When Moussa Diallo was a shaman, he regularly applied a lotion to his body made from the clitoris of a victim of female genital mutilation.
“I wanted to be a big chief, I wanted to dominate,” said the short but charismatic 50-year-old from northwestern Ivory Coast.
“I put it on my face and body every three months” or “for about three years,” Diallo said, asking AFP not to give his real name.
Lebe Gnable, head of the National Organization for Women, Children and the Family (ONEF), said illegal “circumcision” ceremonies in several regions of the West African country involve the cutting of girls’ genitals to be used to make “love potions” or magical ointments that some believe will help them “make money or reach high political office.”
A ground-up clitoris can sell for up to $170 (152 euros), the equivalent of a month’s income for many people in Ivory Coast.
Diallo stopped using these tools a decade ago, but regional police chief Lieutenant N’Guessan Yosso confirmed to AFP that dried clitoris are still “in great demand for mystical practices”.
And extensive interviews by AFP with former faith healers, circumcisers, social workers, researchers and NGOs make it clear that trafficking in female genitalia is thriving, and allegedly empowering.
Many believe the trade is hampering the fight against female genital mutilation (FGM), which has been banned in this religiously diverse nation for more than a quarter of a century.
Despite this, according to the OECD, one in five women in Ivory Coast is still circumcised, and in some parts of the north, one in two.
chop and mix with plants
Diallo said that before she suffered a crisis of conscience and decided to campaign against FGM, women who were undergoing circumcision around the small town of Touba often asked her to use her powers to protect them from evil forces.
Female circumcision has been practised for centuries by various religions in West Africa, with most girls being cut between childhood and adolescence. Many families view it as a rite of passage or a way to control and suppress female sexuality, according to the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, which sees circumcision as a dangerous violation of girls’ fundamental rights.
Besides the physical and psychological pain, cutting can be fatal, and can lead to infertility, birth complications, long-term infections and bleeding, not to mention loss of sexual pleasure.
Diallo often went into the forest with the women who performed circumcisions or to a house where dozens of girls were being circumcised, often surrounded by pagan and sacred objects. So it was relatively easy for the former faith healer to obtain the precious powder.
“When they cut off the clitoris they dried it for a month or two and then crushed it with stones,” he said.
The result was a “black powder” that was sometimes mixed with “leaves, roots, and bark” or shea butter, which is often used in cosmetics.
They can then sell it for “100,000 CFA francs (152 euros) if the girl is a virgin” or “65,000 (99 euros) if she already has a child” or exchange it for goods and services, Diallo said.
The former exorcist said that recently he had received some powder from a Tantrik in his village – he believes this powder is a mixture of human flesh and plants.
AFP was shown the powder but was unable to analyse it without purchasing it.
‘Organ trafficking’
Former circumcisers interviewed by AFP stressed that the girls’ clitoris was cut off and either buried, thrown in a river or given to parents, depending on local custom.
But a man in the western part of the country believed that some of them were used for magic.
“Some people pretend they are the girls’ parents and walk away with the clitoris,” he said.
He claimed that magicians use them to perform “magic” and then sell them.
Another circumciser said some of his colleagues were involved in the trade, “giving (genitals) to people who are doing wrong things” for secret purposes.
One victim told AFP her body was mutilated when she was a child, with her mother warning her not to bring home severed flesh.
Lawyer Marie Laurence Didier Zézé explains that under Ivory Coast law the trade is considered “organ trafficking” and — like FGM — can be punished with fines and several years in prison.
But police in Odienné, which is in charge of five regions in the country’s northwest, said no one had so far been charged with trafficking.
“People won’t say anything about sacred practices,” lamented Lt. N’Guessan Yosso.
The cutters are both feared and respected, locals told AFP, and are often seen as prisoners of evil spirits.
‘Just crazy’
“The clitoris cannot give you magical powers, that’s just crazy,” said Jacqueline Chanin, a gynecologist based in the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
Nevertheless, according to researchers, the practice is still widely prevalent in some parts of the country.
Health specialist anthropologist Dieudonné Koudio was presented with a box of the powder in the town of Odienné, 150 kilometres north of Toba.
“It contained a dried-up severed organ in the form of black powder,” he said.
Her findings were included in a Dzigui Foundation report in 2021, whose findings were accepted by the Ministry of Women.
Farmers in the Denguele district, including Odienné, “buy the clitoris and mix the powder into the seeds to increase the fertility of their fields,” said Noho Konaté, a member of the Dzigui Foundation, which has been fighting FGM in the region for 16 years.
He said when he told the parents of the young girls about the trafficking they were “saddened”.
In the country’s south and center-west, women use clitoral powder as an aphrodisiac to keep their husbands from straying, said criminologist Safi Roseline N’Da, author of a 2023 study on FGM that also pointed to the trade.
She and her two co-authors found that the blood of mutilated women was also used to honor traditional gods.
According to lawyer Didier Zézé, these are not the only Ivorian folk remedies that use body parts.
mystical beliefs continue to
“Mysticism has a central place in daily life” in Ivory Coast – where Islam, Christianity and traditional animist beliefs coexist – said Canadian anthropologist Boris Koenig, an expert on occult practices there. “It touches every area of people’s social, professional, family and love lives,” he said, “and there’s generally nothing illegal about it.”
However, NGOs argue that the trade is “one reason for the survival of FGM” in Ivory Coast, where rates are generally declining and are lower than the West African average of 28 percent, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Near Touba, former sorcerer Diallo described how up to 30 women a day were bitten in places protected by his magic.
He said the dry season between January and March is the best time for circumcision, when the hot harmattan wind from the Sahara helps scars heal.
Staff at the area’s only social work centre say the felling is still going on, but it is difficult to assess because it never happens in the open.
Instead, it continues in secret, hidden behind traditional festivals that have nothing to do with the practice, they say, and is perpetuated by circumcisers from neighbouring Guinea – just a few kilometres away – where FGM rates are over 90 per cent.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
