Mali: Women Resist FGM Campaign Amidst Legal Status Debate

An online campaign defending cutting, which is still legal in Mali, recasts the practice as a means of protecting girls. A coordinated social media campaign defending female genital mutilation (FGM) emerged in Mali this August, reigniting societal debates not just about women's bodily integrity, but also about tradition and national sovereignty. Days after a national non-governmental organisation displayed posters in Bamako denouncing the practice, anonymous online accounts began posting images that reversed the 'no more' campaign's message. Men of various backgrounds are portrayed smiling or with thumbs up, surrounded by the national colours and the message: 'In Mali, yes to excision! Let's protect girls and build their future.' Keep up with the latest headlines on WhatsApp | LinkedIn The slogan turns the protection argument on its head in a country where cutting out parts of young girls' genitals, often without anaesthesia and at the risk of deadly complications, remains commonplace. A 2023 study estimated that FGM caused roughly 44 000 excess deaths a year across 15 African countries, including Mali. This makes it a leading cause of death for girls and young women where it is practised. For those who survive , the consequences are dire and both immediate and long-term. They include severe pain and bleeding, infection and emotional shock at the time of cutting. Throughout life, they manifest through chronic pain, urinary and menstrual complications, a greater risk of difficult childbirth, and lasting psychological trauma. Local women's rights advocates have opposed the practice for decades. Soon after Mali's 1960 independence, midwife and lawmaker Aoua Kéita and fellow activists pushed for reforms to advance women's rights in the 1962 Marriage Code. They achieved a ban on forced marriage and a minimum age for matrimony. But they failed to secure a prohibition on excision and polygamy. Powerful conservatives went on to defeat draft laws in 2009 on advancing women's rights in the household, and in 2019 on violence against women. Mali's 2024 Penal Code condemns violence generally, but stops short of naming FGM. This legal gap has been costly for Malian women and girls. Mali's latest Demographic and Health Survey reveals that 89% of those aged 15 to 49 have been cut - one of the highest rates globally. Among girls aged 0 to 14 - the age range when cutting usually occurs - the prevalence is lower, at 70%, and down from 74% in 2018. This suggests the practice may be slowly receding. But the decline is modest, and potentially reversible. Many in Mali, both women and men, still support FGM, believing it is a religious obligation or a tradition worth keeping. Both claims are disputed , but the lack of consensus threatens thousands of infant girls every year. FGM supporters minimise its physical harms, presenting it as necessary to control women's sexuality - a long-standing feature of patriarchal control. Societal norms across much of Mali's southern and central regions have long glorified suffering as a badge of honour for women, essentially normalising women's pain. The stigma of bad morality that community expectations could attach to an uncut woman is presented as the greater harm she needs protection from. 'Yes' campaigners also try to portray opposition to FGM as a foreign agenda. This erases Mali's long history of home-grown opposition, from Kéita to today's human rights defenders. But it resonates with broader sovereignty narratives that recast women's rights as a foreign import and traditional gender norms as a societal strength . But this logic replaces one domination with another. It allows men, families and communities to police women's bodies and maim girls too young to consent and call it resisting imperialism. It denies half the population sovereignty over their own bodies in the name of national sovereignty. It is hard to determine who is behind the 'yes' campaign supporting FGM. Journalists and Malian f