“Just as the sun broke the eastern horizon, the circumciser took her hand-beaten iron knife and cut away the labia minora and the clitoris of each girl.” That’s how anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt describes the actual physical process of ‘female circumcision’ as practised by the Sebei, a pastoralist people that live on the slopes of Mount Elgon in Uganda.

Goldschmidt did field research among the Sebei between 1954 and 1962. A good chunk of his work deals with rituals, including the ‘rites of passage’ by which boys become men and girls women, in the social sense. The common factor is that the process involves cutting away parts of the genitalia. The difference is in the physical mechanics, which are infinitely more scarring and consequential for girls.

Which is one of the reasons why many commentators today are reluctant to use the word ‘circumcision’ for the female variety. Rather, they call it ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM), partly to distinguish it from the relatively benign male type and also to emphasise its physical brutality.

They may or may not have a point. I choose that version because it’s the one Chris Fearne MP used (and hardly idiosyncratically, it must be said) in the Private Member’s Bill he introduced to Parliament last Monday.

I’m broadly in favour of the Bill. One of my objections to female circumcision is that it can dent a woman’s capability to masturbate. To my twisted mind, anything that is not strictly necessary and which gets in the way of such a democratic, economical, and harmless fount of pleasure, cannot be a good thing. I’m so lacking in moral fibre that I especially dislike practices that replace that pleasure with gratuitous pain and long-term health complications.

Problem is I hold a job as a social anthropologist. Many – though not necessarily most – members of my tribe are vociferous opponents of the sort of sweeping ban proposed by Fearne. The basic argument is that anthropology is about the native’s point of view. In this case that means we should listen to what the Sebei, among the hundreds of other groups that practise FGM, have to say about the matter.

Things get infinitely more complicated once we factor in notions like cultural imperialism, neo-colonialist moralising, power hierarchies, and such. I suppose that sounds like a right royal stack of head-up-arse academic jargon. I certainly wouldn’t bring up the topic with a Sebei girl who ‘cried the knife’ and ended up plagued and hounded at every turn, for the rest of her life.

Thus far therefore, it may well be that anthropological dithering should best be confined to ivory quarters and left out of the parliamentary equation. Only it turns out there is at least one thing we might usefully bring to the honourable members’ attention.

I don’t think it was wise of Fearne to throw in forced marriage (and forced sterilisation) with FGM in his Bill. That makes it look suspiciously like a Bill to stop strange people from doing strange things. In other words, a means of force-weaning strangers, and in particular Africans, off their indigenous barbarity.

It doesn’t help that his Bill comes hot on the heels of the recent (current?) spate of klandestini-bashing and its sibling-in-a-suit Brussels-directed jingoism. Nor do I like its apparent urgency. There are three possible readings of that.

Option one, pure coincidence. Option two, a rush to foist laws on strangers before they become enfranchised and can have their own say. Option three, a populist ‘we can’t kick them out but look at us, we can kick their behinds’. Fearne’s a decent man and I’ll assume it’s the first. Only politics and unintended consequence are inseparable bedfellows.

Certainly the immediate popular response favoured options two and three. As expected, and I say this with respect to the contributors, the online comments were mostly along the lines of ‘Next up: the burka’, ‘When in Rome...’, ‘The beauty of multiculturalism’, and so on. Strangers doing strange things in our midst, that is.

It doesn’t help that his Bill comes hot on the heels of the recent spate of klandestini-bashing

This is where the members of the House, and especially Fearne as the protagonist, really matter. It’s all about the premise, language, and directions of the forthcoming debate.

The crucial point is that this is not, or shouldn’t be, a transaction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Whatever it is, it’s not a clash-of-civilisations (or, in this case, clash between civilisation and barbarity as imagined) matter of Maltese versus African values.

I’ve good reason to trust that mine is not just politically-correct rhetoric. FGM is actually outlawed in most African countries. A good chunk of the activism and sustained uproar against the practice comes from Africans, including from women have themselves been ‘cut’.

This includes African men and women who live in Malta. It’s a sensitive area best left to the experts (I’m not one) but I’ve come across at least one case of a knife job and deep-seated opposition, by African women, to it. Buzz terms like ‘their culture’ and ‘their community’ simply don’t work here.

The standard objection would be that the opposition consists of Africans who have unwittingly bought Western values, wholesale and uncritically – Africans stuck with a servile mimicry of the West, that is. Which would leave us nursing our cultural imperialism and ‘real’ Africans their barbarity.

A non-starter since that sort of real, inward-looking, authentic (I’ll spare you the single quotes) Africa doesn’t and has never existed. African societies – and why should this be surprising? – are the result of interactions of the artistic, technological, religious, and so on, kinds. The key word here is ‘interactions’, as opposed to ‘imports’.

Fearne’s Bill is not about keeping strange practices off our soil. Rather, it concerns a type of brutality that knows no borders and is actively politicised irrespective of location or ethnicity. Masturbation aside, it’s that argument that places me squarely in the clitoris camp.

mafalzon@hotmail.com