Momodou Keita, a burly, middle-aged man with a mission, sketched out the day’s route in his notebook. Then he grabbed his backpack containing the flier with headshots of 30 women — all suspects — and hopped on his motorbike.
This would be a full day of detective work, and his first stop was the home of Oumie Bah, whose faded photo showed an elderly woman with her mouth set in a grim line. He’d made sure she didn’t know he was coming. The key to the job, he said, is surprise.
In this part of Gambia, Bah had earned a reputation as one of the main practitioners of female genital cutting. During one ceremony at her modest house, Bah said, she had cut 30 girls at one time. She had later promised to abandon the practice, which is illegal but still widespread in this West African nation. Keita’s job is making sure Bah remains good to her word.
It was Keita’s work that triggered the debate that had convulsed Gambia over the past year and attracted international attention to female genital cutting, which affects 75 percent of women and girls in Gambia and more than 200 million women and girls worldwide. For 15 years, Keita has worked for one of Gambia’s premier women’s rights groups, carrying out quarterly patrols monitoring women who had once been the region’s most active cutters, looking for clues of recidivism.
Over the years, Keita said, he had learned the secrets of successful sleuthing: Maintain a network of informants, and protect them.
Talk to the children. They are in the know and can be won over with sweets. Always check the bathroom, often the scene of the crime.
As Keita pulled into Bah’s compound shaded by a neem tree, he slowed his motorbike, kicking up dust as he parked just outside her door. He gave his horn a loud beep.
“Keita! Keita! Keita!” came Bah’s voice from inside.
He hopped off the motorbike and rushed through the door.
Call from an informant
It was a call from one of Keita’s most trusted informants in late 2022 that had launched a nearly year-long fight over female genital cutting in this nation of 2.5 million, including a bill in parliament to repeal Gambia’s ban on the practice. The bill, which would have been a global first, was thrown out by lawmakers in July but sparked fears about renewed tolerance for cutting, widely known as female genital mutilation (FGM).
Keita’s informant had whispered into the phone as she gave him the news: One of the women on his beat was planning to cut eight girls. It was December, a high-risk season when girls are out of school and often go back to their family’s villages. Keita drove directly to the scene.
“Let me tell you one thing,” Keita recalled saying to the woman, Yassin Fatty. “Don’t do it.”
Keita, 51, has a sense of purpose that can verge on hubris, sometimes declaring that he will personally end FGM in Gambia. But those who have known him for decades say he is sincere. He started volunteering with the Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (GAMCOTRAP) in 2007, horrified after learning of FGM cases that led to excessive bleeding and even death. He also started thinking about his private life and wishing that his wife, who had been cut as a girl, experienced more pleasure when they were intimate.
Keita, now the group’s regional coordinator, was with his family when the informant called again a month later: “Come now. It is happening.”
When he arrived, he could hear girls crying. A woman opened the door, and he barged in. One mother rushed out the back door, holding her daughter. Already, two girls had been cut, Keita said, recounting the episode.
“Forgive me,” Fatty said.
“You will face the law,” said Keita. He went directly to the police.
It took six months for the case to be tried in court, where Fatty and the girls’ mothers were found guilty of violating the law banning FGM and sentenced to one year in prison or a fine of about $215.
That’s when the news spread.
One of Gambia’s most prominent imams, Abdoulie Fatty, traveled to the women’s village to pay their fines and declared the FGM ban “a fight against Islam.”
“We want to tell them that anybody who blew the whistle on these women,” Abdoulie Fatty said, “we will curse them until we leave this world to ensure that Allah destroys them.”
(Contrary to Fatty’s preaching, many Muslim leaders have condemned FGM, which is rare in many Muslim-majority countries.)
Keita said he heard that people had begun cursing him with black magic. He stopped riding his motorbike at night, fearing attack.
Surprise inspection
After entering Bah’s two-bedroom home, Keita shook her hand, then quickly brushed past her, toward the curtains concealing the outside area used as a bathroom. He pushed them aside for a clearer view.
Bah, who put her age between 65 and 80, had been trained to cut girls when she was a teenager, by her grandmother. And it was in that bathroom area, surrounded by thatched-reed walls, where Bah had carried out the mass circumcision ceremony. It had been followed by a celebration that included dancing and a feast. The girls’ mothers paid Bah and brought her gifts of rice, oil and meat.
After deeming the outdoor bathroom all clear, Keita asked Bah whether anyone had been encouraging her to resume cutting. On the way to her home, he had passed two young men he’d earlier seen preaching at the local mosque, urging people to continue their traditions and practice FGM.
“No,” said Bah.
She insisted that she had refrained from cutting since 2013, after learning about its impacts — including infections, loss of pleasure and complications during childbirth — from Keita and Isatou Touray, GAMCOTRAP’s co-founder and Gambia’s former vice president. Bah and the other 29 women on Keita’s list, who had laid down their knives, had received the equivalent of $85 to start their own businesses to replace the money they’d made from cutting.
“We have in our minds that we will never do this again,” she said, “so we will not listen to anyone who tries to convince us otherwise.”
As he left, Keita said he believed Bah.
“But a human being can’t trust 100 percent,” he added, noting that he had trusted Yassin Fatty. She, too, had promised to abandon the practice and been compensated by the group, but then she was caught in the act.
“She betrayed me.”
Unrepentant
When a Washington Post journalist stopped by Yassin Fatty’s compound late last month, the old woman grabbed the visitor’s hand and led her to a bench in the courtyard. Fatty wanted to tell her side of the story.
It was true that she had cut the girls, she said, and that Keita had warned her not to.
But she said her family had been struggling and needed money. The bakery she had built with GAMCOTRAP’s money had long ago folded. Now, her eyesight was failing, and she found it difficult to walk on her own.
Fatty seemed confused about details. At one point, she said she had never stopped practicing FGM, but later said she had done it only once in the past decade, and that was the time when she was caught.
On one point, however, she was clear: “I felt this was tradition and something that was right.”
The missing suspect
After Keita pulled away from Bah’s house and continued on his rounds, there was a fleeting moment of alarm.
He drove up unannounced to Penda Camara’s yard and discovered she was missing. A young woman stared blankly when he asked where Camara was. He asked again.
She motioned toward the fields. Keita asked where exactly, barely waiting for a reply before setting off, his head swiveling.
“I don’t know if I believe it,” he muttered as he zigzagged through the millet field, fearing Camara had broken her word.
Then Camara, a petite 80-year-old, popped her head up. “Keita,” she exclaimed, slinging a hoe over her shoulder.
She promised him she had not returned to cutting and did not plan to. But she also said that she was having trouble making a living and that her husband was sick.
She asked Keita for more financial support. He agreed to let his group know. Keita told her he would be back.
Then he hopped on his motorbike, heading through peanut and corn fields, toward the next suspect.
The Washington Post
