C. Edward Hamelberg

Keeping the discussion rolling on these matters is no easy task for me at 
present, draining from my tissues the energy required to continually justify 
why the talk must go on, barring recognition that these "Sweden" issues are 
perhaps a stimulating diversion. But I do not find much disagreement 
anywhere. Except, well in re: the matter of me being in first name terms 
with Nyamko Sabuni and Mauricio Rojas. Swedish tradition has done away with 
such mystification of identities as is supplied by useless titles: Mr., 
Mrs., Sir, Dr, Your Highness, Chief, Alhaji, and so on..., perhaps not quite 
tolerable for the post-colonial mind still soaked in the science of social 
stratification? The prime minister is just Fredrik Reinfeldt, not Your 
Excellency Fredrik Reinfeldt. The idea of being on first name terms is to 
remain down to earth without invading the other's integrity. Just listen to 
yourself say: His Excellency, Dr. Alhaji Yaya A.J.J Jammeh, and then imagine 
the cruelty he represents. What a waste?

So Nyamko Sabuni can be called Nyamko, even on tv! Your attempt to write-off 
Mauricio I hope, was purely for practical reasons. The man is no longer 
politically interesting, I agree. But let us at least recognise the two have 
shared the podium on very significant issues in the past: language skills 
testing for Swedish wannabes, deportation of "hardened" criminals 
(irrespective of social links to the country, such as children and spouses); 
reformation of public funding of private religious oriented schools, and the 
implementation of more aggressive control mechanisms to "smoke" out social 
welfare crooks, and so on. Thus, your writing off one, while lauding the 
other as a "saint who treads where angels fear" deliberately bends the rules 
of logical inference. In a country where even the BertIan double (Bert 
Karlsson and Ian Wachmeister) recognise that immigrants and people of 
immigrant ancestry receive stiffer sentences than ethnic Swedes for 
similar(!) crimes, to call for the deportation of "grova kriminella" (severe 
criminals) even if that should mean their leaving behind children and 
spouses, is simple, callous cruelty. If all that is just the cake, let us 
look att the icing that crowned it!
One of the very first "ministerial" assignments she executed without delay 
was to stifle funding for the Anti-racism Campaign office on the grounds 
that its work brought no tangible results! When about a month ago, Veckans 
Affärer (Sweden's version of Business Week, so to speak), the most bourgeois 
of the right-wing press asked her for comments on the immigrant brain drain, 
she said she had no time! [Hundreds of well educated immigrants remain 
unemployed and/or underemployed for years in Sweden only to find suitable 
lucrative positions as soon as they arrive in Britain or Canada. Nyamko 
finally commented on the issue last night]!  All of this, plus more 
discursive soup served by a very eloquent black lady minister.

Let us recapitulate on what Sweden means to me, and hopefully us. Rampant 
discrimination and racism, certainly. Night clubs that refuse blacks and 
dark-haired immigrants are plenty, and employers will tell you all sorts of 
lies for not offering you a job. These days if you are called Abdirizak 
Mohammad, or Ali Baba, or Abdurahman Omar, your chance of becoming gainfully 
employed might lie in altering your name to Magnus Lindkvist or Ingrid 
Johansson or some other blue and blond name. Forces of cultural alienation 
are sending a lot of immigrants, both young men and women to plastic 
surgeons. Persian and Arab youth alter their facial features, nose and chin, 
so as to look more caucasian! Others, having lost their souls in tentative 
integration into a society that eventually rejects even those with good 
grades, take to violent crime. (Have you read "Snabba Cash"?).
But their is as well, a noble history of genuine solidarity and progressive 
politics. Sweden offered the most help to the ANC and liberation movements 
on the African continent. It still pours millions in aid to Ethiopia, 
Tanzania, Mozambique, and Vietnam, significantly subsidising the budgets of 
these countries. That Nelson Mandela's first trip outside Africa after his 
release from prison in 1990 was to Stockholm was not simply incidental. 
Swedes risked their lives running underground support systems that helped 
sustain the families of victims, killed or jailed, of the apartheid regime.
My friend it is in these complexes of contexts we must place and weigh 
Nyamko Sabunis performance as minister. Perhaps she is no Uncle Tom, but she 
is an Auntie Igrid to me! and even if she deserves a honeymoon on account of 
her historic appointment, I am sure she will be colliding with many 
activists, including me. I know that I am travelling to an entirely 
different destination. The question is whether you are just taking a 
different bus to the same destination as Nyamko. Tell me, please.

I am holding on to Ginny's position on female genital cutting. As she 
rightly opined, some Africans have already gone underground, secretly taking 
their daughters to their home countries where they are cut, and then brought 
back to Scandinavia. It is a horrifying practice to all of us, i.e those 
convinced that they know better, and we should work to abolish it. Yet, I 
cannot think of any country where education and information have been more 
effectively used as instruments of social engineering, as a way of altering 
attitudes, as a consistently proven method of implememting even socially 
unpopular reforms. It has been the cornerstone of social democratic politics 
for decades since the pre war years.
Subjecting African girls to examination to determine the state of their 
genitalia is not just an abominablel invasion of their privacy. Even if 
Nyamko says her suggestion was to provoke debate, that such a suggestion 
came from her is a reflection of the general climate of antagonistic 
cultural encounter immigrants experience here. Because female genetical 
cutting is demonised, its practitioners are equated, perhaps not explicitly, 
as savages whose brutal impulses towards their own wives and daughters must 
be aggressively checked. Why, a trip to the gynaecologist must be taken as a 
most ordinary and compassionate samaritan act. Behold, even Cornelius 
Hamelberg thinks FGC has its historical roots buried in the primordial 
cruelty of men bent on depriving women of their divine right to a life 
endowed with sexual bliss. But don't we know better? Are there no medicinal 
roots to FGC, even if ill informed? And like the circumcision of males, is 
that of girls not largely a crucial aspect of initiation rites into 
womanhood? But besides, whence does all this anti-FGC hail?

Anti-FGC militantism is hardly older than the rise of feminist activism in 
the West. It is this political project of gender liberation that has largely 
defined FGC as an incredible act of widespread cruelty. Yet as genuine as 
the concerns of westerners are, the brutality of the application of "rusty 
knives" on female flesh in the African bush, is hardly more severe than the 
tortuous lives of women in societies steeped in violent misogyny. Sex 
reassignment surgery - never mind the clinically decent name, nothing 
brutish here you see - is in many instances, more horrifying than many forms 
of FGC including infibulation. Male to female surgery involves cutting off 
the testicles completely, apart from other complicated procedures required 
for making a man sexually female. There are "clit" clinics in L.A where 
women go to be operated upon to alter the look of their genitals. If you can 
imagine an old grandmother using crude knives in the African bush to slice 
open the  breasts of young girls and stuff them with different kinds of 
silicon implants you would come closer to understanding why words, 
professional training, money, clinical environments are all brought to bear 
to create a mental projection defined by a dominat culture that sees one 
practice as "barbaric" and the other as qualified aesthetic surgery. It is 
all about the exercise of power.

Unless their is genuine respect for other people inspite of their 
traditional practices, attempts to alter attitudes may prove more painful 
than necessary. That is a message we need to convey to Nyamko Sabuni.

Cheers,
sidibeh

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