Runaway Bride

Young girls are betrothed to older men who have completed their initiation into manhood. In the patriarchal society, the father of a girl accepts, sometimes even before his daughter is born, a dowry of a certain number of cattle, the culture’s currency, from a desirable suitor. The father pledges to deliver his daughter in marriage as a virgin. Since the vast majority of Masai do not read or write, a man’s word is paramount—he must keep it not only to maintain his honor, but to preserve the society.

A daughter does as her father directs. “She has been socialized all along to be a good Masai wife and mother, which means first of all to be obedient to your father and other elder men,” Samad says. Adolescent rebellion, particularly in the form of bucking cultural traditions, is not an option. Good girls accept their circumcisions and arranged marriages. “That’s nothing you can discuss with your parents,” Lydia says, her voice soft but firm. “You can know in your heart you don’t want to do it, but you can’t say it because you will be beaten even until death.”

Some 130 million girls and women worldwide—most of them from Africa or Asia—have suffered female genital mutilation, according to NGO Equality Now. FGM refers to a variety of procedures that ranges in severity from cutting the hood of the clitoris to full circumcision or infibulation, which involves removing all of the external genitalia (clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora) and stitching the vaginal opening, leaving only a small space for the flow of urine and menstrual blood.

The Masai practice full circumcision on girls with very few exceptions. In rural areas such as the Rift Valley, an elder woman performs the procedure with a knife and no anesthesia. Sometimes, girls die from infection or excessive bleeding. Long-term, the procedure can cause chronic infections of the bladder and vagina, extremely painful menstruation, excessive scar tissue, formation of cysts on the stitch line, risk of HIV infection, and difficulties during childbirth. A leading cause of death among Masai women is blood loss during childbirth due to scar tissue resulting from FGM.

The Kenyan government passed legislation in 2001 that outlawed FGM in girls under the age of eighteen, but the law has been widely unenforced and ignored. It has not abated the practice, particularly in rural areas. The results of a 2005 survey reported by Integrated Regional Information Networks, the United Nations’ information service, found that 100 percent of Masai girls over fifteen years of age had undergone FGM. “I doubt the Children’s Act has affected the number circumcised in rural areas,” Samad says.

Federal law prohibits female genital mutilation in the United States. In  November in Atlanta, an Ethiopian immigrant became the first person convicted under the law for circumcising his two-year-old daughter. In Minnesota, a statute banning the practice was enacted in 1994 after a young immigrant girl was treated at a Twin Cities hospital for severe bleeding after circumcision.

There remain whispers and rumors that female genital mutilation is taking place in Minnesota’s African immigrant community—about 95 percent of girls are circumcised in Somalia—but the Minnesota Department of Health and local hospitals have no firm evidence of the practice. A spokesperson for Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota says that it’s possible that girls are being circumcised, but pediatricians are not seeing signs of it: A child’s genitals are not examined in routine visits. “I think it’s kind of an underground thing, because it’s illegal,” says Brooke Mengel, a paralegal at the Breitman law firm who worked on Lydia ’s case.

One August day in 1985, not long after Lydia had watched her sister and the other girls suffer their circumcisions, she walked away from the dung huts. “You walk like you’re going to get some firewood, but you just walk and walk and walk,” she says in her clipped accent. She did not say goodbye to her family. She carried no food. She wore only her togalike dress and the leather sandals on her feet. She did not know where she would end up. She only knew that if she did not leave, she would bleed and scream like her sister.

Lydia walked toward the river more than a mile away.