Humanity's greatest stupidity is undermining and underestimating women | View
I always repeat this phrase as a personal prayer: Those who love justice, peace and human progress, must resolutely fight so that the rights of oil do not prevail over those of humans. I repeat it to support the path towards a total and inexorable restitution of human rights in general, but in particular for the rights of girls and women.
In 1983, when I was serving as a young doctor in Guinea, a dramatic event took place in my life.
I was then the director of the hospital in Tougué, a rural town far from Conakry, the capital city. One afternoon, five desperate crying women came to me at the hospital, holding in their arms two beautiful 12-year-old twins, Hassantou and Housseynatou. The twins were in critical condition, hemorrhagic and covered in blood. Until then, I had never heard anything bad about what was then wrongly called "female circumcision". Today, we know it by its real name: female genital mutilation (FGM).
For the past 36 years, I have travelled a winding and difficult path that has revealed to me the devastation that is wreaked by female genital mutilation, child marriages, and all other forms of violence against women and girls. Above all, I discovered the greatest stupidity of humanity: undermining and underestimating women, which is really an inversion of the hierarchy of human values.
This phenomenon is often sold in socio-economic packages made up of demeaning concepts or ideas such as "she goes to school just to know how to read and write her name", or "when women are educated, they frighten men", or "women only need microcredit, and that's enough for them", or "if she is not circumcised, she will not be subservient to her husband,” etc.
By analysing these paradigms, it is easy to see that our societies are based on discrimination against and the exclusion of women and girls. This explains the backwardness of all humanity, including those at the forefront of scientific, technical and technological knowledge. No effective algorithm has yet been found, at least not yet elaborated, to educate, convince and guide so-called modern societies towards gender equality.
