A coordinated social media campaign defending female genital mutilation (FGM) emerged in Mali this August, reigniting societal debates not just about women’s bodily integrity, but also about tradition and national sovereignty.
Days after a national non-governmental organisation displayed posters in Bamako denouncing the practice, anonymous online accounts began posting images that reversed the ‘no more’ campaign’s message. Men of various backgrounds are portrayed smiling or with thumbs up, surrounded by the national colours and the message: ‘In Mali, yes to excision! Let’s protect girls and build their future.’
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The slogan turns the protection argument on its head in a country where cutting out parts of young girls’ genitals, often without anaesthesia and at the risk of deadly complications, remains commonplace. A 2023 study estimated that FGM caused roughly 44,000 excess deaths a year across 15 African countries, including Mali. This makes it a leading cause of death for girls and young women where it is practised.
For those who survive, the consequences are dire and both immediate and long-term. They include severe pain and bleeding, infection and emotional shock at the time of cutting. Throughout life, they manifest through chronic pain, urinary and menstrual complications, a greater risk of difficult childbirth, and lasting psychological trauma.
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Local women’s rights advocates have opposed the practice for decades. Soon after Mali’s 1960 independence, midwife and lawmaker Aoua Kéita and fellow activists pushed for reforms to advance women’s rights in the 1962 Marriage Code. They achieved a ban on forced marriage and a minimum age for matrimony. But they failed to secure a prohibition on excision and polygamy.
Powerful conservatives went on to defeat draft laws in 2009 on advancing women’s rights in the household, and in 2019 on violence against women. Mali’s 2024 Penal Code condemns violence generally, but stops short of naming FGM.
This legal gap has been costly for Malian women and girls. Mali’s latest Demographic and Health Survey reveals that 89 per cent of those aged 15 to 49 have been cut – one of the highest rates globally. Among girls aged 0 to 14 – the age range when cutting usually occurs – the prevalence is lower, at 70 per cent, and down from 74 per cent in 2018. This suggests the practice may be slowly receding.
But the decline is modest, and potentially reversible. Many in Mali, both women and men, still support FGM, believing it is a religious obligation or a tradition worth keeping. Both claims are disputed, but the lack of consensus threatens thousands of infant girls every year.
FGM supporters minimise its physical harms, presenting it as necessary to control women’s sexuality – a long-standing feature of patriarchal control. Societal norms across much of Mali’s southern and central regions have long glorified suffering as a badge of honour for women, essentially normalising women’s pain. The stigma of bad morality that community expectations could attach to an uncut woman is presented as the greater harm she needs protection from.
‘Yes’ campaigners also try to portray opposition to FGM as a foreign agenda. This erases Mali’s long history of home-grown opposition, from Kéita to today’s human rights defenders. But it resonates with broader sovereignty narratives that recast women’s rights as a foreign import and traditional gender norms as a societal strength.
But this logic replaces one domination with another. It allows men, families and communities to police women’s bodies and maim girls too young to consent and call it resisting imperialism. It denies half the population sovereignty over their own bodies in the name of national sovereignty.
It is hard to determine who is behind the ‘yes’ campaign supporting FGM. Journalists and Malian feminist organisations have traced much of it to accounts sharing artificial intelligence-generated posters, apparently designed to manufacture the appearance of a mass movement. This makes it difficult to assess the campaign’s true scope.
While most men whose portraits are used in the campaign have defended it, some have cited unauthorised use of their image or retracted their support under public pressure.
By mirroring the communication style of the ‘no’ advocacy, FGM supporters have sought to normalise their position, creating a false equivalence between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Once the two are placed on an equal footing, inaction can be presented as a balance rather than a choice to condone violence. Apparent neutrality works in favour of the status quo.
But in the course of Mali’s ‘refoundation’ – a process aimed at resetting societal norms and values, and the basis for political governance – women will not accept a more rigidly gendered social contract without a fight. The pro-excision campaign has met a strong response from women’s rights advocates, health professionals and other public voices challenging the notion that defending FGM equals defending Malian values.
Women – and some men – have also been mobilised beyond national borders. In Côte d’Ivoire and Togo, the ‘yes’ campaign triggered its own swift backlash. Malian and West African diaspora have organised anti-FGM protests in Paris, Montreal and beyond, indicating that FGM can no longer count on silence.
On 26 August, Mali’s National Human Rights Commission called on the authorities to criminalise FGM. Other countries where the practice is entrenched – including Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, Niger, Egypt and Sudan – have passed such laws. It has not ended the practice, but it has made it riskier for perpetrators and handed women’s rights groups a legal basis to challenge it.
But legislating may not be the end of the story. In 2024, traditional and religious leaders attempted to have The Gambia’s Parliament repeal the 2015 Women’s (Amendment) Act criminalising FGM. The case is still pending before the Supreme Court.
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Beyond parliaments and courtrooms, significant shifts in community norms are needed to protect women’s bodily integrity. Religious leaders should clarify that FGM is neither required nor consensually accepted in Islam. They should work with women’s rights organisations, who have long been committed to ending the practice, and health professionals who can best explain its consequences.
International partners should support that effort without becoming its face, a move that risks feeding the campaign’s own claim that reform is foreign-imposed.
Ornella Moderan is the Regional Director for West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin and Central Africa at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
(This article was first published by ISS Today, a Premium Times syndication partner. We have their permission to republish).
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