Not my daughter

The cutting of the clitoris is a cultural imperative for the growing girl in some rural communities especially in Muslim dominated northern Ghana. In such a patriarchal society where the man possesses absolute authority, including over the wife’s body, a dissenting wife is punished severely. To abscond with a daughter on the dawn of her ceremony without the notice and authority of the husband is even more troubling and heretical. Not My Daughter is a simple docudrama of a woman who dares to challenge the social imperative, laying her life on the line to ensure that her baby girl is spared the trauma that she and all the mothers in the village were subjected to under the guise of “culture and tradition”. At the end of it all, whether the act of excising the clitoris is “mutilation” or an “act of beautification” is a matter that still generates bitter debate.