The Ethical Optimist

As some of you will remember from my earlier posts, I am a supporter of Foundation Hirondelle, which is an organization of journalists that sets up and operates a free and independent media in crisis areas throughout the world.

My colleague, Anne Bennett sent me a holiday missive from Sierra Leone that she has allowed me to share with you for the holidays.

Reporting from West Africa has its own set of challenges.  Not least among them is getting out from underneath using the shared recent history of brutal civil war as the defining experience of this stretch of dramatic African coastline. Then there is the poverty, the brutal reality of what it means to be the least developed region on earth.

Squarely at the bottom of the UNDP Development index for the second year running, Sierra Leone offers ample material for the kind of news that readers in Europe and the US have come to see as emblematic of Africa as a whole.  The country has the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world and shockingly low levels of adult literacy, especially among women.  Democratic elections in 2007 ushered in a peaceful change of power, yet a large unemployed youth population that includes demobilized child combatants remains largely sidelined as the country inches forward.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, the country is quickly becoming a transit point for drug trafficking between South America and Europe.  A recent seizure of 700 kilograms of cocaine at Freetown’s international airport led to the arrest of 18 nationals and foreigners. Yet many questions remain unanswered about the likely involvement of government officials, including the Minister of Transport and Aviation.

It’s the “festive season” here in Sierra Leone.  Spirits are high, violent crime is down and theft is up, a phenomena explained by the high cost of celebrating Christmas in this predominantly Muslim country.  A recent article in The Economist on the country’s woes brought the reaction from a friend working for the International Rescue Committee that we in the media “can never say anything good”.  Faced with this indictment, I reflected: what is the good news in this season of Good News?  This is what I have to report…

Last week, over a thousand young Sierra Leoneans graduated from the University of Sierra Leone, as relatives and friends braved a skin crackling sun to bear witness from Fourah Bay College’s outdoor amphitheatre.  This year, the recipient of the Chancellor’s highest honour is Isaac Smalle, who has completed seven years of medical school and will join a small force of underpaid, overworked doctors on the front lines of health care delivery here.

Dr. Smalle’s father cleans my office and classroom in the Mass Communications Building on campus.  He lives near our village of Leicester, one of the early Krio settlements that makes up the Western Rural District, and I often give him a lift on the red dirt road that winds itself up the mountain overlooking Freetown. He is a master gardener, growing quite possibly the best tomatoes in Sierra Leone (by my judgement).  Having tried and failed now for two seasons, I can attest to the skill involved in propagating this non-native vegetable.

He also managed to raise eight children on a meagre, sporadic salary, putting three through university.  Isaac’s mother, a petty trader who was literate but hadn’t completed high school, died when he was a child.  Through a stroke of luck, Isaac and several other children from the village were “adopted” by Plan International while still in primary school.  A Dutch couple, whom the Smalles have never met, paid his school fees through primary and secondary school, where he graduated at the top of his class at the Prince of Wales in Freetown.  His friends called him “Prof”.  With the highest college entrance scores in the country, he gained a place at the University of Sierra Leone, and with it a rare government scholarship.

A day’s drive away over some of the worst roads on the continent, the village of Masanga seems a long way from Freetown.  A small settlement of thatched roofs, Masanga means “other side of the river” in the local Temne language, a reference to its origins as a result of the leprosy clinic that was founded on the banks of the Pampana.

It is an unlikely setting for one of the most innovative educational experiments in West Africa.  In a country where families struggle to scrape together school fees for children as young as 4, over 100 girls from Masanga and surrounding villages attend kindergarten and primary school completely free of charge.  But here’s the catch: in exchange of free education, families must pledge not to circumcise their daughters.

Female circumcision, also know as female genital mutilation or FGM, is widespread in Sierra Leone.  Estimates are that in the area around Masanga, up to 97% of women between 25 and 49 are circumcised.  The forced cutting generally takes place between ages 5-16 and is known as initiation into the Bondo Society. In most cases, girls are taken out of the village to a secluded location known as the Bondo Bush and initiated in a group by a traditional cutter known as a Sowei. Various more informal instances of cutting are also common but in all cases it is considered a rite of passage in the transition from girlhood to womanhood.

The initiation of girls in Sierra Leone is often looked upon as a sort of investment. The ceremony itself is costly for most families but it ensures that the girl will be marriageable. The lack of free education often means that money for school fees for the child will instead be used to pay for her initiation, limiting the girl’s education and employment prospects and leading to early marriage. Girls are often initiated during school holidays and do not return when classes resume, a pattern that is common even in urban areas as girls are sent to ancestral villages to undergo circumcision.

FGM is a taboo subject that even our college educated journalists didn’t want to touch a year ago.  We have covered government corruption, a close electoral contest between bitter rival factions, scandal in the local football world; but it is our coverage of Bondo business, or FGM, that has elicited the most passionate reactions from our listeners, including a death threat to our Woman Tok producer.  Against this backdrop, the success of the Masanga project in a rural backwater is somewhat amazing.

Michelle Moreau is from a picturesque Swiss town on the banks of the Lac Leman near Geneva. She met and married a son of Masanga when both were students in Guinea.  On visits to the village, she started helping families pay their daughter’s school fees in an attempt to stop the tide of female illiteracy in her own small way.  She knew little or nothing about FGM, and had no idea of its prevalence until she discovered that all the female relatives of her husband had been circumcised.  She lay awake at night trying to figure out how to do something about a practice she found shocking, but that nobody- especially not her husband- would discuss.

Deciding that perhaps families needed an incentive to abandoned a practice that few entered into with free will, but where pressure from the community meant that there was no opting out.  She discussed her plan with her mother in law, who gave it her blessing.  Bowing to local tradition, she took her idea to the village chief. In what would signal the project’s success, he pledged his granddaughter’s participation in the program and the land for the school was bought. In 2007 the project’s success forced the local Sowei to announce that there would be no initiation ceremonies that year and, through a costly ceremony she abandoned her profession. Her economic situation was better than many of the village women as her son sent her money from Freetown and she was able to get by on farming and other activities.

Alice Fortune, the local doctor, is the coordinator of the project and in providing free health care to students, she is able to assure that parents’ pledges are being kept. Her mother is a respected former Sowei whose hands show the ravages of leprosy. Standing under the cotton tree at the center of the village, she told me recently that she fully supports the work of her daughter.  “It is time for the community to move on”.—————————————————————-
Anne M. Bennett
Fondation Hirondelle