Africa: A Ritual Of Danger

When I was a girl of ten, I was told to be brave and not to cry, that I'd be a big girl after the ordeal. But when I saw the half-blind old woman with her razor, I bolted. My mother and aunts held me down and spread open my legs. Suddenly, I felt excruciating pain. She sliced off my clitoris and now it lay in her gnarled hands. She then sliced my inner lips until there was nothing left. There was blood everywhere, but by now I felt no more pain, not even when she stuck a thorn from the...