Bernadette Loloju: The FGM survivor now leading fight against the vice

Bernadette Loloju recalls vividly that evening when a retired nurse known to her family arrived at their homestead to perform the then widely acceptable culture, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Loloju explains that her father was a teacher and he took her and her sisters to a boarding school to save them from early marriage, which is common in their village of Rombo in Loitoktok, Kajiado County.

“Our parents wanted to make sure we are not affected by everything that was happening in the village. In our tradition, the moment you give birth to a daughter she is booked from the day she born; she has a husband and a mother in-law, ready to be taken,” explains Loloju.

The anti-FGM champion says even though she was safe from child marriage, she wasn’t safe from the cut.

During the August school holiday of 1988, a few months before she was to proceed to secondary school, her grandmother reached out to a retired nurse who was then known by many as ‘Cucu’ to come and fulfill the right of passage to Loloju.

Loloju faced the knife at the age of 13, thanks to her grandmother’s and aunties who believed that a girl could not get a suitor without undergoing the cut.

“Our grandmother made us believe that that was the right thing for us, and when you are growing up you only know the elders are right, she didn’t know anything about getting a degree,” she narrates.

According to Loloju the retired nurse came to their home with all the necessary paraphernalia including a pair of scissors and syringes which were slightly longer compared to what is being used nowadays. She boiled the syringes using her mum’s sufuria.

“When she started boiling the syringes, I developed cold feet but according to tradition you are not supposed to cry, you have to be a courageous girl, we were lined up outside our mum’s mud hut for other women to see us,” recalls Loloju.

The healing journey took a few weeks, she was happy that she was a ‘full woman’, but she was fighting thoughts of whether to get married or go back to school.

A determined Loloju secured a Form One slot at Alliance Girls’ High School, which enabled her to set foot in the country’s capital city for the first time; she was met with culture shock.

Her four-year stay at Alliance changed her view on FGM and she realized that it was actually a human rights violation, hence swore to change her community by fighting the tradition.

“I found other girls and I wondered why they weren’t talking about FGM, when I spoke about it, I looked like I was from an unknown bush,” she says.

She now has a Master’s degree in Global Community Development from Southern Adventist University, Tennessee, USA and a degree in Community Development from Daystar University; through her efforts, she has saved many girls from FGM and child marriage.

As a survivor of FGM, she feels that it is possible for every girl in the world to be safe, so long as communities are fully engaged in the process of bringing the cut to an end.

The Kenya Demographic Health Survey 2022 report showed a decline of FGM cases from 38 per cent in 1998 to 15 per cent, and that 14 per cent of girls aged 0-14 and 17 per cent of women aged 15-49 were circumcised by a medical professional (doctor, nurse or midwife).

Now, as the Chair of the Anti-FGM board, Loloju has a dream of living in a world free from the vice by 2030.