I hesitate to see it as teleological that so many of our works on female genital cutting have the end of it in sight. Perhaps it is how we attract the readers who keep asking, in surprise, ‘Is that STILL going on?’ Perhaps our writings give them hope that their concern is having an effect, helping to bend behaviour toward a norm that feels more comfortable for the global North and for human rights activists and reformers everywhere.

So, we see words like Hodzic's ‘twilight’ of cutting. Or Melching's comforting wisdom from Senegalese elder, Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay, ‘However long the night, the sun will rise’ (Molloy, p. 111). There's hope that things will change and young girls will no longer have to face the fear and pain of cutting.

These three books address that desire for hope by describing concrete situations where activists conceive of change as possible, work on change, and see slow results. Why change is resisted is a key focus in all of these – what are the impediments, the treasured traditions, and the functional benefits that reinforce continuity? And since change is happening everywhere, can we identify actions or correlates that accelerate the process of change, perhaps ones that could be used by activists elsewhere? And in the most telling analysis, Hodzic focuses on the ‘problematisation’ that occurs as NGOs that have mobilised campaigns against cutting become their own sort of phenomenon, setting in motion additional sorts of opposition to change. Although the rates are declining, the practices are far from ended, and yet the search for momentum is evident in all of these studies.

Of the three books, the smoothest read – and most likely to be added to courses for undergraduates – is Aimee Molloy's However Long the Night, which is a portrait of Molly Melching and her work in Senegal. Based on Molloy's extensive visits and interviews with Melching in 2011–2012 (and with her daughter and a few others) and illustrated with family photos and pictures of her work and colleagues in Senegal, However Long is essentially Melching's biography, a compelling tale of a woman who fell in love with the people of Senegal and made her life there. Molloy finds the roots of Melching's character in her Midwestern heritage and wholesome Illinois upbringing under a strict mother. And from her arrival in Senegal as a graduate student in 1974 at the age of 24, we see Melching as a woman of uncommon perseverance, whose attachment to Senegal grew into a journey that Molloy reports with the vividness of autobiography. When the author recounts a formative incident in Melching's life, she describes the scene as if she herself was in earshot of Melching shouting out for help in the night, when a donkey nibbled her shelter, or in view of the students’ faces, responding to a new teaching technique. The dialogue is fresh, dispensing with any unnecessary framing, ‘as Melching remembered it’. The result is a compelling narration of Melching's move from her work in early childhood educational programmes into becoming one of the most well-known activists for ending female genital cutting in West Africa and beyond.

Like Tracy Kidder's biography of the well-known physician-anthropologist, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer (Reference Kidder2003), Molloy's However Long the Night is a heroic tale. Both titles apply indigenous wisdom to humanitarian commitments that are pursued over the long haul – the ‘quest’ and the ‘journey’ of the subtitles – that are the respective humanitarian missions of Farmer and Melching. Molloy's subtitle's phrase, ‘Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph’, hints at hagiography. But the book stops short of beatification, showing Melching as an admirable woman of modest humanity, endowed with devotion and energy. Repeatedly, Melching herself defers to the wisdom of elders, facilitates someone else's statements, or admires someone like Demba, who told others: ‘Even if you know what the answer is … you must let people discover it themselves … you know if you tell people to stop, they won't’ (p. 164). Melching's approach to change, it is clear, is one that requires persistence and hard work, yet embraces a critical pedagogy, akin to Freire's, that facilitates dialogue and does not impose solutions, that trusts that everyone wants to figure out how to do the right thing.

The book demonstrates another contribution of Melching's work. She challenged the narrowness of the anti-FGC approaches that had begun to take hold in many organisations – such as focusing on alternative incomes for traditional cutters or relying on community lectures using large plastic models of women's sexual organs (pp. 174–5). Instead, she advocated a broader initiative on education, health and well-being, encouraging women's engagement in community development. Such broad goals, she argued, would be a foundation for a more fruitful commitment to changing lives. In such contexts, communities themselves could initiate the movement to end cutting, which could lead to public declarations by whole communities when they were ready to quit the tradition. It turned out that such declarations were an exciting development, because they involve groups of people who influence one another and are often intermarrying groups. Communal declarations allowed individual families to avoid the risks of being criticised for violating social norms if they failed to cut their daughters and the risk of finding their daughters unmarriageable, because they knew that others would support their decision. Also, like others involved closely with the people affected by cutting practices, Melching knew to avoid the condemnatory terminologies that shut down dialogue, realising that judging or shocking people, or using words like ‘mutilation’ or ‘barbaric’, seldom result in change (p. 176). In the end, the reader is drawn to her softened, less judgemental outlook, understanding that Melching does not see herself as a hero, but as a grateful and inspired student of the human endeavour.

Miroslava Prazak's book is a deep ethnography, offering one of the most significant dives into a Kenyan situation where genital cutting practices remained vital – yet challenged – at the turn of the millennium. Her insights into the emotions, conflicting feelings and last-minute decisions about participating in the traditions as they are practiced in the south-western part of Kenya by the people known as Kuria, can only come from the experience of being there, knowing the insiders intimately, and putting in many years of engagement with the communities where she has worked. The analysis of genital cutting, for both boys and girls, is embedded in understanding the role of cutting in initiation. For both, initiation marks their passages to maturity and adult identities, and cutting is integral to it.

This is a rich ethnography that includes larger national and international legal and humanitarian contexts, historical perspective on Kenya and the Kuria people and their neighbours, vivid and intimate photography, poetry and songs, kinship diagrams, and many life stories. As an authoritative source, this is a valuable library addition, as Prazak uses all the proper terms, and she provides the names of each male and female circumcision set, going back to the early 20th century. (While reading, I would have appreciated occasional translations in parentheses rather than repeatedly having to look up Kuria words that hadn't been used for a while in the admittedly excellent glossary.)

It is a dynamic ethnography, and Prazak details not only the traditions and meanings of the past, but also the complexity of recent changes. Prazak's research participants are very aware of ‘pressure from NGOs and from developed countries’ – they've heard that the World Bank and the IMF want ending female circumcision to be a condition for loans, and that in the West it is considered a human rights issue. The participants were aware of bias generated when, for some people, ‘NGOs can pay them to talk against circumcision … they are making money out of that … They only talk about the bad side and say nothing of the good side’ (pp. 183–4). But it is not simply international pressures through NGOs that are contributing to the challenges. Prazak discusses the role of Christian churches in the challenges as well – such as Catholics Against Circumcision, a group that campaigns on the internet (p. 15). Churches and organisations have sponsored awareness work, cooperated with health officers and on prosecutions of violators of the laws, and provided rescue centres for girls who chose to run away from home in response to the pressure of circumcision season (pp. 237–8). In a quote from her participants, it was noted that even when some parents seek male circumcisions in clinics, as more hygienic, it is rooted in their being ‘influenced by Christianity’ (p. 182). Also, they saw that pressure from the church resulted in both boys and girls being operated on at much younger ages than before, even as young as 8: ‘People are preaching against esaaro [initiation], people are being awakened to do it, to undergo circumcision, before it is actually banned. So even younger children have to go’ (p. 182).

Prazak's portrayal of the many different perspectives and the internal debates is riveting. Will medicalisation, aimed at making the operations safer, merely perpetuate the practice (p. 15)? Will the promotion of male circumcision by recent anti-HIV initiatives confuse people who believe that such diseases are due to women, or will it reinforce that idea? Will it confuse people about the role of initiation (p. 15)? The headmaster of the school, who wished to be seen as a forward-looking leader, was influenced by the sensitisation seminars he attended to decide to move in the direction of abandonment. Yet he recognised that the role of initiation in giving the young people secure membership in their patrilineage and community was important – how could they be secure in their identity and rights without participation (p. 206)? Should anthropologists and indigenous activists be castigated for their paralysing cultural relativism in the face of change led by courageous leaders both within and from outside (p. 207)?

Prazak situates herself in a middle ground, ‘articulating grassroots views and experiences that reflect the spectrum of global discourse as it shapes understandings and local realities. What are suitable cultural substitutes for female genital cutting and who is to decide?’ (pp. 207–8). That question leads Prazak to listen to the many voices – of elders, youth (girls and boys) and parents, as well as activists, teachers and others. She reports massive changes in reported attitudes of youth – graphs of records of schoolgirls’ responses between 1988 to 2007, show declines in approval for female circumcision from 58% to 7%, and disapproval moving from 42% to 93%. And yet, not one of the young married women she interviewed who had dropped out of school for initiation and marriage expressed regret. ‘There are no real alternative trajectories available to young women in rural areas’ but to be initiated and married and start families (p. 222).

But despite such pressures and trends, this region of Kenya has demonstrated remarkable tenacity. Although Kenya has seen its estimated prevalence of circumcision for women and girls (ages 15–49) decline dramatically ‘from 32·2 percent in 2003 to 28·2 percent in 2008’ [and now 21%, UNICEF DHS 2014], the region of the Kuria was still at 96% in 2008 (p. 237). Prazak's Epilogue recounts violence during the 2014 initiation season: gunfire, attempted arrests of parents and initiates, and the torching of the office of the assistant chief who ordered the arrests. And yet there was a spike reported in the number of FGM cases in Kuria that month.

Prazak's book, in the end, is a report on this process of change, the local responses to two decades of pressure for changes that has resulted in deep social tensions. She ends with the thought that the ‘rising generations’ of young people may not end up participating in the genital cutting ceremonies of their elders, but may appreciate this book as a chronicle of the ‘social and cultural upheavals’ of these times (p. 235) – and yet, the goal of ending FGM is (and here she quotes an Action Aid programme officer) ‘a long way off for girls in Kuria’ (p. 238). Indeed, the teleology I wondered about at the beginning of this essay is voiced in Making the Mark, although there is much in the complexity of Prazak's excellent portrait of what is happening in this part of Africa to suggest that she herself is not so much focused on ‘ends’ as on life during times of turmoil.

Rounding out this trio is Hodzic's theoretically sophisticated book, the Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. Twilight is the most challenging of the three books, yet it offers theoretical insights and arguments that most successfully address this wished-for goal of the ‘end of circumcision’ that all three projects hint at. Molloy's ‘sunrise’ after the long ‘night’ hopes for the end to a need for making ‘the mark’ on bodies that Prazak discussed. The public discourse imagines the hold of tradition to be so powerful that people just cannot let go. Hodzic recognises that there is widespread evidence that female genital cutting practices are declining, witness the widespread drops in prevalence rates. She then asks provocatively, why, given the declines, are governments and NGOs responding as they do? ‘Who is it who cannot let go of FGM?’ she writes, ‘And why is it that when cutting is on the wane, the discourse about the intractability of the threat of FGM is on the rise? … there is too much talk about why Africans, as Kenyatta wrote long ago, ‘cling to this custom’ (Reference Kenyatta1965: 129–30) and too little understanding of its endings’ (pp. 333–4). She sees the trans-local discourses denying the ‘twilight’ that is so evident from the statistics and from many ethnographers' observations (her own and others).

It is refreshing to read Hodzic's analysis, based on her own extensive ethnographic research in the north of Ghana and her long observations of the international discourse and situations of migrants. For Hodzic, the impassioned discourses can be critiqued for their tendency to focus too much on FGC and to disavow or ignore the other sorts of violence that both cut and uncut women face. This resonates with my own metaphor of the ‘smokescreen’ that I have used for decades (see for example Gruenbaum Reference Gruenbaum, Longman and Bradley2015) to argue that anti-circumcision rhetoric seems to be thrown up to block our view of the fundamental injustices of colonial and post-colonial exploitative economic situations – the ‘harmful global practices’ – that drive so much human suffering. Hodzic points to the violence of ‘extractive governance’ – a more satisfying term than my generation's crude ‘imperialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’ – embodying the neo-liberal manifestations of IMF and other policies that adversely affect the lives of African women and their communities.

Hodzic started out to work on urban anthropology in Accra and national advocacy work against female genital cutting in Ghana in 2002, but opportunity to work in the Upper East Region of Ghana – based in Bolgatanga – with groups doing activism presented itself. As she describes it, ‘efforts to end cutting were alive, intense, and complex’ (p. 88), and it was seen as an ‘outmoded custom whose time has passed’ by people who governed the region. There was both a view of it ending and an imperative to end it. The chief of Bolgatanga, Hodzic reports, said that ‘‘the obsolete customs, cultures, and traditions must give way to modern times’ in the name of development and social progress’ (p. 88), which slid neatly into the ‘harmful traditional practices’ motif. Hodzic, informed by her theoretical roots in the critique of linear and teleological notions of time and space in modernisation theories, latched on to the question, not of how traditional practices might hinder development, but rather the question of what ‘work this notion [of harmful traditional practices] performs in contemporary Ghana and to show how it has morphed, how it lives on and sustains its hold on governance, and what it costs those who govern and are governed by it’ (p. 88). In other words, readers can expect a brilliant feminist critique of the ‘problematisation’ of female genital cutting.

One focus of her research is the law. As has been the case in most countries of Africa affected by female genital cutting, international pressures and local leadership combined to produce a law that criminalised cutting in 1994. In Ghana's parliament in 2007, there was a successful effort to increase punishment and incarceration for performing FGC (Chapter 6), and subsequently some circumcisers were imprisoned. Hodzic recounts the public reaction when two circumcisers in the Upper West Region received prison sentences. These two may turn out to have been the last to be incarcerated, Hodzic suggests, because seeing an elderly woman in prison did not sit well with the public, and the ‘punitive rationally’ came to be questioned. The Ghanaian public wanted deterrence to operate according to a different logic – bringing people ‘to the book’ and ‘summoning them before the law’, but not necessarily incarcerating them. So, even the NGOs and governance workers on watchdog committees seemed to prefer to shift to preventing cutting rather than punishing it. A new role for young people was to engage in surveillance; as word of an impending circumcision spreads in a village, they are to report it so people can be dissuaded. Hodzic's is a fascinating account that leads her to conclude that ‘Ghanaian opposition to law enforcement by the book is a form of governmentality against itself’ (p. 332). In the past, ‘the [traditional] law of initiation not only guarantees equality but also prohibits inequality, which would inevitably arrive with the advent of the state and its law’ (p. 330). (She notes that traditional laws and practices might well be considered not ‘pre-state’ but anti-state.) Ghanaians, she argues, would rather have a ‘reciprocal relationship with the state and NGOs [like] that they had with the gods: one of giving and taking, attention, care, and accountability’ (p. 334), not the ‘punitive excesses of the state’ (p. 331).

And so, I, too, must conclude that our goal should not be the ‘end of cutting’ per se – we are already in the twilight, after all. What might well worry us more is not so much that there is some persistence of practices, but rather ‘the global North's gesture of looking to Africa for hope and solutions while designing punitive zero tolerance policies against African migrants’ (p. 334). The recent cases resulting in incarceration, child custody separations and the highest bail ever required that have fallen on the Dawoodi Bohra community in Michigan should give us pause. The crime was a minimal scraping of the female prepuce: was it as drastic as the average male circumcision? Or as permanent as the ‘Barbie’ cosmetic surgeries performed on young North American women with the blessing of the medical profession? In the end, the goals of our female genital cutting discourse should be humanistic – giving and taking, discussion and openness, attention, care and accountability.