Help, they’re eating black people in Sweden!

The EastAfrican

By TEE NGUGI 
Picture the scene. A roomful of well-dressed party guests making polite conversation. In the middle of the room on a table, is a cake depicting a naked African woman, an agonised expression on her face.


Then a white woman dignitary is invited to officially get the proceedings under way.
She walks to table and performs a clitoridectomy by slicing off the part of the cake depicting female genitalia. The figure emits a macabre howl of pain. The guests clap, and cameras flash.
With the festivity now officially open, guests, with plate in hand, walk to the figure on the table and proceed to cut slices of cake.
At each mutilation, the chocolate figure wails in agony.


No, this is neither a scene from a David Crnenberg movie, nor a misogynistic neo-Nazi indoctrination camp.
The scene is a genteel function in liberal Sweden, the guests respectable intellectuals, and the woman who got the party started by performing the circumcision was Swedish Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth.
The video is doing the rounds on the Web; you can Google it at the peril of your peace of mind.


Where do we begin to process the meaning of this scene; to put it into some understandable context?
Perhaps we can begin at the emotions evoked by the video. First, there is revulsion at the sheer tastelessness of it — the macabre juxtaposition of gluttonous merriment and pain.
This reaction would not be any different had the tortured figure been depicting another race or gender or even species.
Did not the cries of pain ruin the appetite or jar with the good cheer of the occasion? Clearly not, given the frequency of happy trips to the table.


Then there is a mixture of anger and sadness, for the symbolic act recalls the trauma of female genital mutilation suffered by thousands of African girls each year.


During the International Women’s Day commemorated earlier in the year, victims of FGM spoke about the pain of the operation and the lifelong physical and mental scars.
One woman, who is now in the forefront of the fight against the practice in Kenya, described it as having “robbed me of my childhood and womanhood