When Salimata Badji Knight was five-years-old she was held down in the woods near her home by people from her own community and horribly mutilated in a bid to ensure she didn’t grow up to be an unfaithful wife. Earlier this month, the campaigner against female genital mutilation came to Bermuda to explain to Islanders why no child should ever have to go through that again. She told The Royal Gazette’s Sam Strangeways her story.Salimata Badji Knight doesn’t cry when she describes how, as a little girl, she was pinned down by her arms and legs and cut in between her legs as she screamed for mercy.

Her experience of female genital mutilation (FGM) — a custom which two million girls around the globe are at risk of every year according to the World Health Organisation — is heartbreaking to hear.

But the 40-year-old, who is originally from Senegal, grew up in France and now lives in the UK, tells her story matter-of-factly. Perhaps that’s because she has recounted the horror countless times in her bid to see FGM outlawed and because now, as she says, she is “a victor, no longer a victim”.

Back when she was a five-year-old child in West Africa, she was definitely not the winner in a situation which saw her and other local girls enticed into a wood near their homes with the promise of a picnic.

“You hear the screams of other girls before it happens to you; I wasn’t the first one,” she said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen but you realise it makes people cry. When you are trying to escape you know something horrible is going to happen. I think I definitely had a blackout.”

She described the memory as “very vivid”. “I remember it because it’s a part of the memory of my body, my consciousness,” she said. “When we arrived there, all we knew, this woman jumped on us and I feel this pain. I know it’s somewhere down after my abdomen but I was five. I didn’t know what my body is about.”

She added: “What gets my rage is that at that young age nobody had bothered to ask us or to explain that it was going to happen. That is a violation of human rights.”

For decades Salimata stored up resentment about what had happened. “As a young person you rely on your parents. Later on in age, when I realised that that happened to me I was very, very angry,” she said.

Finally, ten years ago, that anger came pouring out during an argument with her mother. “I made allusion to FGM. My mum broke down into tears.

“She said: ‘you were my baby. I never wanted you to be mutilated. Your grandmother sentenced you. I was just a young bride in the community. I had no say’.

“Once she said that we both cried. We both hugged each other. I really felt this anger and animosity I had against her leave me. She was no longer the enemy. She was the compassionate mother. It was her mother-in-law who did it.”

In fact, Salimata’s grandmother had also been mutilated as a girl and Salimata’s mother agreed to two of her other daughters undergoing the procedure once the family had left Senegal and was living in Paris.

It is not unusual for FGM to be carried out outside of Africa. The Home Office in London estimates that about 7,000 girls under 16 are at risk in the UK every year. FGM takes place in many countries with immigrant African populations, including in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Asia and parts of Europe.

Salimata said some girls are snatched from the countries they live in and taken back to Africa for the operation. “Sometimes they never come back because some of them die.”

The practice — barbaric, painful and dangerous as it is — is passed down through generations of women, determined to abide by a tradition whose origins are not known but which is aimed at ensuring their daughters find a husband and stay faithful to him.

Salimata thinks there are other reasons the mutilation, which can involve removal of part or all of the clitoris, the skin surrounding it and external genitalia and the vaginal opening being sewn up, persists.

She said grandmothers who insist on their granddaughters being mutilated are “repeating a crime that has been done to them”.

“Sometimes they say: ‘if I went through it, why should I let her go away from it?’. Some of these societies are matriarchal. The women are in charge of women’s affairs. The men stand by the door observing silently. But the father has every power to stop it.”

She adds: “I definitely forgave my grandmother. I realised that this happened for a purpose. When you see it has a purpose you are no longer a victim.”

That purpose has spurred Salimata into telling her story around the world and campaigning for countries to ban FGM. Her homeland Senegal has outlawed the practice, as has the Ivory Coast. The UK made it a criminal offence in 1985 and introduced a law in 2004 making it unlawful to take girls abroad for genital mutilation.

Salimata likened telling her story to a Holocaust survivor recounting what happened to them to ensure it never happens to anybody else. “We want survivors telling their stories,” she said. “It’s child abuse. Why we have to stop it is because it makes children suffer. It is time to stop practising it because there is no need.”

She described FGM as “a way of controlling women”. “They think a woman who is circumcised is going to be faithful to her husband,” she said. “For them, it’s prevention. It’s a lack of education, of awareness.”

The crude procedure is designed to reduce or totally remove a woman’s ability to experience sexual pleasure. Usually carried out without anaesthetic using unsterilised equipment, it can lead to infection, cysts beneath the skin and infertility, to say nothing of the devastating emotional impact.

“The woman’s clitoris is one of the most sensitive parts of a woman,” said Salimata. “For you to go and hurt that part is like really going to the heart of a person.”

She is dismissive of the argument made by some that Western society can’t understand a deeply-embedded African custom. “It’s escapism,” she said.

She is now lobbying governments in the West to put pressure on African countries where the practice is still legal.

“If one part of this international community is suffering and we are not doing anything about it sooner or later it will affect us in one way or another.”

The invitation by Amnesty International Bermuda to come to the Island to give a lecture on the issue and meet the Premier, Governor and Opposition Leader came as a surprise — but a welcome one.

During her stay, she spoke to Paget Lions Club as well as students at Bermuda High School for Girls and Bermuda Institute.

The youngsters especially impressed her.

“This is not a culture in Bermuda,” she said. “They are never going to go through it but they care and that’s something extraordinary.”

Salimata cites her greatest achievement in life as making changes and getting the topic of FGM into the open within her own family. She is one of five sisters, all mutilated except the youngest.

“With her, it’s where I started saying ‘no, nobody, ever,’” she said. “The family is like a mini-society. If I want to make a change I have to stop it in the heart of my family.

“What is incredible is that now after all these years of hurt we are campaigning, talking about it. I’m the one who in 1996 for the first time broke the silence and then I spoke to my father.

“He cried. He said he did everything he can to stop it. I was able to talk to my sisters about what happened to them. I’m very proud to say that a generation after 1996, there is nobody in my family whatsoever that is going to be circumcised. It’s a fantastic feeling to know that.”

Salimata’s priority remains “the welfare of the children of the world” — but she hopes to have one of her own soon with Paul, her British husband.

Having vowed never to get pregnant so long as there was a risk that the child could be snatched from her and taken to Africa for FGM, she is now confident they will be safe.

“Now I know I’m ready,” she said.

[box] Salimata Badji Knight is FGM co-ordinator for the Victoria Climbie Foundation. To find out more email info[AT]victoriaclimbie.org.uk.