When your switch is turned off, many of your systems go off permanently, with little hope of being revived. That is the principle message of Mary Karoro Okurut’s freshly launched book, The Switch.

The 211-page novel is a gripping thriller with an urgent message: Female Genital Mutilation is not temporary, but a life sentence of agony. For some countries like Somalia and Kenya where the practice is more widespread, this may not be news. But in Uganda where only a peripheral minority from the eastern highlands and the wild northeast practice it, the book is a shocker especially to Kampala folk and other Ugandans.

But The Switch is at the same time a story of triumph amid adversity and hope in a hopeless situation. It is the story of Chelimo, a Sabiny girl from Uganda’s mountainous Kapchorwa sub-region who is circumcised at 12, goes through high school, university, civil service, politics and winds up as a Cabinet minister.

But through Chelimo’s life, we learn of the silent suffering of female folk from communities that still practice female circumcision. These start with the silent endurance of untold pain as the crude instruments perform the cruellest cut in the most sensitive area of their body lest one suffers permanent scorn for even one brief scream; weeks of painful recovery for those who do not die from aggravated infections; years of trauma; repeated UTIs arising from urine retention; painful sex due to scarred genitalia; difficult child delivery due to an inelastic, scarred birth canal, which often causes death of the infants; the scourge of fistula; rejection by even the most well meaning spouses or partners and for some unlucky victims even cancer as a result of the “switch off.”

But Chelimo triumphs over all these in an explosive climax.

Karoro Okurut is easily the best known of Uganda’s contemporary writers who needs little introduction. She is also a public figure who has served in President Yoweri Museveni’s Cabinet for a decade and until May this year held the sensitive portfolio of minister for security. 

Her high profile today is alone enough to draw attention to her literally works, but the reading public has held her in high esteem and thousands of graduates who passed through her hands at Makerere University where she lectured in Literature for some two decades lovingly regard her as a mother.

Much as FGM is not always at the top of Uganda’s public agenda, the chilling statistic that 1.4 per cent of the country’s female population is affected makes Mrs Okurut’s book a much needed intervention.

Until now, an average Kampalan yawningly regards FGM as some distant story from Somalia, and matters are not helped that the afflicted 1.4 per cent of Uganda’s females are mostly on the geographical and economic fringes of the country, so it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

What this means is that even though the practice was outlawed by parliament five years ago, it continues unfettered underground because most parts of the country are not on the lookout for the crime, which is now officially a gross human-rights abuse. This year alone, 200 girls in Kapchorwa are reported to have been “switched off” and many more are believed to have been cut undetected.

Moreover, as happens in countries where FGM is banned, it is likely that even in Uganda it now gets done in modern health facilities where nurses and midwives from the “cutting” communities inflict it on newborn girls, making sure the sensitisation they are to get ten years later comes too late. This chilling message was delivered by no less that the United Nations Population Fund resident representative to Uganda, Akinyele Eric Dairo, during the launch of The Switch.

But the Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, herself a tireless anti-FGM crusader, delivered another scary alert: That even adult women who escaped FGM are at risk of being cut during labour, when midwives who support the practice circumcise them in modern hospitals under the guise of cutting and stitching to facilitate delivery.

The book is another product of the FEMRITE – Uganda Women Writers Association — which Mrs Okurut founded years back. And because of UNFPA’s financial support for her research for the book, Mrs Okurut has donated all proceeds from the sale of The Switch to FEMRITE to help budding female writers break into print.

The book is on sale at all leading book stores in Uganda.