Our Grandmothers’ Drums

“West Africa. Blinding white light, dust and scrub, salt flats and mangrove swamps, a village called Dulaba in the Gambia. People are scratching a living out of rice, groundnuts, millet. At the appointed time, the women beat their grandmothers’ drums and go to the bush for the circumcison rituals. No man is allowed …
To  Mark Hudson, a casual visitor, Dulaba in 1985 was a place of fascination, its stark landscape vivid with the presence of its women. What were their lives, bounded by Islam, by female circumcision, by the necessity to work in the fields and to obey first their mothers and then their husbands? …”