Release | Response to Threats of “Arrest” and “Deportation” by anti-FGM Activists

 

Release 

Gambian Women Are Free to Choose is publishing this press release – our fourth this year – to bring to the attention of the Gambian public, the Gambian authorities including the Ministry of Interior, as well as the ECOWAS Representative, Sierra Leone Embassy, U.S. Embassy, other diplomatic missions,

local and international NGOs, CSOs, and importantly Gambian and international journalists, recent threats against my person, Dr. Fuambai Sia Nyoko Ahmadu, Founder and Executive Director of Gambian Women are Free to Choose (GWAFC).

On July 15, 2024 at around 9am, myself, my personal assistant, Fuambai Jallow, and a colleague from Australia, were verbally harassed in full public view by anti-FGM activist, Ms. Jaha Dukureh, in front of the gates of the National Assembly. Ms. Dukureh was yelling at us and at the riot police guarding the gates instructing the latter to not let me in, screaming “she is not a Gambian, do not let her in, she doesn't belong here!”.

In the early morning on July 17th, 2024 while I was at Lungi International Airport in Sierra Leone, I received a phone call from the Gambian Immigration Office. The immigration official advised me that he had received several reports and complaints that I should be “arrested” and “deported” from The Gambia. I told him that I just left The Gambia the day before, having changed my return flight from the 13th to the 16th of July to Freetown in order to witness the important vote on the repeal of the female circumcision ban. I asked him whether I had broken any laws in The Gambia, and his response was that he was unaware of any criminal offence, that there were some complaints by private individuals that I was not a Gambian citizen.

To these “private” individuals or entities that reported me to the Gambian authorities, or rather questioned my right to speak in The Gambia on behalf of the majority of grassroots Gambian women and girls, I wish to emphasize the following five points:

1. The Gambia is my matrimonial home where I reside when I am there in my family compound in Nyambai, Brikama. The Gambia is the home, Kiang, the birthplace and Brikama, the resting place of my late husband, Major Ebrima Cambi (popularly known as Captain Cambi); it is the home of my stepchildren for whom I share responsibility; it is where I own land and property and conduct personal and family business.

2. I am a dual-citizen of Sierra Leone (through parentage) and the United States (my birthplace). Sierra Leone is a member of Ecowas and as a Sierra Leonean passport holder I am not required to have a visa to enter The Gambia, which is also an Ecowas member.

3. In 2016, I founded the community based organization Gambian Women Are Free to Choose, which is officially registered with the Ministry of Justice in accordance with the Companies Act of 2013. Our Constitution (which is posted openly on our website) and activities were approved by the Gambian Government and we were granted a legal Certificate of Registration #2018/C6041.

4. I am a globally recognized anthropologist and expert in my field and once served for several years as a senior consultant for UNICEF in The Gambia, advising on the compliance of Gambian laws and social policies with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the very issues that qualify me for my current advocacy work and led me to found GWAFC.

5. Lastly, as a U.S. born, bred, educated and proudly circumcised African woman descended from warrior kings and, yes, circumcision queens from the great Mali Empire, I chose to be a civil rights and global human rights activist working to ensure that affected women of my ancestral and religious heritage in the US and around the world understand our rights to equality and human dignity. 

I am focused now on grassroots women in Africa, the bulk of whom do not have formal western education and literacy, and therefore do not understand our legal, constitutional and human rights to equality in our own countries, and vis-à-vis Ecowas, the African Union, the UN, and the international human rights conventions to which The Gambia is a signatory. 

For these five reasons and many more, I want to assure all affected African and Muslim women and girls in The Gambia, the rest of Africa and other parts of the world that I will continue to do my work to the best of my academic and professional training and abilities, to advocate for our civil rights,

constitutional rights and human rights as circumcised African and Muslim women and girls in The Gambia and beyond. I will continue to equip my mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters, and daughters with the evidence based information on health, sexuality and gender, that is being suppressed from them by the “FGM Industrial Complex”.

 I will continue to use whatever means and travel wherever I need to go, to provide circumcised African women and girls with the historical, ethnographic, cultural and religious understandings for our bodily practices, and how these compare with genital practices globally or in other sociocultural contexts. Most important, I will continue to provide them with practical knowledge of the political tools and skills,

including effective community organization and mobilization as well as social media activism, to advocacy ate effectively and coordinate transnationally for our equality at the highest levels locally,

nationally and internationally. I want to reassure all affected Gambian women and girls who reject the term Female Genital Mutilation or FGM, that I will not be deterred by Jaha Dukureh or any other western financed anti-FGM activists. I will not be silenced by threats of “arrest” or “deportation” or any other desperate attempts by neocolonial western or African feminists to silence me and continue the oppression of circumcised

African or Muslim women like me who dare to uphold female circumcision as an integral part of our gender identity in accordance with our ancestral cultures or our religious beliefs. Gambian Women are Free to Choose is a community based organization that was formed in 2016 to

protect the fundamental human rights of women and girls in The Gambia to gender equality, religious freedom and cultural expression that are guaranteed under The 1997 Constitution of The Gambia.