Fight against FGM started 100 years ago

Circumcision initiates in January 1965 [File]

If the author of Kenya’s eleventh commandment, "thou shall not cut" were to rise up from the dead, he would be scandalised to hear banns being broadcast from the altars.

John William Arthur would be distressed that the same altar he had used to wage holy war against traditional rite of passage for girls was now being used to invite maidens to pay at least Sh6,000 to be guided through the transition into womanhood.

Arthur started his revolution in March, 93 years ago. Inspired by sacred indignation, Rigitari, as the missionary was fondly referred to by converts, he defined an oath to distinguish real and fake Christians.

He had made all Church of Scotland Mission followers to take an oath forbidding them to circurmcise girls. At the height of his campaign, Arthur, who was based in Tumu Tumu in Nyeri, pleaded with the government to jail leaders including Jomo Kenyatta for advocating for what he called a primitive practice.

Arthur, who was a medical doctor, could not stand the needless suffering inflicted on women through cliterodectomy, and in some instances victims were forced to undergo the cut or be ostracised.

This stirred deep emotions where traditionalists composed Muthirigu songs to discredit those advocating for cultural imperialism. This dance was popular that it had spread to most parts of central Kenya by September 1929.

When Arthur's calls for perpetrators of female genital mutilation (FGM) were not heeded to by the government, he resigned as the representative of Africans in the Legislative Council, where he had scored a number of important points for Africans.

As the fight escalated some outraged Africans pooled resources and sent Kenyatta to London to petition the government against what they described as the destruction of their traditions.

While in London, Kenyatta penned his anthropological book, Facing Mt Kenya, where he extolled the beauty of African traditions. 

The echoes of that war are still prevalent for what Arthur outlawed in church is now illegal, following the passage of law that prohibits the female cut.

A century later, the church has embraced the initiation of girls by introducing an alternative rite of passage.

When schools close in a few weeks' time, thousands of teenage boys and girls will flood church halls across the country to undergo a rite that has now been mainstreamed. Here the teenage girls will be schooled into the world while boys will undergo the cut in a medically controlled environment.