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Outlook: Confronting my grandma and my nation over FGM

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GettyImages-1152671397_Ifrah Ahmed credit Getty_Roberto Ricciuti.jpg

14/11/2019 GMT

Confronting my grandma and my nation over FGM

BBC World Service - Outlook, Confronting my grandma and my nation over FGM

Ifrah Ahmed went through FGM as a child. Now she fights to ban the practice in Somalia

Somali-born Ifrah Ahmed went through FGM as an 8-year-old, and now fights to ban the practice in Somalia and around the world

Ifrah Ahmed campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM). It's a procedure she herself endured as an 8-year-old in Somalia. Ifrah now lives in Ireland, where she helped ban FGM in 2012. She was one of the first Somali women to speak publicly about FGM, and has challenged the Somali president about the practice. She founded the Ifrah Foundation, a charity devoted to stopping FGM around the world. She told Outlook's Emily Webb her story. This interview contains upsetting descriptions.

As an art student in the 1970s, Michael Jang took thousands of photos of everything from San Francisco street scenes and LA party culture to domestic shots with his family.  He graduated, got work as commercial portrait photographer, put those old snaps away and forgot about them. Decades later, on whim, he submitted the old photos to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. The work garnered instant acclaim and overnight he was being recognised as one of the era’s most important documentary photographs.  Some of his work has been assembled in a book called Who Is Michael Jang? 


Picture: Ifrah Ahmed
Credit: Getty Images / Roberto Ricciuti

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