Reflections from the Field: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony in Northern Sierra Leone

Three years after the official declaration of peace in Sierra Leone, people have finally relaxed and now try to reconfigure their lives in a very visibly war-torn surrounding. In this setting, the girl's initiation, dimusu biriye, becomes not only a ceremony of the making of women, or a social event, but an important post-war event reconfiguring social relations. Also, this event challenges the anthropologist on a more personal level regarding issues of womanhood, bodily integrity, and the position as outsider.

Kamadugu Sokorala village
Sengbe Chiefdom
Koinadugu District
Sierra Leone

January 9th, 2004.

Tears are running down my face. There is a full moon, and I am sitting quite close to the fire, but it is late, and I don't think anyone has noticed. For an instant, I become overwhelmed with feelings as the significance of the ritual hit me—to become a woman you have to undergo female circumcision. I am a woman and also a mother of two daughters, and I can't even conceive of putting my daughters through the physical mutilation of a genital circumcision. I am looking at some of the dances performed by the 58 neophyte girls soon to be initiated and circumcised in the village of Kamadugu Sokorala in northern Sierra Leone. However, I am also an anthropologist, and as I am looking around me at the faces of mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, I can see nothing but joy, happiness, and pride. These mothers do not hesitate for a second in putting their daughters through this, what I see as an ordeal. No, they are proud and enthusiastic. The girls also seem happy; they are the center of attention; they seem proud to share something with the older women, some secret separating them from their younger sisters.

Parents and kin have invested a lot of time and money in this ritual of initiation, the first one of any significance since before the war that started more than a decade ago. The planning started last year when wore (kola nut) was sent to relatives to let them know that next year, the village of Kamadugu Sokorala would host a big dimusu biriye. To host a dimusu biriye is a costly endeavor and has to be planned at least a year in advance. A rice farm has to be prepared to feed the girls and the guests, and the surplus sold to pay the musicians and the biriyelenu (the women who perform the circumcision). Pa Morowa, my friend and host while staying in the village, had planted many bags of seed rice last year, in preparation for the festivities and the seclusion of the girls in the biridela, the "society bush," but he was disappointed as almost the whole crop failed. As the organizer, host of the ritual, and father of five of the girls, he was in acute need of money, so he decided to go to one of his sons in the diamond area to ask for assistance. However, he found his son living in squalor, one of so many young men living from hand to mouth, hoping to one day find a big diamond and return to the village a big man. His son gave him a pair of jeans and money for the return trip.

In post war Sierra Leone, a staggering amount of young men leave their villages for the diamond areas. Meanwhile, in everyday life in these villages, their absence is notable, there are hardly any young men left, and their families pray for their return, dreaming of the material wealth their sons will soon bring. However, in most cases, these hopes and dreams are in vain. Poverty has made fathers rely on their sons; they tread the fine line between begging and demanding, trying not to lose authority with the knowledge that their control is at best symbolic.

Today, three years after the...