The princess,the witch and the fairy godmother: colonial legacies in ‘FGM’

Abstract

This article analyses the discursive construction of what has become known as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM) in colonial-era debates in the UK Houses of Parliament. The author shows how, in order to bring the topic into the realm of political legitimacy and to be heard in an institution that had only recently allowed women to stand for office, (White) women MPs emphasised their superiority to the African cultures they were talking about. They fought for inclusion as parliamentarians by re-articulating and aligning themselves with Whitely virtues, positioning themselves as noble, respectable and civilised in contrast to the ‘evil’, ‘abhorrent’ and ‘barbaric’ natives. By delineating the moral distance between themselves and non-White men and women, and by (re)stating female parity as the measure of civilisation, they asserted their own right to full inclusion in the nation-state, using the master’s tools to trouble the master’s house. Ultimately, they gained ground for feminism through the re-articulation of racism. Through historicising and deconstructing the narrative as iterated in the seat of government in colonial times, the author furthers the tentative moves towards decolonising the global campaign against FGM. The article sheds light on the coloniality in the present-day hegemonic narrative of ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ and questions whether there might be less harmful ways to articulate opposition to the practice.

Introduction

What is known as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM) is a major global policy concern, described by the current United Nations Secretary General as ‘an abhorrent human rights violation that causes profound harm to women and girls around the world’. ¹ The term is often attributed to US feminist and women’s health campaigner Fran Hosken. The 1979 Hosken Report is said to have paved the way for the accepted international definition: as ‘mutilation’ rather than ‘circumcision’; as fundamentally and primarily about the sexual control and subordination of women; and as one single homogenous category within which different ‘types’ – organised according to physical surgery – can be delineated. ² This definition, however, came into being in public and political discourse at least fifty years earlier, raised in the UK Houses of Parliament by two female MPs, who had been galvanised by missionaries working in colonial Africa. It was following these debates that, in Kenya and then later in Sudan, the first steps were taken to categorise female circumcision (FC) by ‘type’ and legislative measures were enacted to prohibit the particular types that male colonial authorities – with an eye on economic concerns around labour and production – believed to be detrimental, whilst encouraging those they thought did not damage the ‘essence’ of womanhood.

This article analyses the discursive construction of FC as sexual ‘mutilation’ as articulated publicly in the UK House of Commons in 1929 and 1949, a definition that has become hegemonic. It demonstrates how parliamentarians, acting as ‘moral entrepreneurs’, ³ took the disparate, and often contradictory accounts of FC reported to them by missionaries, medics, academics and colonial officials, and distilled them into a singular narrative of horror. While the topic was explicitly raised by the Duchess of Atholl and Eleanor Rathbone with the aim of improving conditions for ‘coloured women in the colonies’, the debate immediately derailed into a fight for their own status and inclusion as (female) parliamentarians and for the political legitimacy of what was dismissed as a women’s issue. I argue that through delineating the moral distance between White women and non-White men and women and by (re)claiming female parity as the measure of civilisation, they asserted their own right to full inclusion in the nation-state, using the master’s tools to trouble the master’s house. Ultimately, they gained ground for (White) feminism through the re-articulation of racism.

The feminist movement in Europe and the US has long since come under sustained criticism for its inability to grasp that gender- and sex-based inequalities are not experienced by everyone in the same way, and may not be the most significant form of discrimination that many women have to negotiate in their everyday lives. What has been termed imperial or White feminism is a political consensus that is so entrenched as the norm that its operation can be difficult – for White people especially – to distinguish. It is a standpoint ‘dominated by Western paradigms’ which masquerade as universal. ⁴ But the privileging of White western experience is only part of the story. Chandra Mohanty observed how the construction of gendered racial differentiation necessarily produced a discursive representation of White western women as free agents, in contrast to their enslaved or unliberated Black and Brown counterparts. ⁵ Historians of the British Empire have demonstrated how for some White women in the colonies this discursive representation of Whiteness could be utilised to material effect to overcome the inherent subordinacy of their status as women. Individual White women have been revealed as ‘central actors’ in the implementation of colonial policy, and imperial feminism itself has been revealed as a ‘governing discourse in colonial encounters’. ⁶ The primary way in which the British colonial regimes judged the societies they colonised was through their understanding of the position of women in that society. Women ‘became an index and a measure less of themselves than of men and of societies’. ⁷ Meanwhile, in the UK, scholars have exposed the uncomfortable links between the movement for female emancipation and the growth of British imperialism. ⁸

Several of those whose scholarship I am indebted to have argued that an imperial feminist coloniality is deeply embedded in The Mutilation Narrative which dominates current international discourse on ‘FGM’ and underpins global abolitionist policy. ⁹ Mainstream academia, feminists and political actors, however, remain resolutely convinced that they are on message in speaking about the ‘barbaric’, ‘medieval’ and ‘misogynistic’ practice of ‘FGM’ and challenges have been easily – albeit incorrectly – dismissed as immoral cultural relativism or false consciousness. Through historicising and deconstructing the narrative on ‘FGM’ as iterated in the seat of government at the height of the British Empire, my intention is to provide further analytic evidence to bolster moves towards decolonising the global campaign. Part of the decolonising agenda involves scrutinising Grand Narratives which purport to be universal truths, with the aim of making Eurocentricity apparent and de-centring it. ¹⁰ It is not simply that ‘feminists are not exempt’ from imperialism and the civilising discourse which accompanied colonialism and present-day coloniality, ¹¹ but rather that western feminism was built on imperialist foundations, with a primary commitment to civilising Others. ¹² Through this article, I hope readers will recognise the colonial legacies in present-day articulations of ‘FGM’ and question whether there might be less harmful ways to articulate opposition to the practice.

Colonial-era debates in London are, of course, only one part of this narrative’s rise to global hegemony, albeit a significant foundational part. ¹³ In relation to colonial Kenya, several scholars have provided empirical analysis on the role played by missionaries in the ‘circumcision controversy’, ¹⁴ and the role of government officials. ¹⁵ Others have elucidated the perspective of colonised peoples vis-à-vis cultural meanings of FC and resistance to missionary and government abolition attempts. ¹⁶ In relation to colonial Sudan, Janice Boddy provides an edifying text which situates reform attempts in the wider historical context, while Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf analyses the role of emotion in colonialist reactions. ¹⁷ In the postcolonial context, Hannelore Van Bavel has traced the narrative’s rise to dominance in supra-national organisations including the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, while Abusharaf, Wairimũ Njambi and Nahid Toubia have spoken about the impact of The Mutilation Narrative in relation to the silencing of African women. ¹⁸ This article’s unique contribution is to provide detailed analysis of the narrative’s inauspicious articulation by powerful elites in the seat of government at the height of the British Empire, and to deconstruct that narrative to bring to the fore the rudimentary structure that still underpins and maintains articulations today.

The article begins with a description of the methodology, including the theoretical approach to narrative and discourse. I then analyse the discursive tactics used by speakers, firstly in the 1929 debates on Kenya and secondly the 1949 debates on Sudan, before analysing the three stock characters of The Mutilation Narrative which took shape in these debates.

Materials and methods

The data analysed includes the correspondence and related papers on FC in (1) the Colonial Office, held in the National Archives at Kew; and (2) the (Parliamentary) ‘Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women in the Crown Colonies’, 1928–1938 held by Liverpool University Library; alongside all mentions of circumcision in the following digitised collections: (3) the Church Missionary Society periodicals, (4) UK and English language Africa-based newspapers from 1920 to 1939, and (5) the Houses of Parliament from the first debate in 1929 to 1966 ¹⁹ as recorded in Hansard. Data was extracted from the latter three sets of sources using the search terms ‘circumcise/ion’, ‘mutilate/ion/ing’ and ‘genital’. I repeatedly sought access to the private archive of the Duchess of Atholl but have yet to receive a response. To augment my understanding, I also took account of Atholl’s study of/for women in politics and her autobiography, ²⁰ campaign material by the Principal of the Midwifery Training College in Sudan, ²¹ a political history of Kenya written by the former Director of Public Works for East African Protectorate ²² and the memoir of the Director of Women’s Education in Colonial Sudan. ²³

Narrative analysis in social science takes many different forms; here I am relying primarily on a literary or narratology approach. ²⁴ Multiple scholars have observed how social and political action and discourse is achieved through storytelling. ²⁵ Fairy tales are examples of what has been variously termed ‘formula stories’, ‘cultural scripts’, ‘master narratives’ or ‘canonical stories’. ²⁶ They are epistemological frameworks which underpin Western knowledge construction: taught to children throughout their formal education and used repeatedly in everyday life in advertisements, television dramas and novels. ²⁷ They contain symbolic codes, which are ‘systems of ideas about how the world does work, how the world should work, and about the rights and responsibilities among people in this world’ and emotion codes, which are ‘systems of ideas about when and where and toward whom or what emotions should be inwardly experienced, outwardly displayed, and morally evaluated’. ²⁸

The Mutilation Narrative relies on the framework of a nineteenth-century fairy tale populated by stock characters. In a triangulated relationship, the uncircumcised (sexually innocent) girl was constructed as the sought-for person whose fate (darkness or enlightenment, atavism or civilisation) would be determined by the battle between good and evil. While several key (White) female figures argued at the time that the true villain was patriarchal custom, the male governing elite preferred to blame native women, and the symbolic representation of evil manifested as a (native) witch(doctor) or old hag, bound by superstition and sexual ignorance. In contrast to this character, and through her very characterisation, White women constructed themselves and each other across class lines as benevolent fairy godmothers whose task it was to mitigate the harm done, to provide the magic agent of change, and to alert the hero. Through reliance on such a framework, the narrative resonates with its target Western audience and thus has the capacity to work as a call for action. However, this framing also limits the basis on which knowledge is constructed and unthinkingly reproduces and legitimates bias and stereotypes: indeed, these three stock characters still populate global mainstream campaign literature today.

Debates on Kenya, December 1929

When the Duchess of Atholl rose to speak about FC in the debate on ‘Colonial policy in relation to coloured races’ in 1929, ²⁹ she was one of only twelve women in the House of Commons, two thirds of whom had been in their seats for just six months. The debate was initiated by Labour MP James Marley who had been successful in the private members ballot, supported by a coalition of parliamentary activists for native paramountcy. ³⁰ The motion was broad, covering everything from well-being to self-governance and land rights, and there were only two hours for debate. Marley, followed by fellow Labour MP Charles Buxton, laid out their party’s philosophy of trusteeship. ‘We’, they both told the House, have a duty and responsibility to ‘speak for’ the natives of colonial Africa as ‘they have no representative system and have no chance of making their voices heard’. Neatly silencing the fact that it was that same ‘we’ who had denied them voting rights and representative systems, this motion nonetheless signalled a more benevolent attitude to what had gone before; ‘the bond of common humanity’ was upheld, albeit in paternalistic terms. Atholl, a Scottish Unionist and Conservative MP, then stood to speak. She began by confirming that, like the Gentlemen, she saw colonial governance as a cross-party issue: the ‘we’ in this area of politics that all speakers advocated, was and should be united, so that ‘the coloured races and their problems’ did not become ‘the playthings of party politics’. But while the two men focused on labour and land, Atholl wanted to talk about women’s rights, specifically ‘the existence of a pre-marriage rite . . . frequently referred to as the circumcision of girls’.

I am sure it will be realised that this is not an easy subject to deal with publicly. I venture to bring it before the House, because none of us can afford to forget the responsibility that has been impressed upon us from the benches opposite − the responsibility for that Colonial Empire – which is directly governed from this House. We must at all times be ready to study the conditions in that Colonial Empire, particularly when we remember how little native races may be able to express themselves, and how backward they may be in respect of many of their customs. ³¹

In speaking about female sexuality and female sex organs, Atholl was contravening the norms of socially acceptable topics of conversation. In raising a topic which in the 1920s was decidedly a women’s issue, she was also challenging the masculinist policy-making norms. ³² As a female in a heavily male institution which had only granted women equal voting rights a year previously, her very presence as a speaking subject in parliament was a challenge for many: her biographer recounts that as Education Minister from 1924–1929, Atholl’s contributions were routinely dismissed by the Permanent Secretary, who often made a point of conducting meetings as though she was not present and had not spoken. ³³ To overcome such prevalent prejudicial attitudes (whether consciously or instinctively), Atholl instigated a series of discursive strategies. First, she relied heavily on the paternalistic discourse of White/colonial responsibility; the duty to speak for, care for, and guide the choices of the ‘backward’ natives. This involved the articulation of a united, cross-party ‘we’, composed of respectable parliamentarians. In this, she reiterated the discourse of previous speakers, aligning herself with the prevailing political zeitgeist, and thus staking her claim to speak and make certain topics speakable within the masculinist honourable norm. This numerically limited and elite we was constructed in opposition to the uncountable, inarticulate and silenced, ‘native races’. Second, she incorrectly defined circumcision as consisting of ‘the actual wholesale removal of parts connected with the organs of reproduction’, thereby silencing any association with female sexual pleasure, and instead constructing the issue as primarily about reproductive health. Discursively, this definition worked to maintain her social standing: arguably it is only by her presentation of herself as irreproachably respectable that she is able to introduce an ‘unclean’ and taboo topic. It also spoke to the widely held Christian belief that reproduction was the raison d’être of women and to government concerns with the reproduction of a labour source to be exploited in the colonies. ³⁴ Third, she relied on binary characterisations of us and them, manifested through representations of a racialised and classed femininity:

The term applied to it [female circumcision] is totally inadequate to give an idea of what it means . . . the rite is nothing short of mutilation. It consists of the actual wholesale removal of parts connected with the organs of reproduction. The operation is performed publicly before one or two thousand people by an old woman of the tribe armed with an iron knife. No anaesthetic is given, and no antiseptics are used. The old woman goes with her knife from one girl to another, performing the operation, returning it may be once or twice to each victim. A lady missionary steeled herself to see this operation not long ago, and has given a description of it verified by photographs which she took. She told us that the girl has a whistle put into her mouth so that her screams will not be heard.

Imagery, metaphors and the selection of person-reference categories create a hierarchical contrast through the juxtaposition of the unidentifiable ‘old woman of the tribe’ with ‘the lady missionary’. The ‘woman’ is characterised by pre-modern backwardness, explicitly described as ‘old’ and ‘of the tribe’, evoking an absence of individualism that also extends to the amorphous mass of victims whose voices are reduced to inarticulate shrill whistles. The ‘lady missionary’, by contrast, is levitated from her typical lowly status in White Victorian society through adjectival ennoblement which puts her on a par with the Duchess, an actual Lady. ³⁵ Whilst the ‘old woman’ is threateningly ‘armed’ with the tool of her trade, the ‘lady missionary’ has a camera to hand for the purposes of verification, referencing a scientific, anthropological righteousness. Unlike the woman who goes from girl to girl, seemingly untouched by their pain, the lady missionary is deeply sensitive as befitting a lady (she would undoubtedly do well in the ‘pea under the mattress’ test) and finds it very hard to watch others in pain. Nevertheless, she voluntarily subjects herself to endure this pain for the greater good. The metaphorical association of the ‘old woman of the tribe’ with iron, and the ‘lady missionary’ with steel, suggests that the former is of the iron age when life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, ³⁶ and the latter of the age of steel which in 1929 represented the apex of modernity. ³⁷

This speech reveals that right from the outset, campaigners and politicians were challenging the use of the term ‘circumcision’. As a powerful descriptive, ‘mutilation’ was employed by Atholl as a rhetorical device aimed at invoking compassion in order to persuade Members of the House of the need for action. The term adhered to and referenced existing categorisations of colonial subjects as barbaric and in need of civilising. Other adjectives used to describe FC in colonial-era parliamentary debates include ‘vile’, ‘cruel’, ‘horrible’, ‘hideous’ and ‘barbarous’, while colonial people were called ‘backward’ and ‘ignorant’.

Atholl had formed a ‘Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women in the Crown Colonies’ after attending a meeting on FC convened by the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM). The committee comprised a cross-party selection of imperialist MPs, with strong representation from Scottish constituencies, Suffragist supporters, and those with Empire experience. At the point when she raised the issue in parliament, the Committee had heard evidence from five experts: two Church Missionary Society (CMS) women missionaries, the Director of Medical and Sanitary Services in Kenya, the former Director of Public Works for East African Protectorate, and a missionary medic. They would go on to hear evidence from others including Jomo Kenyatta, who was visiting London as the General Secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association. The archives show that there was no consensus between government officials, missionaries, medics and academics on what circumcision signified to those that practised it, what its origins were or why it was done. They also reveal that Atholl and Rathbone had already made up their minds about the issue before hearing the evidence. The structured questionnaire prepared for experts – which they eventually persuaded Lord Passfield, Secretary of State for the Colonies, to circulate to colonial governors – requested information on ‘injurious or barbarous customs’ done to women, ³⁸ thus framing all and any topic raised as gender violence and as backward/uncivilised. There was no room in this framing for Kenyatta’s contention that the Agĩkũyũ (or Kikuyu) understood circumcision as a gender commensurate practice and as empowering, gender-confirming and necessary for acceptance into the social schema. ³⁹ Further, they openly challenged the knowledge claims of the long-serving government official (McGregor Ross) who resisted the suggestion that among the Agĩkũyũ, circumcision was undertaken as a ‘moral restraint’ on female sexual desire and refused to be drawn into commenting on prevalence in other tribes. ⁴⁰ They shunned the evidence of the anthropologist Dr Leakey, an Agĩkũyũ initiate himself, who took issue with their assumption that the practice of lobola (translated as ‘bride price’) equated to women being bought and sold, arguing instead that it was similar to a western social insurance policy.

Overlooking the nuance and contradictions in these collective submissions, Atholl chose instead to rely on an account of a circumcision ceremony in January 1929 witnessed by the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) missionary Agnes Brown (the ‘lady missionary’ described above in Atholl’s 1929 speech), which did not form part of the official evidence collected by the committee but had been circulated widely in sympathetic circles. ⁴¹ As an important physical and symbolic manifestation of Agĩkũyũ initiation into tribal belonging and spirituality, missionaries understood FC as a threat to their (already converted) ‘natives’. Missionaries described parents as ‘stealing’ (their own) children from their rightful place at missions and seeking to re-barbarise those who had been persuaded to abandon the ‘immoral practices’ of native life. Aware of the need to engage a wider audience beyond those in the immediate church network, they emphasised health implications over immorality in their public appeals, asserting as fact that FC resulted in the loss of the first-born child as well as often the mother as well, a claim contested by others giving evidence to the committee. In this, they framed FC as an issue of health and reproduction and therefore of economic consequence to colonial policy, which was deeply concerned with ensuring the regeneration of healthy, able-bodied labourers. This was the definition of FC – as mutilation, as barbaric and as pertaining to reproduction – that Atholl gave in the House.

Atholl’s claim to affinity with her White male counterparts was rejected, however, and divisions emerged in the House along gender lines. She was interrupted by Labour MP James Maxton who challenged the legitimacy of both (female) topic and (female) speaker, asserting that her choice of subject was irrelevant to the debate and nothing more than ‘a special interest of her own’. The Speaker of the House intervened, partially upholding the challenge; ruling that the topic had only ‘an indirect bearing on the Motion before the House’, but declined Maxton’s invitation to find the Duchess to have spoken ‘out of order’. Atholl’s right to speak in the House was thus reaffirmed, but her subject matter was found to be irrelevant. Some muted support for the impugned honour of the Duchess came from other Conservative members of the House, but Maxton persisted with his challenge despite the Speaker’s intervention, and was only eventually quieted by the indomitable (Independent) Eleanor Rathbone MP who cried out: ‘Women do not count!’ directly quoting, albeit without acknowledgement, one of the CMS missionaries who had given evidence to the committee. Atholl was allowed to continue, and she went on to compare FC to the practice of suttee, outlawed a century earlier, and to call for a similar robust legal response. Rathbone then gave her own contribution, broadening the discussion to the position of coloured women as akin to slavery:

Let them take this message to the men of the native races. There can be no equal citizenship between coloured men and White men till there is equal citizenship between coloured men and coloured women. ⁴²

Significantly, the ultimate measure of civilisation (above education, above English-language ability and above a system of property ownership, according to Colonel Wedgewood, chair of Atholl’s Committee) was how women were treated by men.

Atholl and Rathbone came from very different walks of life and very different political persuasions, but both had pre-parliamentary careers in activism focused on improving the lives of women and children. Both also had strong religious roots, the former in the Church of Scotland and the latter in Quakerism. They can be considered as moral entrepreneurs, or more specifically moral crusaders, ⁴³ both influenced by the White supremacist Katharine Mayo. ⁴⁴ In order to raise this taboo topic in the Houses of Parliament (quite literally the master’s house), it was imperative for the speaker to be beyond reproach in terms of her own morality. Further, she had to assert her legitimacy as a woman in a man’s space, as well as the legitimacy of what was understood as a women’s issue. The means by which these women did this was to align themselves with Whiteness, emphasising their upper-class respectability and their adherence to Christian feminine values. The Duchess’s own nobility and impeccable connections could not have been insignificant in helping to achieve this. The Duke of Atholl was a ‘grandee among grandees’ carrying ‘more titles than any other peer’. ⁴⁵ He had held her seat until 1917 when he inherited his title (which meant taking up his seat in the House of Lords as opposed to sitting in the House of Commons) and, after successfully hosting the Crown Prince of Japan on a state visit at the Atholl estate, was appointed Lord Chamberlain. Further, the Duchess was impeccably well connected politically: it was her friend, David Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, who had suggested and persuaded her to run for parliament, following which King George V wrote in a personal capacity to try to dissuade her from this course of action on account of the importance of her position (to the Union and monarchy) in Scotland. ⁴⁶ She may have been female, but she was of a superior class to many of the men in the House of Commons at a time when class was a major delineator in the UK, and this was reinforced by constant referral: announced by the speaker as she stood to speak (‘the Duchess of Atholl’) and always acknowledged by her parliamentary peers (who called her ‘the Noble Lady’). Furthermore, Atholl’s choice of dress projected the (Christian) values of modesty and purity: ‘simple, practical, thrifty, plain to the point of drabness, though she was always neat’, leading one friend to comment that she had ‘a soul above clothes’. ⁴⁷

From a less titled, but more cash-wealthy background, Rathbone came from a line of industrial Quakers, and her wealth meant that she could maintain a comfortable independence. ⁴⁸ Her father was a Liberal MP and she became a tireless campaigner for feminist causes. She was also a confirmed puritanical spinster who, according to her biographer, ‘rejected the new view of sex as a source of female pleasure or an essential human need and resented the influence of those who promulgated it’ and, similar to Atholl, dressed in plain, chaste clothes. ⁴⁹

Introducing female genitals as a topic of debate in the Houses of Parliament was undoubtedly shocking, even scandalous, for many of the male parliamentarians and the wider British public. In taking up a cause that was explicitly about women, sex organs and colonial politics, these newly elected women were in many ways incredibly brave. Ultimately, however, they made their case through upholding and rearticulating patriarchal, racist conventions, and it was through doing this that they made inroads towards their own acceptance and inclusion in the master’s house. Much as Koa Beck ⁵⁰ and Nancy Fraser ⁵¹ have critiqued ‘lean-in’ feminism for gaining ground for a certain class of (typically White) women at the expense of other (typically non-White, often migrant) women, these women raised the standing and legitimacy of White women as political actors through these debates, but they did so by differentiating and denigrating non-White women and distancing themselves from them. These inauspicious beginnings were rehearsed and expanded some twenty years later.

Debates on Sudan, February 1949

By 1949, when the topic was up for debate for a second time, the focus had shifted to Sudan. ⁵² Labour MP Leah Manning articulated the royal ‘we’ as less specifically limited to the honourable members of the Houses of Parliament, and instead invoked a nation-wide collective who shared the same ‘civilised’ values:

Is there any way in which my right hon. Friend can give voice to the abhorrence that is felt in this civilised country against this very obscene custom practised on young female children?

The detail of FC remained unspeakable, not only because it was ‘obscene’ (i.e. a sexual depravity – reforming and expanding the Obscene Publications Act 1857 was to occupy considerable amount of parliamentary time through the 1950s), but because in raising the topic, MPs needed to reassert their own respectability. To do so, they presented themselves as Atholl presented the lady missionary; as highly sensitive creatures who would not and could not ‘harrow the feelings’ of other ‘hon. Members or . . . disgust or sicken them by going into anatomical details’, as honourable gentlefolk of the upper classes. Whiteness continued to be constructed around notions of sensitivity, empathy and egalitarianism:

No woman who has had the advantage of living in a free and liberal country such as we have in the West, and in most parts of the world in modern times, can fail to feel deep compassion when they know of the suffering, the pain and, indeed, the terrible psychological effects which this mutilation brings upon these very young girls throughout the Sudan. It must be true that every hon. Member here wants to help the Sudanese people to understand exactly how bewildered public opinion is here – it is our condominium – that a people so intelligent and so adaptable as the Sudanese, can still carry out a ritual which has its origin in the dark atavistic regions of their minds.

Having feelings and being sensitive to the plight of others, expressing pity for their (morally) impoverished circumstances, is articulated as a ‘Whitely’ way of being. ⁵³ This was a strategy employed by Victorian feminists, who constructed particular colonial others as having ‘injured identities’ in order to distinguish and levitate their own position as superior. ⁵⁴ It also has a history within the suffrage movement which was informed by an ‘essentially evangelical notion of feminine moral superiority’. ⁵⁵ Notions of empire as a civilising force were intimately tied to Victorian notions of female respectability in which middle-class values of sexual propriety and ladylike sensitivity were paramount. In line with this position, Manning attributes empathetic feelings to White women and explains these feelings as emanating from experience of equality between the sexes. Just as it had been twenty years earlier, the mark of a civilised society was held to be one in which women are treated as full/equal citizens.

Despite the advances of the feminist movement, women in the UK were manifestly not living in freedom from patriarchal control. Although the number of women MPs had doubled since 1929, women still comprised less than 4 per cent of MPs. Inequality of pay was systematic and inbuilt: men’s wages were family wages. Post-war austerity and political conservatism, including the withdrawal of childcare provision, had worked to drive women out of the waged economy and back into the home, where they were unprotected from abuse and violence. ⁵⁶ Replace ‘Sudan’ with ‘Great Britain’ in the extract below, and Manning could easily have been talking about the UK, where women were ‘hobbled’ by social mores and political beliefs:

We want them to understand that we believe that no country can move forward quicker than the pace at which its women move forward and that one cannot have a country which is half free and half hobbled – and these women certainly are hobbled in every way in their move forward into freedom. Once the men of the Sudan understood it, how much more quickly they would move forward to the intelligent and enlightened ways which most of them really desire.

The model of civilisation that Manning invokes is very much in keeping with that pedalled by the suffrage campaign decades earlier, in which it was argued that ‘true modernity could not be achieved without women’s political equality’. ⁵⁷ Articulations about female equality and its relationship to civilisation are assertions not just for full inclusion in the nation-state, but in this context also about the composition of Whiteness: the subtext claims a status for White women as more akin to White men than to Black women. In many ways, the discursive constructions used by the suffrage movement had more success than the material reality: by 1949, the notion of moral respectability and sensitivity as a defining aspect of civilised people was so embedded that it was evoked by men as well as women, as was the claim that sexual equality was the mark of civilisation. Furthermore, the topic of FC had been made sufficiently legitimate that it could have its own scheduled debate, although what it actually entailed still could not be described.

Knighted in 1945, Basil Neven-Spence had previously served in Sudan with the Royal Medical Corps and worked as a British Army specialist physician before entering politics. His speech below followed a five-year search by Elaine Hills-Young, matron of the Midwife Training College in Khartoum, for a politician who would raise the topic in the House and much of it was lifted from her 1944 report subtitled the ‘Surgical Seal of Chastity’: ⁵⁸

The Elder Pliny coined the phrase ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’; in other words, ‘The dark Continent is full of surprises.’ But I hardly think that ‘surprise’ is the correct word to describe the reaction of hon. Members when they read the memorandum, recently circulated, which was written by Miss Hills-Young. They were not only surprised; they were without exception horrified and revolted to learn that practically 100 per cent of the girls in the Northern and Central Sudan are subjected to this form of mutilation in its most brutal form between the tender ages of four and ten, and that in many cases the operation is performed with a primitive instrument without any antiseptic precautions and without an anaesthetic, in the presence of a crowd of women who drown the child’s shrieks with their babbling and ululating, and at the same time there is a background of noise from tomtoms and empty kerosene tins. ⁵⁹

Hills-Young had been appointed matron on the retirement of the Misses Wolff, who, said Neven-Spence referencing Kipling, had ‘laid down the burden’ of civilising the natives. Hills-Young and her fellow ‘crusader’ (to use her own words), Ina Beasley, in charge of girls’ education in Sudan, sought to instil ‘Western notions of selfhood’ in Sudanese women. ⁶⁰ Specifically selected for the role by British politicians for her strong views on the moral backwardness of native culture, she taught trainee midwifes that civilised women were ‘chaste through moral force and not through any bodily painful one’. ⁶¹

In the extract above, Neven-Spence employs a very similar juxtaposition to that seen in Atholl’s speech, in which the named and respectfully titled Miss Hills-Young, who expresses herself through writing memoranda, stands in contrast to the ‘crowd of women’ who express themselves through ‘babbling and ululating’ and hitting ‘tomtoms and empty kerosene tins’. As with Victorian-era missionaries, midwives were not held in high esteem at this time. Their status was tainted by their work with that unmentionable obscenity: female sexuality. In the colonies, midwives held an even more ambiguous status, operating in the liminal space between the society of White gentlemen colonisers and Black female natives. ⁶² In these colonial narratives, the status of ‘civilising women’ (missionaries and midwives) are elevated through unequivocal inclusion as one of us. The distance between us (or the intended hearers, i.e. parliamentarians) and these women is reduced by emphasising their respectability; and the distance between these women/us and the inarticulate ‘natives’ is increased, thereby (re)producing Whiteness as defined by respectability, modernity and articulacy. A further dimension to these levels of articulacy is provided by the speaker himself who opens his prepared speech by quoting ‘The Elder Pliny’ in Latin, thereby performing his upper-class and elite status.

Articulacy thus becomes a key mode of differentiation between us and them, of which at least four layers can be seen. Although vocal, they – who are all female – are inarticulate. They whistle, babble, ululate and bang things. Unlike us (who are ladies = White, virtuous, noble women), they do not vote or stand for office. Outside parliament, ‘ladies’ articulate themselves through respected and scientific means: they write memoranda, take photographs and compile reports. In the House, we articulate our points of view through well-crafted speeches and polite dissent. And in a further manifestation, men grandstanded in these debates in a way that the female politicians did not, not only through being articulate but by performing articulacy through coded and elitist language designed to draw attention to the speaker and seamlessly confirm his membership of the elite, private-school educated, governing class.

FC itself, however, remained unarticulated. To describe it explicitly would have been an obscenity and as such would impugn the class status and respectability of both speaker and audience. This ultimately led to the failure of the campaign. ⁶³ The debate engendered by FC, however, provided an opportunity for the principle of (White) sexual equality to be firmly cemented with notions of progress and civilisation.

The characters of The Mutilation Narrative

Three distinct stock characters emerge through the debates on FC in the colonial period and they are all female. The first is what Propp terms ‘the sought-for person’, the character around whom the plot revolves. ⁶⁴ In western fairy tales, this is often a princess and always a virtuous maiden (e.g. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, etc.). The second is the villain, typically a witch or wicked stepmother. ⁶⁵ The third is the helper or dispatcher; as fairy godmother she may dispense magical gifts at opportune moments or be the means by which the news of the princess’s plight is conveyed to the hero. ⁶⁶ These characters take shape in relation to each other and within a moral framework in which the forces of darkness and atavism battle with those of enlightenment, progress and modernity.

The princess

At the crux of the narrative is the figure of the sought-for person, the uncircumcised female child. She is the least well-drawn of the characters, for little more is required of her than to represent sexual innocence. The quintessential victim, she has no voice and is attributed no agency, or even personality. In fact, she needs no further elaboration as a character because she is merely symbolic: she is the battleground. In quest narratives the sought-for person is not a person at all but an object, often the means of gaining/holding power (e.g. the ring in The Lord of the Rings, the fleece in The Golden Fleece), and the uncircumcised female children in The Mutilation Narrative should be thought of in similar terms: the battle is for their hearts and minds, as well as their bodies. In Kenya, this discursive construction led directly to the ‘nationalization of the female body’, ⁶⁷ when FC became the focal point for independence from British colonial rule.

Being a wife and mother defined womanhood for these colonial-era parliamentarians and objections to FC were premised on its implications for reproduction – which was of economic concern to the colonial authorities. Despite the fact that women in the colonies were routinely reproducing, FC was understood to foreclose pregnancy; western knowledge of anatomy and sexual intercourse rendered it unbelievable that a circumcised woman could successfully reproduce. ⁶⁸ This construction had a direct impact on policy: procedures that were believed to impair childbirth such as infibulation were actively discouraged and/or made unlawful, while those that only removed the clitoris were actively encouraged as a viable alternative. ⁶⁹ The loss of the clitoris was deemed irrelevant as that did not change nature and left women as women. This was in part due to the exploitative drive of imperial economics, in part because of prevailing Christian notions of womanhood, but also the social impossibility of articulating what FC actually involved was relevant too.

Aihwa Ong ⁷⁰ observed that western feminism constructs non-western women as ‘women in development’, but those who were deemed mutilated were considered unrecoverable, lost forever to the forces of ‘dark atavism’, remade in the image of the old women who mutilated them, and doomed to become mutilators themselves. As Neven-Spence put it: ‘henceforth she is not merely handicapped, and often disastrously so, as a wife and as a mother, but her entire being undergoes a most profound alteration which lasts for the rest of her days’. In Kenya, girls who had been circumcised were banned from missionary schools, ostensibly with the aim of encouraging parents not to opt for circumcision, but also reflecting the belief that once circumcised, the girl could not then be ‘civilised’. ⁷¹ What Ann Stoler ⁷² has termed ‘carnal knowledge’ becomes – as it has been so often in colonial history – the marker of alterity. In colonial parliamentary discourse, rescuing little girls from FC was not simply about preventing pain and suffering; but about saving them from their Blackness and from their culture.

The witch

According to Ina Beasley, who was employed in the British Sudan Service as Superintendent and then Controller of girls’ education from 1939 to 1949, ‘posters illustrating the shadow of the old hag, Superstition, being driven away from little girls by the lovely maiden, Enlightenment, were the most successful’ campaign propaganda against FC. ⁷³ The role of the villain in The Mutilation Narrative is the ‘old hag’ of superstition, whether represented by Agnes Brown’s ‘witch-doctors’, Atholl’s generic ‘old women of the tribe’ or Neven-Spence’s ‘grandmothers and so-called wise women in the villages’. Her actual age matters little; she is metaphorically old, pre-modern, a dinosaur. Old women became firmly established as the source and representation of evil in European texts during the Enlightenment, when the Grimm brothers provided a written standardisation of European fairy tales for the purpose of socialising children. ⁷⁴ Whether she is a witch, a wicked stepmother or a bad fairy, old women are the purveyors of a tainted knowledge, who typically seek to hold back the righteous march of progress and modernity by harming young girls through sexual initiation. Diametrically opposed to western conceptions of the ideal woman/mother, they nurture only in order to nourish themselves. ⁷⁵

In the UK and its colonies, governance was a masculine affair and the nature of gender relations in Muslim colonies in particular meant that British officials were unlikely to meet native women. For government officials, native women’s behaviour was ‘opaque, inscrutable, [and] more barbaric than those of . . . men’. ⁷⁶ A medical department circular of 1924 stated that the ‘old women’ were the ‘main obstacles’ to the abolition of FC because they ‘want others to suffer as they did’ and are ‘ignorant, obstinate, brutal, and are quite capable of stirring up trouble’. ⁷⁷ Similarly, Neven-Spence claimed that ‘little or nothing can be done about the grandmothers and so-called wise women in the villages, because they have got a very strong vested interest indeed in seeing that this practice is continued’. The imagery of ‘so-called wise women’ who are ‘stirring up trouble’ references the European folkloric witch, mixing her cauldron and casting spells with her tainted wisdom, as does Agnes Brown’s repeated use of the term ‘witch-doctor’.

It is of note that this gendered reading of the villain was not often evoked by the ‘civilising women’ who actually met and interacted with natives of both sexes. In Sudan, the Wolffs, Hills-Young and others including Constance Huddleston, then wife of Governor-General Huddleston (1940–47) who would go on to marry Neven-Spence, were all of the opinion that men played a central and direct role in FC – paying cutters for their services, driving the market through spousal choice and directing the degree of re-infibulation post-partum. ⁷⁸ But the governing men were unpersuaded. For them, native men were akin to the father of the princess in the European fairy tale: ‘supremely passive or positively negligent’ but nonetheless ‘benevolent personages’. ⁷⁹ They knew that the educated ‘Mohammedan men’ with whom they had formal social relations were civilisable, if somewhat weak in their ability to control their womenfolk. ⁸⁰ And it was accepted knowledge that the mark of a civilised society was how it treated its women.

The fairy godmothers

The White professional ‘civilising women’ in these narratives are Propp’s enablers, agents of change whose magic mitigates harm done (like the good fairy in Sleeping Beauty), whose morals and values educate the sought-for person (like the seven dwarfs in Snow White), and who act as messengers to bring the frightened cries of the damsel-in-distress to the attention of the hero.

The fairy godmothers in this narrative are in many ways a disparate bunch ranging as they do from one of the most noble in the Empire (the Duchess of Atholl) to lowly, socially marginalised missionaries and midwives. But this is what makes these articulations of womanhood and Whiteness so significant: in these debates which took place in the master’s house, class boundaries between White women are overlooked and obscured: all become ladies through their Whiteness, and Whiteness itself is thus re-articulated in racialised and class-based terms. Through emphasising the distance between White women and non-White women, the colonial narrative privileges Whiteness as a common bond over class and sex or gender.

Impact and legacy

Atholl, Rathbone, Manning, Hills-Young and Beasley were complicated people and make for complicated heroines of the feminist movement. The three politicians shared many similarities: all were childless, economically privileged and driven by deeply held Christian moral convictions, leading them to operate without any obvious regard for their own career in Westminster. ⁸¹ All three shared a lifelong commitment to the advocacy of women and children’s rights, but they came from three different political standpoints. Whilst Rathbone openly embraced feminism, Atholl and Manning were more ambivalent. Hills-Young and Beasley came from less financially secure backgrounds, but were similarly driven by Christian beliefs. These women brought a taboo topic into the realm of political discourse and challenged British patriarchal ignorance, but they did so by using the master’s tools. In relying on notions pertaining to Whiteness as manifested in modernity, respectability and (claimed) equality between the sexes, they reproduced and reiterated the racist ideology that underpinned colonialism. But it was through this (re)articulation of gendered and racialised binaries that they gained ground for (White) women in the UK. The Mutilation Narrative as constructed in these debates is not simply a standpoint ‘dominated by western paradigms’ which masquerade as universal, ⁸² but a means through which White western women sought to cement their tentative acceptance as autonomous liberal political subjects in their own right.

White women’s gain, however, was at the expense of the non-White women who were Othered in the discourse. Colonial government responses to the campaign to abolish FC involved divesting colonised women of their social standing. The most concrete example of this was in Meru, Kenya where, in the 1930s, co-opting the all-male Local Native Council to act as proxy, colonial authorities began enforcing pre-pubescent circumcision among a group that practised FC on adults as part of pre-nuptial ceremonies. ⁸³ Adult circumcision ceremonies removed labourers from the workforce for extended periods and women who became pregnant prior to being circumcised often had abortions, which the colonial authorities believed were responsible for increased infertility. Adult women had been responsible for the lengthy female initiation ceremonies and education that accompanied it, but these ‘government’ circumcisions were undertaken expeditiously by policemen at mass forced gatherings. ⁸⁴ In Sudan, meanwhile, the approved clitoral circumcision became known as ‘government sunna’, ideally to be undertaken by midwives trained by the Misses Wolff. ⁸⁵

The legacy of the colonial discourse on ‘FGM’ remains highly relevant today. In the UK, it lingers on in discriminatory legislation which prohibits ‘FGM’ for women as well as girls, but permits the equivalent cosmetic genital surgery for (White) women and girls. ⁸⁶ Meanwhile, the three characters outlined above continue to dominate global campaign literature, with non-White women receiving the brunt of the stigmatising and criminalising policy measures aimed at preventing and reducing FC. ⁸⁷