One picture that’s worth a thousand voices
In this day and age, isn’t it bad enough that the little girl was being operated on with crude, unsterilized tools, must she now be subjected to this inhuman method of being held between two dirty feet, her two arms held backwards by some ancient toes? Don’t get me wrong, this is not the first […]
In this day and age, isn’t it bad enough that the little girl was being operated on with crude, unsterilized tools, must she now be subjected to this inhuman method of being held between two dirty feet, her two arms held backwards by some ancient toes? Don’t get me wrong, this is not the first time I have seen traditional uvula removal being performed on new-born babies, but this is by far the crudest and least humane.
The very first time I witnessed such a ‘surgery’ I was a little girl myself and the theatre room was my family home’s zaure (traditional reception room outside the main house). One of my younger siblings was getting uvulectomy a few days before the traditional naming ceremony on the eight day. My Aunt was holding the baby, it might have been my brother Bashir or our last born Fati, I’m not sure now. But with the baby securely wrapped in a new wrapper my aunt held him or her at one end while the Dan Wanzam was at the other end.
The baby lay between them on my aunt’s laps. I recall being sent away from the ‘theatre room’ several times along with my friends in order not to distract the ‘surgeon’ but always making our way back because we found the scene magnetically attractive. The only thing to suggest a painful thing was going on was when the baby let out a loud scream. Remember that this was not being done with any kind of anaesthesia. But there was none of the crude savagery meted out to Baby X in the picture below.
My only consolation after viewing Baby X’s ordeal was that the traditional, twice a day infant bath will take care of the dirt she was subjected to, while a thunderous response from the NGO’s will make sure she is the last known victim of such inhuman and potentially unsafe practice. But to my great amazement, the incident was met with a deafening silence. Not a squeak from women NGOs, girl-child NGOs, health NGOs, First ladies NGOs and other related activists for health and humane causes. In fact not a tear was shed for Baby X, even after a full-page feature on the issue was done in the Daily Trust of Tuesday this week.
If the saying is ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’, I had expected Baby X’s picture to have raised a thousand voices, but none come. The health personnel spoken to in the feature said uvulectomy isn’t necessary because even people who had never had their uvula cut lead normal, healthy lives and I agree with them. For instance in my family, all my siblings and I had undergone this traditional surgery (albeit in the safety and comfort of our aunt’s laps) but not one of our children, numbering almost thirty now have had this done. And they are all leading normal, healthy productive lives, some of them already as adults with families of their own.
Dr. Fatima Daggash-Jinjiri, the eldest grandchild in my family, is probably in a position to perform surgeries now but she did not taste the DanWanzam’s knife. Nor did Abubakar Sadiq Sani, a Scottish-based Ph D student, who is the second grandchild. Ruqayya Nasir the family’s newest doctor and Zainab Daggash, the IT specialist as well as Fatiya Umar, the new-generation journalist, in addition to Muktar Sani, the family physicist all escaped the Dan Wanzam’s crude surgery, but they didn’t suffer the thousand and one illnesses he claims are all caused by an uncut uvula.
In last Tuesday’s feature, Dan Wanzam Malam Baba, pictured here with Baby X claims that an uncut uvula leads to cough and other respiratory ailments as well as laryngitis, stuttering and regular stomach upset. Well we never saw much of that in my family where the young generation have all been spared his native treatment. And this is the norm in most modern households from the early 1980s to date. The practice is only held dear in traditional households where the local barber is still the first port of call for infant-related ailments. But it is high-time the local populace are enlightened as to the dangers of this unsterilized surgery. That feature report says that it is still a very common practice among the ordinary folk in Kano. And Dr. Blessing Umenweze of the Abdullahi Wase Specialist hospital, Kano also corroborated this when she said that the paediatric outpatient unit of the hospital is full of children being treated for uvula-related infections.
In her own words ‘Though we have no record of the number of cases emanating from traditional uvula removal, the paediatric outpatient department has received cases of it and most are very severe. I have asked most of the mothers on why they did the Uvulectomy and most of the answers I got were just flimsy. I have been saying that there is no difference between removing the uvula and allowing it. The public should be enlightened on this. Uvulectomy predisposes infants to early infections, it does more harm than good to our babies.’
Now add to the doctor’s warning the very conditions on which the surgery is conducted and you’ve got a perfect recipe for disaster. The theatre room in Baby X’s case is by the road-side. The operating table was her zanen goyo, while the surgical assistants were Malam Baba’s two feet and ten toes, holding her tightly in place. Honestly, I had expected this picture to cause as much uproar among women activists as does the issue of female genital mutilation. Why was there a muted response to this? Does this picture really not compare to the horror of FGM, especially happening to raw infants who could easily die as a result?
It is my sincere hope that the relevant NGOs will take up the challenge of enlightening people against this uvula removal practice. It will be a disservice to Baby X and many others like her who do not need the surgery but are subjected to it anyway; with all its attendant hazards. And if it must be retained because some people absolutely subscribe to it, then let it be introduced in a safe and sterilised hospital environment, the same way circumcision has been made a hospital affair.