Abstract
In her account of the politics of excision in Mali, Claudie Gosselin (2000: 52) comments that ‘male novelists and film-makers were among the first to bring excision into public debate in West Africa’. Following that the renowned African film-maker Ousmane Sembene entered the debate with his 2004 film, Moolaade. This film, set in an unspecified West African village and first screened in Burkina Faso, depicts the successful attempt of a group of girls to not be purified, that is excised,2 by asking a senior woman in the village to protect them. This woman, who has lost several pregnancies because of complications arising from her own cutting and whose daughter is not cut, invokes the moolaade (literally, protection) to prevent both the women practitioners and the girls’ mothers from removing them from her compound. Her own daughter is a bilakoro (literally, uncircumcised) and is betrothed to the son of the village headman. This man, who returns from his education in France, to marry her is then forbidden by his father to do so because she is a bilakoro. That this would not have been known before the marriage was agreed is inconceivable. Everyone in the village would have known that this girl had not been circumcised. We can, therefore, read it as a device through which Sembene asks how changes in culture enter the cultural imaginary and change practices.
One must buy maturity with pain.1
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Filmography
Sembene, O. (2004) Moolaade, Direction de la Cinematographie Nationale (Burkina Faso), Centre Cinematographie Marocain (Morocco), Cinetelefilms (Tunisia), Les Films de la Terre Africaine (Cameroon).
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© 2012 Karen Wells
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Wells, K. (2012). Making Gender and Generation: Between the Local and the Global in Africa. In: Imoh, A.TD., Ame, R. (eds) Childhoods at the Intersection of the Local and the Global. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283344_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283344_8
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