Long before the idea of ending female genital mutilation (FGM) was gaining traction among world leaders, a group of young Maasai men were already questioning the need for the brutal practice.
“Female genital mutilation is part of our culture and practice and it marks the transition from childhood to adulthood, of women from girls. We now realise FGM is one of the practices we should not have in our society. It’s not helping us but affecting our girls and mothers and wives,” says Sonyanga Ole Ngais, one of the stars of a new documentary that charts how a cricket team formed in the shadows of Mount Kenya helped change attitudes towards the practice.
Warriors, released on Friday, follows the Maasai Cricket Warriors team as they train and travel to the UK to compete in the 2013 Last Man Stands world championship, an event that offers the chance to play on the hallowed turf of Lord’s cricket ground in London.
Interspersed with shots of life at home as they prepare for the trip, their arrival in the UK, and their first visit to Lord’s, we hear the team talking about FGM and the lack of women’s rights in the region, views in stark contrast to those expressed by Maasai elders.
Sport is often used as a way to engage people and spread health or education messages. But for the Warriors, the message was clear before cricket arrived in the area in 2007.
“It started a long time ago when we were young and our sisters were being married off and not completing school,” says Ngais, in London this week to promote the film.
“When I was young I remember very well my last sister to undergo the cut [FGM], and she was married off. I really liked her and was really sad and cried a lot when she was married off. She was like my mother, taking care of me … when she was married I realised I was not going to have that company. I was not going to see her.”
Ngais, 26, had already seen three other sisters undergo FGM, drop out of school and marry young; culture dictates that girls should be cut before they are married. FGM has been banned in Kenya for years.
The pain of losing his sister to marriage never left him. And as Ngais grew older and came to understand more about what girls went through, he began to question the importance of FGM in the Maasai culture, and started talking to his friends about it.
“When I grew up I started to realise what these people were doing … it was not nice, it was inhuman.”
By this time, he had a younger sister, Eunice. He was determined that she would not be cut.
“I realised I was not ready to lose another sister,” Ngais said. “I had the passion to fight for women’s rights in our society.
“We have to realise girls have their rights and need to study. They don’t need the brutality of FGM.”
As Ngais’ passion for women’s rights grew, a new sport was introduced to him and his friends by Aliya Bauer, a South African woman conducting research in the area who was missing the sport she loved. She brought over some equipment from South Africa and began teaching the locals to play.
In 2009, the Warriors team was formed and the novelty of the Maasai taking up the game soon attracted media attention. The team was invited to Cape Town for the Last Man Stands championship in 2012, before heading to London the following year with a film crew in tow.
The team used their growing popularity to talk about ending FGM.
A Maasai saying – “The eye that leaves the village sees further” – rang true on their return. In the eyes of their elders, the young men’s travels had earned them the right to a hearing. The elders ask the younger men whether they would want to marry women who had not undergone FGM. They replied by promising to marry only women who had not been cut.
“Parents don’t want their girls to stay with them [at home] so they have not forced them to have the cut,” says Ngais, who knows there is still some way to go before FGM is completely abolished in the region.
Ngais, who captains the Warriors, didn’t get the chance to play in the finals at Lord’s, and had to settle instead for practice sessions on its nursery ground. But by enlisting his two older brothers in the fight against FGM, and petitioning his parents, his sister Eunice and his nieces have not been cut. Eunice is now at secondary school. A women’s cricket team – the Maasai Cricket Ladies – is also proving popular in the area.
Inspired by cricket and his involvement in the filming of Warriors, Ngais is now studying for a degree in communications and electronic media at Daystar University in Nairobi. He hopes to work in the film industry when he graduates. He is still playing cricket, and has set up a team at university. He returns home regularly to practice with the Warriors, and harbours dreams of one day returning to Lord’s to settle unfinished business.
- Warriors, directed by Barney Douglas, is in cinemas from 13 November. #WakeTheLion
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