Anka Fo "Ante" (Let's Decide To Say "No")  by Kandia Kouyaté

(View just the lyrics in English to the song)

When the dance troupe was practicing for the music video of the song "We Can Say 'No!'", Healthy Tomorrow director Susan McLucas asked them to look scared and cry. She showed them how she would think she would feel, and started crying. The girls laughed at the white lady who cried real tears, thinking about female genital cutting. Then one of them started crying and one by one, they all started crying and, when it was time to do the next part of the video, they couldn't stop crying.

For the video, the girls were lined up on a bench in a traditional courtyard in Bamako, Mali, with tears streaming down their faces. Fear was in their eyes as they waited to be "excised" or genitally mutilated by the old woman near the bathroom. As the first one was taken, she cried out for her parents and struggled against the women who were dragging her toward the exciser.

The girls were helping film this music video to be used to convince Malians to give up the age-old practice of female genital mutilation. All but one of them had undergone the painful ritual and remembered all too well what it was like being held down by women in the family and having their clitoris, and maybe little lips, cut off, without anesthesia. They were working now to keep other girls from undergoing the same ordeal.

The video has come out on Malian TV and will be shown again, along with other videos from the same album.

One year earlier, in that same household, a little girl would get hysterical every time she went near the bathroom. She had been excised, or genitally mutilated, there a week before and still felt the terrible pain every time she urinated. She was the little sister of a friend of Susan McLucas.

The friend, Zana, had tried to stop the practice in his household, but his father told him that he'd have to leave the family if he kept talking like that. His sister hasn't been the same since. The father has now died and the others in the family are mobilized in our struggle.

View the video (best viewed with high-speed connection).