The Tale Behind Women's Circumcision

By Abukar Ali

The story of Arrawelo remains the best known of all Somali folk tales. A pre-Islamic pagan queen, it is she who ruled the entire Somali-speaking world at a time when the Somali sun god Ra- subsequently co-opted, it is said, by the ancient Egyptians-held sway as the supreme deity in the universe.

The exact locality in Somaliland of the pagan queen’s fabled seat of power remains a mystery. But its whereabouts is still of much speculation, and there are in the Horn of Africa any number of ancient mounds and heaps of stone that one time or another have been claimed by local communities as marking the tomb and final resting place of Arrawelo.

The Queen’s notoriety stems from her unparalleled cruelty to men. Legend has it that as a girl Arrawelo was the unfortunate victim of a brutal rape. This so embittered her that she later came to power her long reign was given over wholly to exacting her revenge - on the entire male sex. In an uncompromising crusade, she set out to empower women through having all her male subjects forcibly castrated, so creating in Somaliland a whole generations of eunuchs.

Arrawelo, though, was haunted by misgivings that somewhere, some men might elude emasculation at her hands, and that one of their number would one day engineer her downfall. Accordingly, she introduced a strict code of precautionary dos and don'ts for women, including the infamous injunction that they were always to say NO when they actually meant YES, and YES when they meant NO. She is also said to have lectured women endlessly on how to maintain their dignity in the face of possible approaches by maverick men.

To flush out those few wily men whose intact manhood, she was convinced, posed a threat to her absolute rule, Arrawelo devised a series of seemingly impossible demands and riddles, which - she believed - only such men would be able to solve. Thus on one occasion, the neurotic queen instructed a community of villagers to supply her with camel-load of fruits from the Lote tree, stipulating that the fruits be brought before her on the bare back of the animal without using any form of container.

Try as they might, the villagers could find no way of fulfilling this demand. For, no matter how balanced, the fruits would simply roll off again as soon as the camel was made to walk. The Queen, for a while, while berating the poor villagers on each failure, was secretly satisfied; all was well she thought, reasoning that the inhabitants of the village must indeed be either women or eunuchs. Then one day, to her surprise, she was told that a camel-load was waiting for her outside her chambers.

Her worst suspicions were soon confirmed, the feat had been orchestrated by one Oday Biqe, a reclusive village elder who had managed to get the fruits to stay in place by first smearing the camel’s back with a thick viscous mixture of bird lime and mud.

With the help of further layers of this sticky paste, baked hard in the sun, the fruits - piled high on the camel’s back - had easily withstood the rigours of the journey.

For his trouble, Oday Biqe was ruthlessly hunted down by Arrawelo’s knife-wielding minions, although in one version of the tale the old man died before the pursuing mob could do its worst. All the same, the offending organ was summarily cut from the dead man’s body and carried aloft to the savage queen as proof that her order had been carried out.

Arrawelo’s own secret fears - that an undocted male would bring about her demise - were to prove well-founded. For one night a youthful stepson of hers, who had long since fled for fear of being an example of and emasculated, returned in disguise and drove a spear into the old queen’s chest, thus putting and end to the perpetual misery of men.

After the Queen’s death, long suffering Somali men wasted no time in conspiring to get even with their womenfolk. Their immediate recourse was to introduce the practice of female circumcision, which they felt would forever serve to censure womankind for the untold misery that Arrawelo had once inflicted on the male sex. And so it is, the story goes, that many women, not just in Somalia but in many other lands as well are fated to go on paying the penalty for Queen Arrawelo’s legendary cruelty.

Email: abukarali@usfamily.net