The BBC showed a most enlightening documentary the other day on certain tribal practices in Eritrea (formerly part of Ethiopia in Africa). Apparently it is the custom in some rural areas for women to have their labia stitched (I know) so that the entrance to the vagina is far smaller than normal. It is impossible to give birth in this condition, so the stitching must be cut to allow the baby to pass out of the birth canal. Those who perform this procedure are not trained medical professionals, and the instruments used are not sterile. Once a woman has given birth she is restitched in the same manner by the same individuals.
Moreover, though the custom of female circumcision has been formally illegal for some time, it still prevails. Once more, though this is a highly dangerous operation to perform on an infant female, it is not carried out with sterile instruments, nor is it done by qualified medics. Those who perform it are apparently frequently elderly and often even incapable of identifying the correct part of the anatomy with any accuracy. It goes without saying that there is a considerable risk of mortality to the baby due to shock, blood loss, subsequent infection, or some combination of these.
One must ask why it is that these practices of stitching and circumcision survive. Their origins are unknown even to those who keep them, so though one might intuit that they result from a male fear of female sexuality and an effort to exert control over it, this remains psychological speculation. Essentially, they seem to take the form of purity taboos, and significantly, it is the women themselves who are most closely wedded, if that is the right word, to them. They are worried, for example, that if they do not have their labia restitched after giving birth (with all the associated risk of infection, etc.), they will not be able to buried with the other women of the tribe when they die, or be allowed to associate with them in their daily lives. This fear persists even when they are taken around a medical clinic, offered a birth in a clean environment attended by qualified medical staff, and told of the risks of continuing in their traditional ways.
The Eritrean government is working hard, it seems, to persuade them otherwise, and in urban areas these efforts have met with some success. The senior minister interviewed had the intelligence to realise that there was no point in simply berating the rural people for their ignorance, that any change would inevitably be gradual, and that the most successful long-term strategy would likely be based on education and persuasion. The government is holding workshops at which the peasants are effectively made to confront the grounds of their own beliefs, and during which blatantly false claims - such as the belief that the Koran requires female circumcision - can be politely but firmly corrected. It was refreshing to see a government appreciate that minds cannot be changed by force on such matters.
Nevertheless, the survival of these customs raises significant issues for liberals who want to respect cultural difference and tolerate the practices of others - as indeed do the remarks of our delightful Saudi judge who wants to kill the owners of cable TV channels (see below). What is the positive benefit of continuing to respect irrational and superstitious beliefs about spiritual pollution when their preservation requires bodily mutilation that all the medical evidence suggests only endangers the lives of pregnant mothers and causes lifelong damage to infant females? Cui bono? To whom is the good? Who could possibly be served by this? To pretend that this is a case where the kind of simplistic cultural relativism of 'I say tomayto, you say tomarto' could possibly apply seems simply to trivialise what is at stake here. It is to the great credit of the Eritrean government, so far as I can see, that it it is doing its best to stamp out practices that are, in the most literal sense of the terms, primitive and worthless.
