Reviews:

It's the sad, defeated expression on Kadi's face after her initiation, even more than the photographs of her agony as the razor blade cuts, again and again, through the tender, innocent flesh, that makes me angriest.

These are terrible pictures. They are in a book, The Day Kadi Lost Part of Her Life, published by the feminist publishing house Spinifex Press. The photographs, which first appeared in a Spanish newspaper, follow a four-year-old girl in an unidentified sub-Saharan country as she undergoes the rite of circumcision.

In the first pictures Kadi is all flashing white teeth, laughing, unaware of what is going to happen to her. In the following pictures her face is distorted in a scream, her arms and legs pinned down by one woman while another woman cuts until all the clitoris and the inner lips of the child's vagina are removed. In the last picture... the little girl, firmly forbidden to cry, stands forlornly with a blanket wrapped around her in the hut where she must remain for a week while her wounds heal.

Reviewed by Pamela Bone
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
11 March 1999