that no one filmed, and what else they are going to do.”
Sudan’s leaders have long sought to erase anything that does not suit their own narrative. According to Shinger, threats to wipe out Sudan’s rich historical, cultural and artistic heritage date to the 1940s.
Under the rule of Bashir’s National Congress Party — which ended when the dictator was toppled in a revolution in 2019 — cultural events at Khartoum University were routinely censored, the theatre, music and sculpture departments at the Fine Arts College were shut down and attempts were made to destroy an invaluable archive of Sudanese music.
Shinger says the party was trying to erase 7?000 years of Sudanese culture, “as they try to rewrite history to start when Islam entered the country or pretend that it begins with their coup in 1989”. He referenced the Taliban in Afghanistan, who destroyed monuments, such as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, that were inconsistent with their beliefs or might inspire resistance.
The irony is that all this history is far from being forgotten. It has fuelled the current conflict, which is rooted in power dynamics and historic injustices that were so rigorously documented by the library at the Centre for Sudanese Studies — before those documents were destroyed.
Many of the books in the library were a donation from the family of researcher and writer Reem Abbas. “My family decided to donate all of the books belonging to my great grandfather, Al-Tijani Amer [a writer, politician and civil servant] to the university,” said Abbas.
“When I heard about the destruction, I felt it was a loss on so many levels,” he said. “The motivation is just a way of completely erasing this country’s history and heritage, disempowering its population from the things they valued and the things that connected them to their history and this city in particular.”
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.
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