No Blade, No Blood: In Northern Sierra Leone, 55 Women Test A New Future For Bondo

MABALAY, Sierra Leone — The songs were familiar.

So was the dancing.

There were celebrations, cultural teachings and the sense of occasion that has accompanied rites of passage for generations in many parts of Sierra Leone.

But something was deliberately absent.

There was no blade.

No cutting.

And no blood.

In Mabalay, a community in northern Sierra Leone’s Port Loko District, 55 women recently took part in an Alternative Rite of Passage known as Bloodless Bondo.

They participated in cultural ceremonies and teachings associated with the Bondo Society. But they did not undergo female genital mutilation, or FGM.

For the Amazonian Initiative Movement Sierra Leone, which has championed the alternative approach, the ceremony represents a challenge to one of the country’s most difficult cultural questions.

Can Bondo survive without cutting?

For Rugiatu Neneh Turay-Koroma, founder and Executive Director of AIM-SL, the answer is yes.

The celebration can remain.

The teachings can remain.

The cultural identity and sense of belonging can remain.

What does not have to remain, she argues, is the cutting.

The initiative, promoted by AIM-SL since 2019, seeks to separate the social and cultural elements associated with Bondo from FGM.

The programme in Mabalay, in Thawuya Section of Bake Loko Chiefdom, is the latest test of that idea.

But changing one of Sierra Leone’s most powerful social institutions may prove considerably harder than changing a ceremony.

A tradition and a dilemma

For many Sierra Leoneans, Bondo is more than a ritual.

It is associated with womanhood, identity, belonging and the transmission of knowledge between generations.

It holds an important place in the social and cultural lives of many communities.

But Bondo is also closely associated with FGM.

That connection has complicated efforts to end the practice.

According to Sierra Leone’s 2019 Demographic and Health Survey, 83 percent of women aged between 15 and 49 had undergone FGM, compared with 90 percent recorded in the 2013 survey.

The figure remains an important nationally representative benchmark, although it is not a measure of prevalence in 2026.

For campaigners, the statistics illustrate how deeply the practice has been embedded in Sierra Leonean society.

But numbers alone do not explain why change has been difficult.

For some women, Bondo represents cultural belonging and identity.

For others, FGM is associated with pain, trauma and serious health consequences.

And in communities where initiation is socially expected, refusing participation can carry consequences of its own.

That makes the debate about more than health.

It is also about belonging.

The Bloodless Bondo initiative is attempting to find a way through that dilemma.

Preserve what communities value.

Remove what causes harm.

The Port Loko experiment

The idea of separating Bondo from cutting is not new in Port Loko.

AIM-SL has spent years working with communities and traditional practitioners to promote alternatives to FGM.

The district has become an important testing ground for that approach.

In 2019, reporting by the Thomson Reuters Foundation documented efforts in the Thawuya area of Port Loko to move communities away from FGM while addressing the economic and social realities surrounding the practice.

The experience exposed one of the central difficulties in efforts to end cutting.

For some women, the practice was connected not only to tradition but also to income and social status.

Ending it therefore meant confronting economic realities as well as cultural beliefs.

That history gives the Mabalay ceremony a broader context.

The 55 women who participated in the Alternative Rite of Passage were not simply attending an isolated event.

They were taking part in a longer effort to demonstrate that cultural transition is possible.

The programme retained elements of cultural education and ceremony while deliberately excluding FGM.

For AIM-SL, the initiative is intended to demonstrate that cultural belonging and bodily integrity do not have to be opposing ideas.

But possibility and acceptance are not the same thing.

The larger test will be whether communities beyond Mabalay are prepared to accept that distinction.

The government’s middle path

The debate over Bondo and FGM has also reached the centre of government.

In June, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Gender and Children’s Affairs, Dr. Isata Mahoi, publicly drew a distinction between Bondo as a cultural institution and FGM as a harmful practice.

“We are not touching Bondo,” Mahoi said in remarks reported during the national debate.

“Bondo is a tradition on its own but the link it has with FGM is our own problem.”

Mahoi described FGM as a harmful practice and argued that girls under the age of 18 should be protected, while adult women should retain the ability to make their own decisions.

Her position reflects an attempt to navigate one of the most politically and culturally sensitive issues in Sierra Leone.

The government is not presenting the question simply as whether Bondo should disappear.

Instead, the debate has increasingly focused on whether Bondo and cutting can be separated.

That distinction places the government’s emerging approach surprisingly close to the central principle behind the alternative rite being tested in Port Loko.

Preserve culture.

Protect children.

Question the practice of cutting.

Yet the debate remains unresolved.

Sierra Leone still has no law that explicitly criminalises FGM, while human rights institutions and campaigners continue to call for stronger legal protections.

The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone has advocated for a specific law addressing FGM and has engaged traditional leaders and soweis in discussions about a rights-based approach.

FAHP and the case for changing harmful traditions

The broader argument for separating culture from harm is also reflected in the work of the Forum Against Harmful Practices, or FAHP.

The Sierra Leonean coalition campaigns against FGM and other harmful practices while engaging communities, traditional authorities and policymakers.

Ishmael Cole, FAHP’s national coordinator, has argued that traditions can change when they threaten the lives and health of women and girls.

The principle is straightforward.

People create traditions.

And people can change traditions.

FAHP has been unequivocal in its opposition to FGM and has advocated for stronger protection and a move toward zero tolerance.

But its approach also recognises an important distinction.

Ending mutilation does not necessarily require erasing every cultural value associated with Bondo.

That distinction gives the Mabalay experiment additional weight.

The debate is not necessarily between culture on one side and human rights on the other.

The more difficult question may be whether communities can decide which parts of their traditions should survive.

The First Lady and the politics of consent

Few voices have generated more debate around Bondo and FGM in Sierra Leone than First Lady Fatima Maada Bio.

The issue returned sharply to national attention in June after allegations that a 30-year-old woman had been forcibly initiated into the Bondo Society and subjected to FGM in eastern Freetown.

Responding to the allegations, the First Lady said she did not support circumcision carried out without a person’s consent.

“If Binta’s allegations are true, I condemn the act,” she said, according to reporting by Sierra Leonean media.

The Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs said the woman was under protection and that investigations were underway.

The intervention placed consent at the centre of the national debate.

For the First Lady, the issue was not presented simply as an argument about Bondo itself, but about whether an individual could be subjected to initiation or cutting against her will.

Her position has, however, remained controversial.

Women’s rights campaigners and international observers have criticised what they see as ambiguity in her broader public stance on FGM, particularly her reluctance to support an outright ban.

The First Lady has rejected suggestions that she supports forced cutting and has argued that her comments have been misunderstood.

That controversy illustrates just how politically sensitive the debate has become.

Even among people who agree that women should not be forced into initiation, there remains disagreement about consent, adulthood, culture and whether FGM should be explicitly prohibited by law.

It is precisely within that contested national landscape that the alternative rite in Mabalay takes on wider significance.

The Bloodless Bondo model attempts to move beyond one of the debate’s most difficult questions.

Instead of asking whether women should choose to be cut, it asks whether cutting is necessary at all.

The women who carry the tradition

Any attempt to transform Bondo must also confront the role of the women who have traditionally carried its authority.

Soweis are not simply associated with cutting.

In many communities, they are custodians of cultural knowledge and influential figures in social life.

Traditional initiation can also have an economic dimension.

That creates a difficult question for campaigners.

What happens to women whose livelihoods or social positions are connected to the traditional system?

The answer cannot simply be to tell them to stop and walk away.

The experience in Port Loko has helped demonstrate why.

Earlier efforts to move away from FGM included attempts to support alternative livelihoods for women who had depended economically on the traditional practice.

That experience shaped a broader lesson.

A sustainable transition requires alternatives.

That may mean new sources of income.

It may mean new social roles.

And it may mean transforming the position of traditional practitioners into educators, mentors and custodians of a non-harmful rite of passage.

The limits of law

The debate over FGM in Sierra Leone is also increasingly a legal one.

Human rights advocates have continued to demand explicit legislation against the practice.

The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone has called for stronger legal protection, including a specific law on FGM.

But the experience of Port Loko also demonstrates the limits of law alone.

A government can introduce policy.

Parliament can legislate.

Courts can interpret rights and obligations.

But none of those measures can instantly change what happens inside communities.

Social change takes a different route.

It happens in conversations between mothers and daughters.

Between traditional leaders and their communities.

Between campaigners and practitioners.

And in the decisions families make about the future of their children.

That is where alternative rites of passage are attempting to make their intervention.

Can culture change?

The 55 women in Mabalay did not simply attend an anti-FGM campaign.

They participated in an alternative cultural rite of passage.

That distinction matters.

For decades, campaigners have faced a recurring problem.

Opposition to FGM can be interpreted by communities as opposition to their culture.

The Bloodless Bondo model challenges that assumption.

The songs can remain.

The celebration can remain.

The teachings can remain.

The mentorship can remain.

The community can remain.

The cutting does not have to.

The government’s distinction between Bondo and FGM, FAHP’s campaign against harmful practices and AIM-SL’s alternative rite all approach the problem from different directions.

But they converge on one increasingly important question.

Can Sierra Leone preserve cultural identity while changing a practice that human rights and health advocates consider harmful?

In Mabalay, the 55 participants have offered one possible answer.

A promising experiment — but not yet proof

The ceremony in Port Loko is significant.

But it does not prove that Sierra Leone has solved the problem of FGM.

Fifty-five participants can demonstrate that an alternative is possible.

They cannot yet demonstrate that alternative rites will replace cutting across the country.

The real questions will come afterwards.

Will other families choose the alternative?

Will traditional leaders recognise it?

Will soweis embrace it?

Will communities regard participants in Bloodless Bondo as fully initiated?

And, most importantly, will alternative rites help protect women and girls who might otherwise face pressure to undergo FGM?

Those questions require time.

They require evidence.

And they require more than a successful ceremony.

For campaigners, declaring victory too early would be a mistake.

An alternative rite is meaningful only if it contributes to reducing the number of women and girls subjected to FGM.

That remains the measure that matters.

The next generation

Perhaps the most important person in Sierra Leone’s debate over Bondo is the girl who is absent from the political arguments surrounding it.

She does not write legislation.

She does not sit in government meetings.

She does not decide the traditions of her community.

Yet the decisions made by adults can remain with her for life.

For generations, the blade has been associated with the passage into womanhood in many communities.

In Mabalay, 55 women experienced another path.

They entered a rite of passage.

They received cultural teachings.

They celebrated.

They participated in a tradition connected to their community.

But there was no cutting.

No blade.

No blood.

For Turay and the movement behind the Alternative Rite of Passage, that difference is the entire point.

The future of Bondo, they argue, does not have to depend on preserving every element of its past.

It may instead depend on deciding which elements deserve to survive.

In Mabalay, in northern Sierra Leone’s Port Loko District, 55 women have tested one answer.

The larger question now belongs to the rest of the country.

Can one of Sierra Leone’s most powerful traditions change without losing its meaning?

The women who took part in the alternative rite have demonstrated that another possibility exists.

Whether that possibility remains a local experiment or becomes part of a broader cultural transformation may help determine what the next generation inherits.

The songs.

The teachings.

The celebration.

The sense of belonging.

But not the blade.