Molly Melching

Hillary

In March 1997, Chelsea and I visited a number of African countries, meeting with political and civic leaders in cities and villages to emphasize a message of respect and friendship on behalf of the United States. Our first stop was Senegal, the ancestral home of millions of black Americans who had been sold into slavery through Gorée Island off the coast of Dakar, the capital. At the small fort where slaves were held, leg irons and chains were still attached to the walls of musty cells. Innocent people, ripped from home and family and reduced to chattel, were herded through the Door of No Return at the back of the fort, dropped onto the beach, and loaded into boats to be rowed out to the anchored slave ships—all reminders of the human capacity for evil and of the original sin of the United States.

In the village of Saam Njaay, an hour and a half from Dakar, I saw a revolution in women’s lives and health in the making. Molly Melching, an American from Illinois, was our guide and teacher. Molly had come to Senegal to study French at the University of Dakar in 1974. After completing her studies, she stayed in Senegal and served in the Peace Corps, working with children. She published books, started a center to serve children who lived on the streets, and used songs and plays to educate young people about health.

In 1991, Molly created Tostan, a nonprofit organization committed to promoting democracy, community empowerment, and child development. Three years later, UNESCO chose Tostan as one of the world’s most innovative education programs. When Molly took Chelsea and me to Saam Njaay, we saw the organization in action. The word “tostan” translates from the Wolof language as “breakthrough,” and that’s exactly what started happening as women in Saam Njaay talked with each other and with Molly about their own power to fix injustices in their community.

Molly did not initially plan to take on the controversial practice of female genital cutting, but, as she recounts in the book written by Aimee Molloy about her work, However Long the Night: Molly Melching’s Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph, she changed her mind because of what she heard from girls—and because of her own daughter, Zoe. Molly was stunned when nine-year-old Zoe, who had been brought up in Senegal, asked her mother if she could be cut in the same way her Senegalese friends were going to be. Molly saw the powerful pull of tradition and peer pressure, explaining, “It was a very decisive moment in my own understanding of the power of female genital cutting, and I knew now what I had to do.” She added women’s rights and human rights to Tostan’s empowerment programs, including the sensitive issues of female genital cutting and child marriage.

As a result of Tostan’s work and, crucially, the local leaders who made its mission their own, women in Senegal began speaking up about the pain and terrible health effects—including death—they had seen or experienced because of female genital cutting. Tostan organized village-wide discussions, and one by one, villages started voting to end the practice. Imams and other male leaders joined the effort, traveling to neighboring villages, which followed suit. The movement’s leaders petitioned Senegal’s then president, Abdou Diouf, to outlaw the practice throughout the country. When I met the president and his wife, Elisabeth, I praised the grassroots movement and endorsed the call for legislation. Due to popular demand, Senegal passed a law banning female genital cutting, and more than eight thousand villages across eight nations in West Africa soon decided to stop practicing not only female genital cutting but also child marriage and forced marriage.

“If I feel we are moving forward respectfully and peacefully, I am never afraid, and will continue on with confidence and patience. But that for me is not courage—just determination and perseverance.”

—MOLLY MELCHING

Making good on those pledges has been difficult, since deeply engrained cultural traditions die hard. But the determination of imams, community leaders, elected officials, and models like Tostan’s that empower communities to drive the changes they want to see, has helped to free hundreds of thousands of girls from female genital cutting, as well as both boys and girls from forced marriages.