THE STANDARD
NYANZA
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimates that last year, about 700 girls in Kuria were circumcised.
In March 2020, when schools closed after the Covid-19 outbreak, Wankuru was a happy-go-lucky 13-year-old.
By March 2021, she was married and pregnant.
Wankuru, 14, is only married, and no longer in school, because in the Abakuria culture she is an adult; thanks to the practice of female circumcision.
“My mother wanted me to undergo Female Genital Mutilation. She said I was ready,” she says. “I wouldn’t have got married without the cut.”
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She underwent the rite of passage in October 2020. By December, she had attracted a suitor. Wankuru lost her father, the family’s breadwinner, to a short illness in 2016.