By Gideon Nma Scott, Jr.
A group of women, most of them young girls with few older ones are dancing to the beat of a traditional song sang in the Vai language. The lead dancer is an elderly woman believed to be in her late sixty. Despite her age, her legs are moving to the rhythm of the music as she twists her little wrist from one side to the other. Her feet are as swift as those of the young girls in the group as she displays her excellence in dancing. All other heads and legs including mine are moving according to the beat of the drum as the dancers, Zoes and five young teenage girls dressed in country cloths and marked with brown and white earth on their bodies move around the village. The girls are graduating from the Sande Society or Zoe Bush as many would call it. They have stayed in the bush for several months and the Zoes are proud to present them to their parents and community after completing the curriculum of their traditional school.
The Sande Society or Zoe Bush is a traditional bush school for indigenous women found in north, central and southwestern Liberia. In the Sande Society, girls are initiated into adulthood. They bestow on them the notions of morality, proper sexual attitude, and encourage them to maintain an interest in the well-being of fellow members throughout their lives.
Anthropologists say the Sande society originated from the Golas and spread to the Mende and Vai tribes in western Liberia. Other ethnic groups in southwestern and some parts of southeastern Liberia inherited Sande society in the late 1700s through intermarriages, farming and migration. Today this social institution is found among the northern and southwestern tribes of Liberia including Bassa, Gola, Kissi, Kpelle, Loma, Mano and Vai.
All of the Sandes have some basic feature in common such as group initiation in an isolated area of the forest; the use of Sande society names at birth following initiation; respect for older people most especially those of the Sande; a pledge to keep sacred the secret of the Sande in the presence of men and uninitiated girls; and the female genital mutilation performed by a chief zoe or traditional midwives who are members of the society.
Teenage girls are initiated as a group during the post-harvest period in the dry season. They are taken to a distinct area in the forest where the actual initiation takes place. The initiation period varies from several weeks to several months, depending upon such factors as the initiate’s age, lineage membership, school attendance, and ethnicity. In the past, the girls are said to have remained in the forest up to one year, during which time they made rice farms for the Sande leadership. In addition, the initiate’s parents or would be husband paid a substantial amount to the leaders of the zoe bush as initiation fees. The girls were not allowed to have husbands before initiation.
During the initiation, an initiate goes through a unique experience in which her clitoris and parts of her female organ are removed. It is a woman, the Zoe or head of a localized society, who usually performs this surgery. “Those who perform such act are typically elderly women in the community designated for the task or traditional birth attendants,” a Ministry of Gender report revealed.
A Mende woman in Tubmanburg said the removal of the clitoris helps women to become prolific bearers of children. Information also has it that the removal of the clitoris makes the woman clean. According to medical reports, many women who survive the “surgery” experience life-long complications. In some Sandes, not only is the genital removed, the student is marked so that large scars remain on the skin of the initiate for life.
After their wounds have healed, the girls are instructed in domestic skills, farming, sexual matters, dancing, and traditional medicine. Specialized skills such as tie and dying may be taught to girls who demonstrate special aptitude or, according to some sources, to girls from high-ranking landowning families. But at least one anthropologist suggested that the girls “learn little more than they already knew before they entered the bush or than they would learn at that stage of their lives if they did not become secret society members,” claiming that said training is more symbolic than useful, for the essential lessons learned are deferent to authority and an absolute respect for secrecy. He later argued that emphasis is not on learning new skills so much as on learning new attitudes toward their work. “Instead of playing the role of a daughter, they begin to anticipate the role of wife who must work cooperatively with her co-wives and her husband’s female kin,” he added.
Meanwhile, the shared experience of a lengthy stay in the forest and the risk of the surgery bind the girls together as a cohesive social group. Except for the little pain they go through during initiation, the students enjoy a lot of pleasure and difficult experiences which encourage other girls to gladly go into the initiation grove. According to a myth, the girls are guided by their ancestors, who on occasions, speak to them and wish them well in their endeavor.
Food is plentiful since the initiation season occurs in the post-harvest dry season and each girl’s family is obliged to send large quantities of rather special food into the initiation grove on her behalf. There are also special Sande songs, dances and stories to be enjoyed around the evening fire. The stories usually end with an instructive moral linked to Sande laws given to the living by ancestresses of the secret society. At the conclusion of their initiation the girls are ritually “washed” and returned to the community as marriageable adults. They emerge from the forest dressed in their finest clothes, with new names signifying their newly achieved adult status and their façade in the Sande’s ritual hierarchy.
According to a source, the initiate’s moral transformation from child to adult occurs in three stages; novice, virgin, and bride.
Despite the accusation of many western international humanitarian and human rights organizations against the practice of the Sande, traditionalists still hold to their belief and practice. In Western Liberia, young girls are being initiated into the Sande cult (willingly or unwillingly). The government as well as International aid groups have described the female circumcision as barbaric and have accused the Sande society of practicing a “harmful tradition”. According to medical reports, over twenty percent of the initiates die from excessive bleeding after their clitoris have been removed.
A nurse in Robertsport said female genital mutilation comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia whether for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons. She observed that it causes extreme pain, excessive bleeding, temporarily incapacitating and permanently disfigures the female genitalia. She argued, “Risk of serious potentially life-threatening complications, including continuous bleeding, infection, urine retention, stress, and shock, long-term and even irreparable physical, physiological, sexual, and psychological effects such as psychosocial trauma, damage to urethra and anus.” She pointed out that victims may possibly loss genital sensation, sexual and erotic feelings.
“People have said all sorts of things against our cultural heritage which are not true. I am a member of the Sande and I’m proud of it. There is nothing harmful about the Sande,” says Madam Catherine Watson Khasu, former superintendent of Grand Cape Mount County. Madam Khasu called on government and human rights groups to respect the tradition and culture of indigenous people. “We know the war did a lot of damage to our country, but that does not mean we should desecrate our traditional shrines,” Madam Khasu pointed out.
*The thought of the son of a professional Kru woman.
