The Solution is TALKING ABOUT Breast Flattening
Hi all,
this video is a conference by Chi Yvonne Leina, a very engaged speech to stop breast ironing by SPEAKING.
If we do not talk about breast flattening we can never stop it.
This is the way we have to go as women, in Cameroon and outside Cameroon.
Thank you for sharing our videos!!
Dr. phil. Milena Rampoldi – ProMosaik e.V.
I never
knew that one day I’d be sitting in New York, among these tall buildings with
so many kind […] looking at me and listening to my story.
in the north-west region of Cameroon and as a young girl I realised a lot of
things were going on with the women of my community, which up to now I’ve had
no concrete answers to but for the fact the […] is our tradition, is our
culture, but to me this practice are totally unacceptable.
4 years old, when my grandpa died I saw my grandma go through obnoxious
practices in the name of widowhood rituals and that haunted me se much.
women been disgraced and beaten by their partners with no justice for them.
Source: new.int.com
these things have touched my heart and what happened one day when as a 14 year
old girl I was coming back from school to my grandma’s house. I loved spending
time with her because she allowed me to play as much as I wanted unlike my mum
who always wanted me to be disciplined like most grandmas do. My cousin was my
main companion in that house, she was also 13, a bit younger than myself, but
her breasts were beginning to sprout. So when I was approaching my grandma’s
house I realised that the joyful chatters of my cousin which was the usual
thing that attracted me to that house as absent that afternoon. I could only
hear birds singing. When I approached grandma’s kitchen which was at the same
time our living room I noticed my cousin was growling inside. I peeped through
the peephole and I saw something which has traumatised me for the rest of ly
life up to today. I saw my grandmother warming a stone on the fire and pressing
my cousin’s breast with that and she was growling. I didn’t understand what it
was. I peeked for some time then I couldn’t take it any longer and I went
outside and I stood nearby. When they came out no one told me what was going on
there and up to today my cousin has never told me anything about that. Few
months later my grandma called me into the same kitchen and asked me to take
off my shirt. And when I asked why she said she wanted to fix me. I told her
because my breasts are beginning to sprout and they are so painful, at that
time, each time my hand touched it it hurt so much. I don’t want anything to
come near my chest, I don’t want her to fix me. And she told me if she didn’t
fix me then I was going to be spoiled. And I tried to scream, she told me good
girls don’t talk about their breasts, good girls don’t scream about their
breast, good girls don’t talk about their privacy. I just told her then I’m
going to be a bad girl and I insisted on screaming and she stopped, she didn’t
do that to me.
That day I
realised there is power in the voice. There is power when you speak out against
something that is going on that you don’t like. And I’ve grown to realise
silence is the weapon that is being used on women in my community. You’re
allowed to speak about the things that are done against you especially in your
home. So many women are suffering in backyards, in kitchens and in bedroom
where they were relegated by men and even sometimes women. And so much is going
on that nobody is talking about it. I realised somebody needs to be there for
these women and my […] I wanted to be this person. But it was like I was in a
box, like there was no opportunity for me to even have the education I wanted
to have, no opportunity for me to have forms to speak. But I kept pressing and
pressing and somehow I got to university. Somehow I got to be the journalist
that I wanted to be and somehow I got the minor in women and gender studies.
That for me was like all I wanted in my life and I never knew how I was going
to…because in Cameroon when you are a journalist you are the rich person, you
are enemy to the public, but I knew I was going to be poor, but one thing I
knew was that I was going to be a voice of the voiceless […] in my community.
reports I wanted to. I wanted to report about widowhood ritual, about breast
ironing, I wanted to report about domestic violence but there was no room
because all the media organisations are focused on politics, focused on the
things that interest the men and not on the things that are touching. The media
then to me was not the voice of the voiceless because where then are the
stories of these women who are being battered every day. Where then are the
stories of these girls who have their breasts ironed every day? Where then are
the stories of these old women who are asked to sit on the floor, asked to walk
barefoot, asked to cut their hair, asked to dance naked because they lost their
husband in the name of widowhood rituals. No one thought I was having a genuine
pain or a reasonable story to tell, but I beleived somehow in my heart that
there was a solution out there, especially when I got to know about the
internet. In August 2011 I was crying on my bed one day with the computer,
someone came to my house who had internet connection on the computer and I was
like Oh y God this is the whole world, how do I tell these stories? And I
googled “telling the stories of women, telling stories about women”
