THE CONQUERED SELF

What you need to know: In his 802-page book: Selfhood; Divinity of the Clitoris, the retired minister of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) gives a rather revolutionary strategy to clean the Kenyan society of the vice in a country where one in three girls is at risk of the cut. In his justification of the brazen title, Rev Njoya says he chose to use the word clitoris in its outright term to bring the message home to every man and woman on the effects of FGM. Retired Rev. Timothy Njoya has taken a radical approach on ending Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Kenya. In his 802-page book: Selfhood; Divinity of the Clitoris, the retired minister of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) gives a rather revolutionary strategy to clean the Kenyan society of the vice in a country where one in three girls is at risk of the cut. In his justification of the brazen title, Rev Njoya says he chose to use the word clitoris in its outright term to bring the message home to every man and woman on the effects of FGM. PIECE OF MEAT “Clitoris is made in the image of God and it is divine,” he explains. “To cut a woman and remove the clitoris is like taking a woman for a piece of meat.” But why is it so important that a clitoris remains in its whole? Rev. Njoya has a divinity answer to that. “A woman’s clitoris has more than 20,000 nerve endings, while a penis is wired with only 2,000 nerve endings,” he states. “The clitoris is wired to pull 60kg of pelvic bones apart and pull them back. Without the nerve endings, the muscles cannot pull apart…that is why 20 per cent of Kenyan women die during child birth because their pelvic bones have nothing to pull them apart when they are circumcised.”