Bogaletch Gebre: Activist who defended Ethiopian women against female genital mutilation

Bogaletch Gebre nearly bled to death aged around 12 when, like almost all Ethiopian girls of her generation and before, she was subjected to the excruciating ritual now known as female genital mutilation.

A man restrained her while two women held her legs and a third wielded the razor. Her mother cried as Gebre was led away for the cutting ceremony. She would have liked to spare Boge, as Gebre was known, but saw no way to avoid the ordeal.

“Cleansing the dirt”, the local term for genital cutting, was treated across faiths in Ethiopia as a religious rite that rendered a young woman marriageable. Many victims died from blood loss, infection or subsequent complications.

Gebre, who had already defied expectations for Ethiopian girls in her village by secretly learning to read, went on to devote her life to ending female genital mutilation, as well as bridal abduction, domestic violence and other scourges that combined, she said, to make Ethiopian women “live in fear every day of their lives”.

She led change not with demonstrations or confrontation, but through what she described as community conversations facilitated by KMG Ethiopia, a nonprofit organisation she co-founded with her sister in 1997.

FGM continues to be performed in Ethiopia, but in the areas of the country where Gebre worked, there has been a decline: 3 per cent of villagers in 2008, down from 97 per cent in a survey eight years earlier, said they wished for their daughters to undergo FGM, according to figures cited in a 2010 Unicef study.

Gebre was unsure of her age, having never received a birth certificate, but at her death in Los Angeles was believed to be 65 or 66. She had lived in LA during and after graduate school and returned periodically to the city to receive treatment for nerve damage that she sustained in a car crash in 1987.

Gebre’s life took her from a farming village in central Ethiopia, where she stole away for schooling during long trips to collect water, to scientific studies at universities in Israel and the US, and back to Ethiopia, where she won respect for her work.

She was born in 1953, according to her organisation, in Zato, a village in the Kembatta district, southwest of the capital of Addis Ababa. Most of her 13 siblings died in childhood. Gebre was said to have been the first girl in her village to receive schooling beyond the fourth grade. With her hard-won literacy, she helped fellow villagers to read official documents that they otherwise would not have been able to decipher.

“As a sign of respect in Kembatta tradition, a father is called after his firstborn son, and a mother after her firstborn daughter,” Gebre told Ethiopian-American publication Tadias. “Imagine his surprise when my father’s peers started calling him ‘Father of Bogaletch’.”

She received a scholarship to enrol at a women’s boarding school in Addis Ababa, then studied the sciences at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She received a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and pursued further graduate studies in epidemiology at UCLA.

She traced her fervour for ending FGM to the death of a sister during childbirth to complications caused by FGM, which made it impossible for her to deliver her twins. “From that moment I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Gebre said. “My goal was: can I save one girl from that horror? It became the drive for what I started.”

She left California for Ethiopia and founded her organisation with another sister, Fikirte. The KMG of its name stands for Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma (Kembatta Women Standing Together).

Gebre won the cooperation of communities by first providing practical services, such as the construction of a bridge or well. Slowly, she began encouraging dialogue on such topics as education for girls, HIV/Aids, and the kidnapping of young women into marriage. During discussions of FGM, she showed videos of the procedure that left men physically ill.

“People in villages may be illiterate, but they are not stupid. They want what’s good for themselves and their children,” Gebre said, according to The Lancet.

Over the years, her organisation has worked to promote education and economic freedom for women, their participation in government and greater reproductive health.

“I began KMG Ethiopia thinking that if I could save a single girl from a dreadful life, from practices that numb, crush the spirit and rob women of their dignity, I would have done my life’s mission,” she once said. She added that the “breakthroughs” – the first abducted bride returned to her family, the first uncut young woman married in a public celebration – come “one girl at a time, one person at a time”.

Gebre was never married and had no children.

Bogaletch Gebre, anti-FGM activist, born 1953, died 2 November 2019

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