“I couldn’t understand why no one would come and save us, despite the fact that people outside could hear us crying. Our mothers were there. Our families were there. There were people outside in the market, but nobody cared.”
This is how Assita Kanko recalled the moment, at five years of age, when she underwent the excruciating pain of female genital mutilation in her native country, Burkina Faso.
Ms Kanko, who today is a city councillor in Brussels, was in Malta last week to join celebrations of the International Day of the Girl Child.
Her mother, she remembers, took her by the hand one morning and told her she would be going to a friend’s house to play.
But she was not taken to a friend’s house and she was not going to play.
I remember looking down and seeing one of them holding a razor and then she cut me, and it was the worst pain I ever felt
Instead, Ms Kanko was taken to an abandoned, derelict house where she could hear children crying. As her mother went inside the house, she saw three women come towards her to grab her and drag her inside.
“They pushed me down on the ground, and I remember there were holes as deep as teacups, and I looked at the holes and realised they were filled with blood.”
“As they pushed me down, I could taste the sweat from the women over me. I remember looking down and seeing one of them holding a razor and then she cut me, and it was the worst pain I ever felt, and the deepest loneliness I ever felt.”
When Ms Kanko questioned the procedure later that day, her uncle simply answered that she had to go through it “because she was a girl”.
The procedure is forced on women in Burkina Faso and other countries in order to make women submissive, Ms Kanko said. They want to make women used to the idea that they cannot dominate in a patriarchal society.
Asked why women inflict the procedure on others, Ms Kanko said that if the perpetrators refused to mutilate the young girls, they would have nowhere to turn to.
“You say no, and then what? You don’t have a job, you don’t have money. Your boss is your husband and you just need to have children and shut up,” she said.