The New York Time || Called “the woman who began the rebellion of Ethiopian women,” she helped thwart a barbaric practice that she had suffered and that had cost her sister’s life.
Bogaletch Gebre, an Ethiopian women’s rights activist and scientist who helped lead a successful campaign in her homeland against female genital mutilation, a barbaric practice she herself had endured growing up there, died on Nov. 2 in Los Angeles. Her birth date is not known, but she was said to be 66.
Her death was announced by the website of the nonprofit organization she founded, KMG Ethiopia, which in its two decades has helped end the culturally entrenched practice of genital mutilation and has empowered women in that country.
The website did not specify the cause of Ms. Gebre’s death. The Los Angeles Times reported that she had been receiving medical treatment in Los Angeles in recent years after a car accident in 1987 left her with nerve damage.
After that accident, doctors told her she might never walk again. But she went on to run six marathons, raising money to pursue her charitable projects.
That was just one sign of the determination that propelled her life. Ms. Gebre overcame extraordinary adversity in her youth, gaining an education and moving to Israel and the United States for scientific training, then returning to Ethiopia to focus on improving the lives of its women.
Through her efforts, the rate of female genital mutilation in the areas where KMG Ethiopia operated dropped to 3 percent from 100 percent over 10 years, according to a 2008 UNICEF study. In addition, some of these areas banned child marriage, bride abduction, polygamy and domestic violence.
The UNICEF study recommended that the KMG model be replicated in other parts of Africa.
The British newspaper The Independent called Ms. Gebre “the woman who began the rebellion of Ethiopian women.”
The rebellion was not a conventional one of protest or labor strikes but one rooted in community conversations designed to reach consensus and bring about cultural change.
KMG started, with the help of grants, by focusing on the practical, day-to-day needs of rural communities, like fixing bridges, digging wells and planting trees to ease the burdens of women who had to fetch water and firewood.
Then came the facilitated conversations about what needed to change.
As the KMG website described the process, there would be testimonials from parents “that they would not allow their daughters to be cut, that the men wanted to marry uncut girls, that the abuse of wives and children would be stopped, that daughters will be kept in school, that no girl would be married without her will.”
In many cases, the process has empowered women while improving economic conditions.
“The societal change that KMG has triggered is substantial,” the Belgium-based King Baudouin Foundation said in 2013 in awarding its prestigious prize for African development to Ms. Gebre. Tens of thousands of women have been spared gross human rights violations, the foundation said, and their communities have become more equitable.
Ms. Gebre was in graduate school in California in the mid-1990s when she was drawn back to her homeland. Severe famine had struck Ethiopia, poverty was mounting and her country was in political turmoil.
“Yes, I could have had a better house and gone jogging on the beach or gone to a spa every weekend,” she said later. “But is that what life is all about? Could I have stayed there, knowing my sisters were being cut and abducted and turned into servants? Einstein said you start living when you give yourself out. I feel I’m living now.”
Ms. Gebre, known as Boge (pronounced Bo-gay), was born into a farm family — her mother was Lonseke Ayemo and her father, Gebre Kabre — in the remote village of Zata in the Kembatta district, about 250 miles southwest of the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. She was one of 14 children, many of whom died in childhood.
When she was 12, she was subjected to female genital mutilation. The myth was that it cleansed a girl and prepared her for giving birth, and that if her baby was touched by some parts of the genitals during childbirth, it would die.
As Ms. Gebre described her procedure, a man grabbed and blindfolded her while two women held her legs and a third woman sat between them using a razor to slash her genitals. She nearly bled to death; one of her sisters did die that way.
Once a girl healed, a process that took about two months, she would be considered ready for marriage. Had Ms. Gebre accepted that fate, she would most likely have led a life of drudgery as an illiterate farm wife.
“Women were regarded as no better than the cows they milked,” she said.
Ms. Gebre wanted to avoid replicating the life of her mother, who, she told The Independent, had been routinely beaten and abused.
“She had her back stooped, her legs broken, her jaw broken, even though she did everything right,” she said of her mother. “In that situation, many women accept their situation as God-given, not man-made.”
Ms. Gebre resolved to change those attitudes and the culture that promoted them, however impossible that seemed.
“I began KMG Ethiopia thinking that if I could save a single girl from a dreadful life, from practices that numb, crush the spirit and rob women of their dignity,” she wrote in a fund-raising letter in 2015, “I would have done my life’s mission.”
Ms. Gebre had a role model — a great-uncle who was a pastor at a mission school. He and his family dressed well and were worldly, and he inspired her to get an education.
When she was supposed to be doing her chores, like fetching water, she stashed her water bucket in the bushes and slipped away to school. Her sisters covered for her. By the time her mother discovered what she was doing, Ms. Gebre could read.
“I was an oddity as a girl who learned to read,” she told The Economist in 2013. “My mother helped, but my father never knew — he would have preferred his son to have learning.”
She was the first girl in her area to finish primary school. She then won a scholarship to a boarding school in Addis Ababa. From there, she studied microbiology and physiology in Jerusalem, and then won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her master’s degree. She studied for her doctorate in epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but returned to Ethiopia before completing it.
She and one of her sisters, Fikirte Gebre, founded KMG Ethiopia in their home village in 1997. (The abbreviation stands for Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Toppe, which means “women of Kembatta working together.”) They learned quickly that women’s rights were just abstractions to the villagers, and that they first had to gain their trust by helping them with their day-to-day concerns.
Ms. Gebre then set up local assemblies where anyone, even young women, could speak to anyone else, even village elders. The women started with small proposals, like asking if men and women could sit together in public, then questioned whether women could become elders, then moved on to demands for the eradication of female genital mutilation.
“The rebellion just grew and grew,” Ms. Gebre said. KMG built a mother and child health center and set up schools, and women have been appointed and elected to public positions.
For the rest of her life, Ms. Gebre continued to press for what she said was her dream for African women: “That the world realizes that women’s suppression is no good for business, for the economy, nor for human development.”
