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Holy Week resources and reflections

Book review – However Long the Night: Molly Melching’s Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph


Molly Melching found her calling halfway around the world at the age of 24 in Dakar, Senegal. This is her story of self-discovery through understanding and later using diffusion through empowerment, which engineered the vehicle for women of various African communities to improve their lives by way of health, economics and human rights.

 

How are people empowered through diffusion? “However Long The Night” is a journey into the heart of Molly’s fearlessness, as the author describes it, as she sparked the “the largest human rights movement in modern African history.” The image on the cover provides an image of this movement: a single group of women walking together along the beach of the Atlantic Ocean with containers for gathering upon their heads. Is this the first group to stand up against female genital circumcision (FGC)?

 

FGC — “the tradition” as the women commonly referred to it — was a violation. Yet, circumcision was and is still, in many communities throughout Africa, held in high esteem for women to be wholly socially integrated. One such tradition in China — foot binding “was considered necessary for proper marriage and family honor.” But, through community association, the practice of binding a girl’s feet ended.

 

Many rural villages within Africa attached numerous beliefs and customs to religion and held firm to this practice. As one of the elders pointed out after consulting a religious text, the practice was not a religious requirement, yet the people had followed it for hundreds of generations out of love for their children. As Molly learned, you cannot enforce your ways or beliefs onto people who are deeply committed to an institution by expecting them to simply abandon these rituals without consulting their elders, religious leaders and entire community. I saw a parallel between our communities and the many villages in Senegal. We consult our church leaders on many aspects from local affairs to intimate issues in just the same way. Why would this be absent from other cultures?

 

The book does a wonderful job of mirroring the lives of women in remote locations to those in more developed parts of the world. Emboldening women with the proper tools to understand their rights without imposing or creating a division between the sexes was key. This is interwoven masterfully over the conflict, the delivery of information and the timing of change. 

 

I never knew of Tostan (“breakthrough”), the organization created in the late 1990s, and its work within Africa. The founder humbly refrains from taking credit for all its outcomes and the success of the programs implemented. Many near-death moments in which fear was prominent were overcome by the willpower and sheer belief of these women, who demonstrated a relentless desire to perse-vere regardless of possible alienation from their family and friends, and by expressing themselves though open dialogue together.

 

by Aimee Molly

HarperOne, San Francisco. 243 pages

 



 

MIA R. STAFFORD-KISUMBI is a church administrator and freelance writer in Washington, DC.

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