When a group of people is committed by their culture to do something harmful to their own people, change is very difficult. In the article “She Ran From the Cut” By Jina Moore Nice Leng’ete’s story is told. She is a woman from a tribe in Kenya that helped combat Female Genital Mutilation. In the article “The Art of Social Change” by Kwame Anthony Appiah a similar story is told, but the focus is on Chinese Foot-binding in the late nineteenth century. Both of these events are similar in the way that they are continued because of tradition, cause great suffering to the women who receive either, and it’s men who primarily kept both alive. With both stories, a woman born into either of these societies could have been forced to mutilate their body. This mutilation was done because it was tradition, and a person who was non-compliant would be ostracized by their community and not be able to marry.
In both cases, pain creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. In both cases extreme agony was avoidable, as there was no base for either besides in the cultural sense. Conversation is needed for a change. In the case of Nice Leng’ete, Kenyan methods for “the cut” involved dancing and singing, it was a beatiful ceremony for women coming of age, except that one aspect kept it from being that. Nice Leng’ete decided that it was time for a change, so she started a conversation in the most classical sense. She made people realize that change was accessible and possible, just by using her voice and learning new methods to replace the old ones.
