Words: Rachel Sharp

Multi-award-winning human rights activist, respected speaker, and devoted mother, Khadija Gbla knows the price a woman can pay for speaking up for the oppressed in her community. She and her son receive threats, and she has been ostracised by her entire family. She can’t even take him to cultural events celebrating her birth country Sierra Leone in her adopted city of Adelaide, for fear of violence.

But the courage, determination, and single-minded focus she has displayed since her youth, despite enduring a horrific mutilation in West Africa before her tenth birthday at the hands of stranger holding a rusty blade – have left her determined female genital mutilation (FGM) should be labelled child abuse, regardless of which country and culture a girl is born into.

Tragically, an estimated 200 million women and girls alive today have endured FGM, with at least 200,000 of those currently living in Australia, and 11 girls still at risk here every day. Khadija has spent her adult life fighting for an end to the barbaric practice, using her signature warmth, compassion, dignity, and sharp wit to educate countless audiences – from local schools to the Commonwealth Youth Forum and Harvard National Model United Nations. In 2011, she was named Young South Australian of the Year. Just two years later, Amnesty International labelled her a young human rights activist to watch. To call her a changemaker is a vast understatement. She is nothing short of phenomenal.

“My personal experience as both a survivor of female genital mutilation and as an African Australian woman gives me a clear direction,” Khadija says. Here, she also describes what it was like growing up between two cultures after arriving in Australia as a refugee at age 13, the reason FGM still happens, why she founded the Desert Flower Centre Australia – a branch of the internationally recognised Desert Flower Foundation established by supermodel Waris Dirie – and how she feels about being labelled heroic.

For those who don’t already know your story, can you describe your childhood in Sierra Leone and what happened to you when you were nine years old?

I didn't really have much of a childhood in Sierra Leone, because even though I was born there, by the time I was three, the war had broken, which made my family need to flee Sierra Leone as refugees. We were internally displaced for couple of years before we finally made it to Gambia, which is another neighbouring country in West Africa. It doesn't always feel like I had much of a childhood at all.

I'm raising my son now, and I think of his life now. That's not the life I had. No playground, no teddy bears. Just insecurity, feeling very unsafe, a sense of not knowing if we're going to live to see the next day, where food was going to come from. I lost my dad during the war, so I was raised by my mum, a single mum, with my sister. I didn't get my first teddy bear until I was 13 when I came to Australia. I didn't see my first playground until I came here. I lived on kerosene lamps, not electricity. That was my childhood.

What did you know about FGM at that point? Did you have any inkling that you might be subjected to it?

Nobody talked to me about FGM. I wasn't even aware of what it was. It's such a tight-lipped and taboo conversation and topic. One day my mum just came home and said she was taking us on a little holiday, which made no sense to me given we were refugees. We had never been on a holiday in our lives. But in my culture, the hierarchy is God and parents, and especially mums, so we did what she said and got into a car and drove for hours on end from the city to a very remote village in Gambia.

When we got there, this old lady came out to talk to my mum, and I remember being very scared of her. She went back inside her hut, then came out holding a rusty brown knife. At that point nine-year-old Khadija thought she was going to be slaughtered, because whey else do people have knives? I was dragged to a second hut, and [my mother] was taking my clothes off, and she pinned me to the floor. [The old lady] took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris, and she started cutting away and it felt like it went on forever. I passed out, woke up, passed out again, woke up, screaming for my mum to make it stop, but she didn’t. There was no conversation. I think only words my mum said later were ‘You're now a woman’.

I spent a week after that sitting in a tub of Dettol. To this day, I cannot stand the smell of it. There was no anesthesia, no numbing, nothing. It was just me, my flesh, my body, a rusty knife, and an old lady very intent on her mission of cutting away my clitoris and my labia minora, and a mum intent on keeping me down while I struggled. She paid this woman money to do this to me. Around the world it’s known as female genital mutilation, but in my community, where my mum is from, it's known as female circumcision – but it’s very different to male circumcision.

You’re a mum yourself now. What do you think was your own mother’s rationale for subjecting you to this nightmare?

She didn't do it out of hate. I think I need to be clear on that. If anything, she did out of a misguided sense of love and understanding that in that cultural context her daughters needed to have this act done, like it had been done to her, so they could be clean and pure and marriageable and belong.

This was the cultural norm. More than 90 percent of the women in Sierra leone have had FGM. To have a clitoris is outside the norm. None of this makes it okay, but that’s the place she came from. Obviously, with my work, I'm trying to make it stop, but I think that is important to understand the patriarchy … and the cultural norms used to control and subjugate women. Women who have said no [to FGM] have been ostracised, threatened to be killed, and their daughters are not marriageable. There are consequences. These women, like my mum, became the agents of something that has no benefit to women but has been sold as the necessary cultural norm to be carried out generation after generation, to the point where we have 200 million women and girls all over the world who have been subjected to this. Two hundred thousand of them are in Australia. Now, if I said to you, ‘we're cutting off the whole penises of little boys,’ we would never have got to two boys, let alone 200 million!

When did you start to fully understand what had happened to you, and how did that realisation affect you?

When I went to high school and started doing health education, some things were not fitting in for me. Not just around FGM, around all sort of things, like anatomy. I sat in these classes where they talked about the clitoris, which I still had no awareness of. Then I started reading Dolly and Girlfriend magazines, which back in the day were like bibles [for sex education] for us all with their sealed sections. Every teenaged girl had one in her bag. But when I looked at those magazines, I felt different, not just in [terms of the] lack of diversity in pictures, but body parts and the clitoris, which I finally realised once my memory came back was the thing that had been cut from me. Suddenly, I was being told by the world I was different. Something useful and meaningful had been taken away from me, something really at the center of womanhood. It is a painful thought to this day, but when you're a child, it's even harder.

I had to go through this rollercoaster by myself. I went to see my family therapist, but she’d never heard of FGM, so I had to sit there educating the poor woman, when I was the one looking for help. It wasn’t my African side and Australian sides that were polarised at that point. It was that I was a girl, and it wouldn't have mattered where I was in the world. These ideas that I should not have body autonomy, that I needed to be kept pure and clean, and that marriage was the Holy Grail achievement, they happen in Australia, too. Look at the Women’s Marches that happened here earlier this year – they're part of the same spectrum, and no matter a woman's colour, race, sexuality, class, whether she wears a hijab, whether she's in a bikini, whether she's in Africa, she's in Australia, in the UK - we are all being subjected to one evil: patriarchy, and its child sexism.

You talk of looking your mother in the eye saying, ‘This ends in my generation’. How did you find the courage to do that?

FGM goes all the way back to the Egyptian time. It predates Islam and Christianity, so to stand there as a little child in my mama's house – the woman who fed me and clothed me, paid the bills, and culturally I was never supposed to [disobey] – and say, ‘This ends with me’, was powerful. I was speaking power and truth in that moment. She had been a victim too, also my grandmother, but both didn't feel they could challenge it.

Somebody has to say, ‘This ends with me’ and I was that trembling child who said it – but out of [my mother’s] reach so [she] could not smack me in the face as I said it, because I’m not stupid. Twenty years later, I still stand on that promise to her. It ends with me in my family, and no other little girl born into this family will be subjected to this. I'm watching all these adults in my life, not just around FGM, but any form of child abuse. I'm watching for it and they’re on notice.

Since making that promise, you’ve prompted incredible education and change, and co-founded the Desert Flower Centre Australia in Adelaide, which offers psychological and physical treatments, including reconstructive surgery for victims of FGM, as well as workshops and educational programs for communities, medical staff and even aid workers. What inspired you to bring this to life?

Desert Flower was born from my frustration in not getting medical care as a survivor of FGM in Australia. When I was pregnant, I was so scared that my baby would be hurt because I saw incompetence in a medical field that did not care about FGM, had not educated itself about FGM, and didn't know how to provide care for women like me. Every step of the way, I was fighting to advocate for myself.

In my TED Talk, I mention how I wasn't asked about FGM in my antenatal appointment, and when I did mention it, there was panic because it made it a high-risk pregnancy. The doctor wouldn't even examine me to verify what type I have had so we could decide on which way I would have that baby to we weren’t at risk. If I had Type Three FGM, for example, where I'd been sewn up, how could I push any baby out? That is medical negligence. That is what racism looks like in the medical field. Refusing not to do something as simple as a two-minute inspection could be the difference between life and death. Today, working with medical professionals is my bread and butter. I never say no because the more information we give, the better. Then I realised women who want surgery to rectify some of the side effects of their FGM had to go all the way to Europe to get that treatment or surgery. If somebody has cancer, they don't have to go to overseas for surgery. They have it here, right in Australia.

You've received death threats against you and your son, yet you continue to speak up. You've said before that we all have the power to be heroic. What do you mean by that and what does heroic look like to you?

I'm not heroic. I take very seriously threats against my life, my work, my child, and I put protective measures in place to make sure that we are okay and safe. Too many people look at activists or people like me who are changemakers and assume we're just [fuelled by] passion and there're no negative downsides. But my work comes with downsides.

I take those threats very seriously and I adjust my life and that of my child. I don't post pictures of my son. That's a form of protection for him because I know people try to get to him to get to get to me. I'm in touch with the police when people send threats and I don't post beforehand when I'm going to be at events, because somebody might think of stalking me or want to come and do me harm.

We can't go to cultural events because of the threats, so I've had to raise him devoid of a cultural community. You know how heartbreaking that is? I don't have my family in my life because of the ostracisation they got. That was a huge cost. I have a mum, I have an auntie, I have cousins here, but no contact for years. It's just me and myself. My mum has never seen her grandson, wouldn't even know what he looks like if she saw him on the street. My son wouldn’t know his aunties and cousins if he saw them. It's just me and him. That's the cost of me taking a stand, and I don’t take any of the threats lightly. It’s important people realise this life isn’t glamorous, with all the awards and what they see on Instagram, and all the nice highlights. That’s just me having platforms to get my message out. My work is more the other side of things and choosing to remember every day why I do this. I remember lying there as a child and crying, wishing somebody would stop it and rescue me, so I choose to show up every day and be that person.

I love this saying, which I live by – all it takes for evil to continue is for people to do nothing. I choose to always challenge, to stick up, to stand, even when it comes at a cost, especially when it comes at a cost.

What do you consider your most unforgettable moment in campaigning for change?

Years ago, the first couple of workshops I did on FGM was with a group of African girls who thought that because they were in Australia, they would be safe. I told them they were still at risk and the words to watch out for. I said if their mothers or parents ever came home and said they were going to go for a special holiday, they were going to become a woman, there's going to be this big party to celebrate them, they needed to maybe ask a few more questions. When I did those first workshops, my voice was shaking, I wasn't sure those girls were hearing anything I was saying. And most times, that's what it feels like – like I'm talking to a vacuum. Sometimes people even mock me.

Years later though, I went to do a lecture on feminism, and a young African girl stood up and told me I’d saved her life. She said, ‘Years ago, I went to one of the workshops where you talked about FGM, and to be honest, I thought you were overreacting. But guess what? Years later, my mum came home and said we were going on a special holiday back home to Sierra Leone and that I was going to become a woman after this big celebration and holiday.’ And then it clicked in her head, so she went to her dad and said, ‘Dad, I think Mum wants to take me home for female circumcision,’ and he was shocked. They went on the holiday, but her dad made sure she was never left alone with her mum or her mother's family. Essentially, he made sure the mum would not kidnap her, which is very common, to take her to have FGM done to her.

She's now 28, she runs her own consultancy business – an amazing, beautiful, empowered, black woman, with her body intact. And in fact, she's been helping me with my work. We have gone full circle! But that was a rare moment. Generally, I will never meet these girls. I will never know how I helped. But those are lives changed. And what we know about FGM is that if you can break the circuit, if you change one girl's life, she will go on to make a different decision for her daughters. All because I made that choice to stand up to my mum and say, ‘No more!’.