211. Nimco Ali

0:06Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do. Huge props to this week's Difficult Woman. Someone I've admired for many years, Nimco Ali, who has set up an organisation to campaign and fight against the practice of female genital mutilation nationwide. ride. She is a survivor of the practice which was carried out on her in Somalia when she was a very small girl. It's a hard listen but welcome to Difficult Women.

0:59Nimco Ali, OBE, is a warrior. Nimco Ali is a queen. Okay. Yes. And Nimco Ali is probably the leading voice, not just in the UK, but also I would say globally on violence against women and girls with a specific angle towards FGM, female genital mutilation. I'm sure you call it something else, genital cutting, female cutting. but just to fill our audience in a bit you were told Nimco age seven by I think a British teacher in an English school that this is what happens to girls like you after you suffered FGM you've been instrumental in shifting policies to have FGM recognized as a crime and you've worked both within and outside government on child abuse and violence against women and girls I think you're going to have much to say about whether labour is fighting the good fight but anyway to start at the beginning your early life your birth and the circumstances of that and how you came to this country yeah so I was born in Hargesa which is the capital of Somaliland now it used to be the second city of the Republic of Somalia but obviously that fell apart in the 1980s so I was in a very privileged family I had a very comfortable life and the thing about Somalilanders which we were before the 1960 kind of joining of Somalia is that there was a connection with the UK so like for example Cardiff has a history of Somalilanders going past 250 years there was a lot of them in East End and Sheffield and all these places so my family had access to come to the UK from did they have family already here so my grandfather had some of his kids here some of some of my aunties were here so there was like being educated so some of my cousins were in boarding schools in the UK so we had a connection to the UK so I moved to Manchester when I was four years old so that's how I came in it was a choice between my father was in Dubai at the time the UAE and the UAE wasn't what it is today it was just like one high rise and and like you know loads of desert lands so my mother had a choice between bringing us to the UK or like you know educating us in UAE.

3:16So we came to the UK at the age of four, but I had a very kind of great connection back and forth to East Africa. So my mother, as it was of the time, she was a very young mother. She was a very young bride. How old was she? So she got married at the age of 19 and had me at 20. And my father was a bit older, had money. So my mother's main thing in life was, which she really enjoyed, was having children. And I always say the reason why, well, there's six of us, So I'm the elders of six. But the kind of connection was that every time that my mom was pregnant, that we would go back to Somaliland and we would hang out with my grandparents.

3:51And my mother was very insistent on having her kids around her mother and around the kind of community support. So we had that. And my mother had a child every year. So I was in Africa quite often. So did she have the babies in the UK or in Somaliland? No, no, no. She always had her babies in Somaliland because she wanted to be with her mom. and so this was there any citizenship nationality issues around that wasn't so you could come here as like you know on our kind of on our visa so we had visas too because we because we were we were from Somaliland and my grandfather was um had kind of worked here as a seaman so there was the ability to be here on our visas so she wasn't interested in having her kids in the UK subsequently my two younger brothers were born in the UK and the complications that came out of that was actually quite interesting because because I never had the conversation with her beforehand but going back to Samadhalan meant she was there with women who understood FGM she was there with women who understood and kind of medical um assistance that um that understood her kind of like you know the birth um ratio of our brothers and our kids so my brother was born with a very big head but it's very it's very fine for our family so my youngest brothers when they were born in Manchester they were kind of like rushed around for at least a day and a half because the doctors thought there was something wrong with them because the head was so big compared to the general British centile and this was the late 80s so most kids that were in the like the red book centiles were all British Caucasian kids so the heads were quite averagely small but my brother's very Somali head was very big so I think for her and I think for a lot of women of her time being young and not necessarily being able to speak the language having babies around people so she didn't speak English she didn't speak English she didn't well she speaks English but she didn't speak English to the point where she could communicate her own needs at the time and you you said that she wanted to have her babies in the community where the other women understood both kind of her needs around child birth and you also said around FGM yeah no no but that's what I meant about the whole kind of so you would be so you so basically the birth attendant would be um would would would understand the complexities of fgm so so she'd had fgm herself so she had fgm so i come from a lineage of women the like you know from my greatest grandmothers to all the way up to me had fgm the people that don't have fgm within my family are in the early teens and that's kind of like how realistic it is in terms of like that break in that cycle of fgm so your nieces haven't had fgm so my nieces haven't had FGM my first cousins in America haven't had FGM and my little cousin hasn't had so you're in a way the last frontier of it yes for your family yes but also without you maybe your nieces and your and your little cousins might have had it because you've done so much to bring it to national attention yeah to make it to criminalize it here yeah I know 100 % but also what's what's what's interesting is that I haven't like had kids yet and I'm not sure if I'm going to have kids but um but the generation of british kids are being born now to somali parents are being born to first generation somali landers like myself um and they're not being cut but for me i think yes i i think my cousins maybe could have been at risk of fgm as opposed to my niece um in terms of the conversations that we're having but i think i also serve another kind of buffer in that conversation of trying to tell people that their kids are not different because they haven't been cut it's their difference because they're living in a complete different kind of context so in terms of the FGM that I had which was really bizarre and I always say it's bizarre and I always say mine happened completely out of context because I as you know me very well is that I'm very outspoken and I come from a family that has never really feared my ability to be outspoken but obviously FGM was still there is that I had my FGM happen to me at the age of six and then I came back to the UK by the time I was seven but I was freely then I was freely educated nothing else happened I wasn't kind of chastised or segregated I wasn't told this is what a girl is and as I said I have four brothers I have two uncles that are older than me that came back to the UK with us as my brothers so I grew up in a very male-dominated family but the kind of but the kind of the matriarchal role and the support for women was always there and that is one thing I always say about that I can't speak for the general Somali community but the North Somalilanders it's like when you're like you know girls are educated as freely as boys if you're if if there's no education in the family then nobody's educated because of poverty but there's no of this none of this conversation about girls not being educated and boys educated so on it's a very egalitarian system but yet we still have this really bizarre almost 100 % uptake of FGM but then the second part of FGM doesn't happen which is always trying to get you to say that you're going to get married like you know education is not a thing you are to go to school but that's not necessarily for you to be an independent kind of woman so yeah I had a I had a quite privileged upbringing until the age of seven when the when the civil war broke out in Somalia.

9:05When you you were in Somalia and you were six and this procedure took place without any warning yeah you've written about it you've spoken about it was a woman who came in in black yeah and you might subsequently found out again was the birth attendant so even in that conversation of my mother so when my grandmother passed away in 2018 I ended up starting having conversations with my mother that I never did and that is why in my writing my book I really realized that my mother is just a girl in that conversation of that she's just doing life just like I have so when she had me at like you know um at 20 yeah so she got married at 19 and had me at 20 she had very little control of anything but what she had control about was who was going to cut me how it was going to happen and the context it happens and I think it's bizarre to say that she did her best in a situation where she had no control over and I remember really well I still dislike that woman um but there's a but there's a thing that i have that that whole thing about hating my cutter that a lot of african women don't have they have this really weird maternal relationship with the women who carried out fgm to them and there's another friend of mine jaha dakwari who is an incredible gambian activist and she goes and talks to her cutter and there's a real why do you think that is stockholm syndrome i think so i think it is and i think it's also because you're not given the space to really question what happened to you and say like what the fuck was that and I and for me it was it was really as even like from the age of six on onwards it was like what the fuck was that and then when I came back to the UK at the age of seven and I told my teacher because I was so concerned as to what was this weird thing because my mum just completely stopped talking about it after that we never really had another conversation about my FGM until I had to have medical intervention at the age of 11 so it was this thing it happened and then it was just like kind of forgotten about who took care of the aftercare after you've been cut down there yeah so it was my mom it was my grandmother it was it was it's so it's this really rigorous kind of like process that happens and it's so meticulous so that's why um i always say to people that that would they we used to talk about the eradication of fgm and i say fgm is not a virus it's a pre-planned um form of act of violence which has many steps in order for you to consciously decide to do so yeah it was kind of like there was a well you can call it care there was there was a you know a communal kind of aftermath but compared to other people who have like real like you know they're kind of indoctrinated into this as being something that's part of their womanhood that part was skipped for me so then I could have the ability to question and the ability to talk about it in the way that I did and kind of be so kind of blasé about it and I remember having a conversation um a year ago or so with with one of my friends and I said oh I just re-watched back me talking about my FGM why was I so crass and just like laissez-faire about it and she's yeah I've always wondered that and I said because I don't really have the same I don't have the shame around it I don't have the connection as this is part of my culture and I don't have this kind of immense need to protect it or to respect the people that were around the whole kind of process that's why I'm very kind of vocal and very maybe kind of aggressive and I'm talking to perpetrators and people that kind of keep this on as a as a traditional practice but as a form of violence against women and girls it is definitely you think not a cultural tradition but a form of violence 100 % there is like that and that's what I mean I think it's the it's the uncomfortability of trying to say that people of color or people of certain um tribes and you know religions harm their children yeah it's a basically it's it's a form of um torture ultimately and it's also definitely a form of five violence against women and girls because it only happens to girls because they're girls I wasn't I wasn't cut because I was brown I wasn't cut because I was a Muslim or because I was Somali I was cut because I was a girl and the concept of me having power and the ability to be more than just a vessel for bearing children it was just like unimaginable you say that you didn't talk to your mother afterwards and I don't want to re-traumatize you although you seem I think happy to talk about it because it actually spreads the word about it being violence rather than tradition and I think that's the most important distinction that that we can make but is this a distinction that you have made with your own mother and has she have you had that conversation with her we we have had it now and and i and also i realized that ultimately she had very limited power around the conversation the only thing she could control is how it happened as a but not but why couldn't she stop it because she was 20 she was married this was like this was what this was what the role was in order for me to be accepted into that society so it was just kind of like the dumb thing she wasn't given the same space that I've been given in order to think about the consequences of this and to see this as something that's completely unnecessary I was having a similar conversation interestingly a night ago with with a Jewish guy about male circumcision yeah I was going to ask you about because people say well what about male circumcision so it's like in terms of completely different it's completely different in some contexts in the sense that men get the keys to the kingdom after they're cut um women after fgm that's the first line of oppression so then all the other kind of segregation um and and oppression starts so child marriage or like you know actually like you know forced marriage um like you know polygamy all these other things that you don't end up having choices over start but what's a really interesting thing about male circumcision is that most of my friends who are having the conversation is that they don't they have no religious need to do male circumcision but they can't imagine their sons not looking like them so there's a real primal weird thing about well it's helped me so I have to do it because I'm I'm kind of a man and I've got all these kind of like positive things around my anatomy because i was circumcised and i'm always like but you're holding an eight-day-old child in this ritual bris yeah bris and it's the same with um kind of like the mass circumcisions that that happen in like places like birmingham and stuff like that but i also think it's also similar to really barbaric boarding school experiences where men who've had horrible experience of boarding school send their kids to boarding school because they think they've made them so FGM is similar to that whole conversation very good you have to you have to be given the space in order to think about it in order to make those decisions and my mother wasn't given that space at the age of 20 but what she did have and I completely respect her for is that she had the ability to educate me freely and obviously as a child you don't see and you don't appreciate that my mother fought for me to go to a Church of England school which wasn't done for for Somali girls she allowed me to be as vocal as I was I wasn't forced to wear the headscarf so there's things that she fought which I actually just took for like you know like of course that's what's meant to happen but those are things that she was fighting against a very traditional community which I've never been part of so just FGM was the not the hill she chose to die on yeah and you you suffered something she had suffered exactly and it was like me sending my my son to the to the prep school that turned out to be you know anyway full of weirdos and yeah all these things and i did it and i knew it too yeah i knew the prep anyway you know it's just we it's like the philip larkin poem they fuck you up your mom and dad they may not think so but they do you know it deepens like a coastal shelf every generation re-traumatizes the following generation in the ways that they were traumatized

17:18you're you are different because all that happened in in somalia you were being educated in manchester but at the same time i had for me the bizarrest thing about my experience of fgm was grown girls and again i think i'm being a bit flippant because they were again i say grown but they didn't have the privileges that i did in terms of having a mother that wasn't necessarily as as strict as um others like they were like 15 year old girls being so when the war broke out in um somalia and then somali landers came over to the uk a lot of people were concerned about the uncut girls who were living in cardiff so there was like a large somali community in cardiff there's a large community in sheffield and we were called the fish and chips generations because we just grew up in the UK and the first thing that these parents were like oh my god we haven't had our daughters cut so they were taking adult girls to Dubai and I remember as a nine-year-old from out of school it wasn't of course illegal then it wasn't and it still happens now but carry on but it wasn't illegal and that's and that's the thing is that these people who were pretending to be like oh we're so innocent we don't know what's going on knew that the law meant that if they cut them here it was illegal but if they took them to Dubai it wasn't illegal and I still remember their MP at the time a very like you know prominent Labour MP um saying that we shouldn't question the Somali community because they're being because they're traumatized because there's war going on and there's family reunions.

18:38It's the whole business of it's a culture. Yeah. So it's like what your teacher said to you and I know don't want to make you do this but what do you remember of that day and then coming back to your school and actually talking to your teacher about it. Yeah but because again because i was so empowered as a child and um i came in as like what the fuck miss like i've seen i saw civil war i basically so we drove from hergesa which is the capital of somaliland as it was being bombed to djibouti took like days and days my mom who is heavily pregnant had gone back into somaliland to try to get us because she was like i need to go get my kids so it was it's really like a like a film i remember my mom going and i heard my so we passed in the night because we were like english-speaking kids so my brother said something and i was like shut up like you know we're not going to be able to pee or something i said something to him so i was i was i was scolding my little brother and my mom heard me and she called my name and then i said to my grandma because we were all hiding in the back of a van because my two uncles were were with us they were 11 and 13 at the time and the somali army were very much insistent on murdering the sons of Somalilanders I know and hit right on was this six-year-old um screaming I said mom I I can hear my mom and then my grandma was like no no no you're just like imagine it so then my heavily pregnant mom goes back into Somaliland to try to get us here's that we've left so we so we drove to Djibouti got our visas because so then talking about immigration our passports were cancelled because the Somali passports no longer existed so we had to reapply the visas to come back to the UK proved that we lived in the UK.

20:16My lovely Jewish neighbours sent photos and everything of us living in Manchester to the Home Affairs to get all our documentation, all this stuff. We came back, but before we were coming back, we had our FGM done. So you say we had our FGM done. You had your FGM formed, didn't you? Yeah, I had my FGM, but I had other people. There were other people at the same time, with the same midwife type. With the same midwife type, but that's their story to tell so i never tell whoever else was in that totally was in that um kind of so we had fgm then came back but was this in kind of sterile conditions did you have anesthetic we you know we did and this is like so i didn't know that this was the same woman who had delivered me cut my mom like this kind of lineage that she had within our family so my parents because again it's this whole thing of like fgm doesn't happen in a vacuum you had to they basically evacuated her from Somaliland to come to Djibouti she was in Djibouti and she'd got some like anesthesia some like some all this stuff and then I was like I'd kind of like kicked off and then she called me a brat because she was like you don't know how much I've worked to get all this thing together and she was like you had to thank her for her for mutilating you she wanted me to be grateful for the efforts that she went through a war zone to be well to be fine kind of understanding in a weird kind of it was her job it was her job and i've always had a weird issue with the word being a brat or being having standards because because people always think that i complain about things that i'm not necessarily sure we complain about i should complain about that but she was like how are you kicking off when i've put all this effort into making this as sterile as possible at what point did she call you a brat in the procedure she was holding me down but yeah i haven't talked about my fgm for a long time and it's like you know it's like almost like well I've lived more with FGM than I have without it and it's yeah you said yeah you have because it happened when you were six what really shocked me when I was reading into you Nimco was that when you went to a school 20 years ago and you found that a lot of the girls in the class had experienced FGM in this country yeah in 2006 what the actual that's and that was and that's what it was so I basically so my FGM kind of experience was I had it at seven like six and then by the time I was seven at eleven because I had a really invasive form of FGM which is very common in um in the Somali community I had complications from my FGM so I had a de-infibulation I had a medical intervention so so there were two situations when I when I came back I was in school and I told the teacher and I was ignored and I thought okay this is what happens to girls like you I was in a major hospital in Cardiff as a result of me having complications from my FGM the impact of the abuse that I'd suffered was there but again they dismissed it there's always this cultural lens that's put on the rights of girls that's what I hate terms such as culture on a based abuse all this bullshit that the Labour Party and the left really are keen on means that you other girls and you look at the context of a community as opposed to the individual so either we believe in the rights of girls or we don't so I had that at 11 and then I just disengaged because my friends and their elder sisters in Cardiff were being taken as like as almost full adults to go have FGM and I thought you know what this is just too ridiculous I'm just gonna I'm just gonna disengage until 2006 when I went to the school to speak to 13 year olds about aspirational things that they could do going to university and all that kind of stuff and the first thing that they asked me was about FGM and I was very flippant and I said okay how many of you have even had FGM what do you know about FGM not thinking that 13 out of 14 British porn girls were all cut and again there was that whole dismissal of what these girls experiences was so yeah it was that was you talk to the teacher I talked to the teacher I went back to my office because I was in public health at the time and I wrote about FGM in a third person because I knew that as soon as I said I was a survivor of FGM the word survivor wasn't even being used at that time it was victim victim there's victim that I knew I would be I would have this complete different lens on it I would I would no longer you would be that person I would be that Nimco Ali writer activist I mean like you know at the time I was another issue yeah at the time I was a graduate I was in a fast stream I was doing like all these things so I would then become an FGM survivor and I just didn't want to be it's like being a very victim yes you don't you don't want that to define you but you felt you had to i had to talk about it so i i'd always talked about it in the third in the third like person i said oh have you ever and then i remember when i when when i ended up first setting up an organization um to talk about um fgm it was like at the time it was around 2011 and theresa may had kind of come in and wanted to do something about um fgm and i said oh there's this incredible organization called daughters of eve that that reframes fgm in a in the context of violence against women and girls and she said and then somebody was in the team so somebody in the team like oh yeah i heard of that and i was like well you haven't because it doesn't exist and that's why you set it up with leila yeah i did set it up with leila because i went to leila hussain yeah and i went to go um but the thing about that is that's when my activism started and i thought i don't want to be the the fgm like you know person again that's why i created my name with a k i want to be a completely different person so my professional name was like nimko ali like you know civil servants like you know this person that is like doing what she's doing and then they would be like nimko the fgm activists um and i didn't want the two to coalesce um coalesce but they did because you can't talk about these traumas without necessarily also showing your face and then obviously like you know google is a thing apparently so yeah well you must be i mean you must be very glad that you did because you've achieved so much yeah i mean but it's not it's not over let's spin back it became fgm was criminalized but then you know in a sense it's been decriminalized because so few criminal prosecutions have actually taken place so can you just bring us up to speed as to where we are now so yeah so basically what we did is like we we closed the gap of taking girls out of the uk in order to have them cut so the thing was so fgm was criminalized to do it in the uk in 1985 but people could read the law so they were taking girls out in order to cut them for example mine was extraterritorial so that wasn't a crime so then that was in 2013 they closed the loophole in order to say that if if you take a british citizen out of the uk and and you cut them you can still be charged for that then in 2014-15 we um said that at the time they they wanted the victim to come forward in order to have the prosecution stand and a lot of these girls sorry you needed the victim you need the female to go against their family which was which is really tough it's it's really hard it was the same with um forced marriage where they weren't being preemptive about supporting girls before they were forced into marriage what they would do is they would wait for them to go to bangladesh or pakistan and then say oh well we can we can bring you back to the uk but you can't have any conversations with with your family anymore so that in 2015 um it was said that the state could carry out prosecutions even if the victim fails to um press charges which was again that was great then the uk invested in in terms of um having um african defense or the department for international um um development gave like you know the the larger investments into um ending fgm and then what we had is that we had fgm added to the Children's Act meaning that FGM didn't have to happen in order for you to take the child out of the situation the risk of FGM could trigger a child protection mechanism so if the mother was cut and or the sister in the family was cut there was enough evidence exactly because within a lot of the families where FGM is evidence there is very little you know red flags that are happening these are well-functioning families clean houses all those things that would consider a child to be at risk when not being indicated and social services were like oh but yeah you know so and so is a lovely mum she's like you know the kids are well fed and well dressed I'm like but she's about to mutilate her fucking child like like she's telling you that she doesn't think it's wrong so we kind of weakened the triggers in order for child protection mechanisms to be happen and that again was like you know I think I'm very flippant about the like you know the hard work that was done within the space of a decade that could have been done before but it was just like you know being single-handedly and stubborn and also having a lot of men interested enough that was supportive in government you've you've said that FGM is a kind of expression of the way society values it's yeah it's girls and i suppose until you see a total sea change in gender apartheid for example which is not going well yeah in muslim majority countries then it's going to carry on because you're swimming against the same tide yeah there's a real issue I have with the terminology about Islam ultimately being about the segregation and oppression of women these are cultures that I've chosen that so a Pakistani and an Indian don't have the same kind of gender parities that we do China has an incredible so you're saying it's elective it's elective it's not dictated by religion no it's not the Mohammed no it's not and I think we have we also have a deep-reaching issue with the use of British Muslims as a term that I find quite problematic because when we talk about British Muslims, we're normally talking about Pakistanis.

30:17We're not talking about Nigerians. We're not talking about Qataris. We're not talking about the myriad of different Muslims that are here in the UK. And I said that before, when every time there's a British Muslim organization set up, it's just predominantly Pakistani people. And I'm thinking, well, Somalis are Muslims, Nigerians are Muslims, Qataris are in the UK, Syrians. There are a myriad of Muslims that are in this country that are not Pakistanis. so again there is a confusion between cultural like you know views on women within certain communities and islam and i think that is something that we need to separate there are people that interpret islam islam like you know the first commandment of islam is to read so it's like knowledge because you're meant to read the quran for yourself and it's meant to apply to you as an individual person but because they've segregated women and they've segregated people from learning to read the Quran these men have interpreted the Quran as the way into things to do with FGM or whether it's to do with child marriage or whether it's to do with polygamy, all these things those are not Islamic tendencies This is the male interpretation Which is taken to the extreme in Afghanistan at the moment where a woman can't even see out of both eyes or sing, sing in her own eyes And that's not a Muslim thing that's an Afghani issue so there's an issue in Afghanistan And I think it's the same in India where we're having like women who are being gang roped and all these things.

31:39So those are issues within the Indian subcontinent and certain places. So what's your conclusion then about why do some countries, I'm not going to say cultures, continue this practice? Is it a way of just the continuation of the patriarchy? What is it? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And it's also another way of ensuring that men don't lose power. fgm was meant to break me and meant to keep me silent in a corner but it made me incredibly vocal i always say i would not give a shit about vaginas had i not had fgm the irony is i was meant to be embarrassed about the experience that happened to me i was meant to fear what happened to me and i was meant to be like you know being so shamed that you never spoke of it again exactly and you became a good wife and mother yes and really like stood behind men and didn't like you know didn't didn't raise my voice and have all these other kind of conversations but ultimately I was very much like you should be embarrassed for thinking FGM is okay rather than shame change sides yeah age when you were six yeah I was I had a conversation about a year ago with um a politician in Somaliland and he was talking about FGM in such a like crass way and I said to him like in Somalia I'm like are you fucking crazy I said you're not talking about like nose piercings you know you're talking about a child's anatomy and the guy sitting next to me was more shocked about me calling this guy a fucking weirdo.

32:59I'm like, why are you guys not embarrassed about feeling so comfortable about the abuse of kids? So until we put words like weird and gross and abusive around FGM, then we're going to consistently have this ability to try to negotiate with abusers. It's abhorrent, it's shocking, it's evil, and it should not happen anywhere in the world for any reason.

33:43explain your position kind of your liminal position both you know as a home office advisor working in public health and so on and just to bring people up to date so yeah so i've like so I was in civil service from 2005 up to 2010 as a general civil servant. And then I left to pursue activism. I came back professionally into the Home Office again in 2020 to be the independent advisor for Priti because she was doing the violence against women and girls strategy. That's Priti Patel, who was then Home Secretary. Yes. Yeah. um so the the reason why i took that role was that i have a privilege in terms of working in the sector working in the violence against women and girls sector who's very mistrustful of government and then also having this conversation with the ability to to be able to sit there with government and say the government wants to do something and i can say something about pretty is she's incredibly passionate about victims and she's incredibly passionate about women and girls and she's incredibly passionate about ending violence against women and girls that was one of the key things that she wanted to do but the institution of the home office is different i think the home home office is only second worst to the foreign office it's filled with a lot of people who think they're progressive but they're actually quite regressive i was in a i was so this is me the independent advisor to the government an african woman who's a survivor of fgm being lectured by a member of the civil servants male female okay female there was also a male there female telling me oh we need to educate communities about fgm because they don't know it's wrong i was like what the fuck are you talking about so i thought you know i said i said these people are able to live in the uk fill their tax benefits know when to park know how to when to take the bins like if they know the basic civilities of you know living in this country they know that fgm is wrong and if you look at the home office so i'm actually not even invited to the fgm events anymore they had these cultural blinkers on which was like they can't see it if they if it's of another you know another tribal or national culture it's like no we're not i remember meeting nikki morgan and many years ago when she was education secretary and we were talking i think about fgm and girls being segregated in british schools she said well we can't go and see these schools because you know they're not allowed to by the community i was like your education's yeah i know it's like get in there it's your country like why don't you step in and i always say that i'm always like you you are the person in power just say it's not okay and they're always very much like oh am i allowed to i'm like you are allowed to because when i was a child i was behind this progressive Labour Party Cardiff wing of speaking on my behalf saying it was offensive it was racist to talk about my FGM it was it was bad to call it abuse and all these other kind of conversations and I needed somebody to say no actually as a as an adult and as a parent or as a human being I think this is wrong and that's what we need we need people to be able to use their privileges in order to put their head and you've done that you've done that and you've done so much you've done daughters of eve you've done the five foundation your book which is what we're told not to talk about but we're going to anyway women's voices from east london to ethiopia nobody has done more than you thank you in terms of just this business of it's their culture i i mean this the whole hoo-ha over the iftar in trafalgar square yeah what do you think that was really about so i you know so i can't even say that i'm the child of immigrants i consider myself as an immigrant in this country and i think it's it's okay to be offended if that is happening in that kind of context i don't know why it's needed i don't believe in the concept of islamophobia either which is going to get me into a lot of trouble it's fine because i don't either because you can't because again this is this so you say it wasn't needed what we're talking about is the mass prayer event to celebrate the end of eden the and the iftar in which was attended by sadiq khan and also men and women for other faiths yeah as well nick timothy said it was an act of domination do you think this was evidence that we still have a problem in this country i'm saying you don't like that yeah are we too tolerant in this country yes that's what i'm getting towards yeah so was nick timothy right to say look you know we love our neighbor but multiculturalism is actually a device like multiculturalism is the ability to allow people to build mosques to allow kids to be able to um i can speak their languages to do all these things.

38:18It is not about taking over Trafalgar Square and having a mass prayer. You can do symbolic things and I think Ramadan should be celebrated and we had the Ramadan lights. I think it's just a little bit over the top and I think it is... But where do you draw the line, Nimco? The mass prayers. Because you're allowed to say that you still are a Christian country that respects... So there was an Instagram reel that I was watching today and it was about an Indian woman or a Pakistani woman. she was a south asian woman who knocked on her german neighbor's door to offer them food saying oh it's ramadan like you know i want to offer you food and she's like i don't want it and i'm like but that's fine but if that was a british person even if they were uncomfortable they they would still take the food saying thank you very much and then just take it and then put it in the bin or feel bad about putting it in the bin i took an english friend of mine to um to kenya she's vegan but she was so scared of being offensive she started eating like things that were cooked in like animal fats and i was like babe are you okay like what is wrong with you this is when we get to the problem we have with the rape gangs the fear of of offending has led to far worse harms yes than take some some particular members of our british society taking offense yeah and then we've led to the point now that the only people that are objecting to these things which have gone so far this way are the far right and if the far like you know if the far right become the voice of reason then that becomes a problem it's like i always say a broken clock can be right twice a day but ultimately you need to fact check it with a working clock and the working clock should be the right-minded like you know people in the middle ground it should be us saying well that's not okay like i wouldn't allow that there are open churches in saudi they're not open churches in Somalia, they don't do any of these things.

40:08If the indigenous people of a country are there, then their culture should be supreme. It's fine. But if countries like America, there has to be things about the African-Americans, there has to be different... Native Indians. Native Indians. Native Americans, sorry. Yeah, Native Americans. There has to be conversations around the balance of people's rights. And Americans, I feel a bit weird when they say this is a white country it's never been a white country and it's never going to be an indigenous white country but europe is an indigenous white population and i don't have any offense with the way that i was raised as a child so i went to a church of england primary school i went to a school where i said grace i was given a bible it didn't make me less of a muslim it actually made me more tolerant as a human being to be able to grow up with the jewish community like you know learn about christianity at school but now we've gone to the point where we're taking teachers like um what's her name um i think it was catherine the mikaela school to call burble saying yeah so that she's done this podcast but that's see that's the kind of an like that's like um i can't remember why she's being taken to court so she's being taken to court because um there are there are um men specifically i think it's led by men saying that their daughter should be, or their children should be allowed to pray in school.

41:30And she doesn't have... Oh yes, she's saying that it's a secular school. The governance of the school is secular and they can't pray openly in the playground. And I'm with her, I'm behind her. Me too. It's only in France, you wouldn't be able to wear a headscarf to school. No, but the point is also, those kids don't have to go to that school. If it's so important for your kids to pray at school... Send them to another school. Send them to the Yusuf Islam School in Brent. Now, you were going to mention an email you got. Oh, yes. Women and girls. No, so, yeah. So I got an email from this government.

42:03The Labour government. The Labour government, from the Home Office, the Department of Justice, and also the Foreign Office, are going to put together an incredible movement to end FGM the first time ever. And I was like, what are you actually talking about? And they've been headed by, they've got an organisation that they're working with, which is led by a white woman. and I said we've worked on FGM for the last 15 years like you know the last conservative government you might not respect any of the things that they've done they didn't even know about it no no but no strategy no they didn't know it's not the thing and then that they didn't know about it but they're rewriting history in order for them to be like you know the keepers of women's rights and I think that is really problematic and that is not going to help anyone okay difficult time okay what is it what's been your when have you had to be most difficult and then your most difficult time I want both so I think I think my difficult like you know I've I've had to be difficult in order to be able to get the changes that I've had and I've had to be really um kind of dogmatic and really believe because it's really bizarre to say when nobody else is saying that FGM is wrong and to kind of put my head above the parapet and say it's abuse and people say well it's not and I said like having to explain it so that I think I've had to always be difficult and I'm consistently still being difficult and a lot of people find that hard because I haven't been broken by my FGM it's become a source of the reason why I do what I do but I think my most difficult time has been recently people always misunderstand the concept of institutional racism in terms of health care and things we also have to be able to diversify our systems so we understand the root of institutional racism within the police but we don't understand that we don't accept the institutional racism and the misogyny within the healthcare system so my mum has recently been diagnosed with cancer and the service that she got as a woman of colour was shocking and I could see because she was a woman of colour and she is a lot like a lot of immigrant women doesn't complain and has this conversation of the fact that the NHS is free the NHS is not free the NHS is something that we pay for on a daily basis I think that's one of the t-shirts I really want to get.

44:12It's like the NHS is not free. It's quite incredibly expensive. So that has been my most difficult time advocating for somebody that you care about in an institution which you respect, but you also understand has a long way to go. We consider the NHS as though it's so sacrilegious that it can't be criticised. And that's a problem because because we don't criticise it enough because we love it, then it fails a lot of the people that we care about. and it becomes another example of something that we you know it's our religion so we can't criticize it i wanted to write an article about the two the two organizations which have adjectives the bbc and the nhs we're criticizing the bbc on a daily basis because we think we pay for it and we know we pay for it it's like a hundred and whatever odd a year we pay millions for the nhs and we're so embarrassed of saying anything about it like matt hancock i think was an incredible health secretary because he wanted to revolutionize it but he was consistently because he was a conservative he was consistently being seen as somebody that was breaking down the NHS but the reality is if you love something then you have to be able to hold it hold it to account say I love you but this is not working so my most difficult time and it's something that is like you know that I'm that I'm still going through is like you know holding the NHS to account and there's a an amazing organization called black women rising who are it's about how black women so there's maternal health care for black women in the nhs is horrific cancer care is horrific like most black women are being diagnosed at stage four because they're just being dismissed so yeah i think my most difficult um time and is an ongoing time is while caring for somebody that i love fighting an institution which is loved by everyone and you can't like you know you can't say anything bad about the nhs and i'm not saying nhs is terrible i'm just saying an nhs needs to get better it needs to get especially for black women black women actually women but specifically black women can you believe that the the first women's health strategy was done in 2022 i know and it was the conservative party it was a no it was an incredible girl within um woman within and within the nhs um emma dean who who basically pushed through the fact that we needed to do a women's health strategy.

46:22Nimco Ali thank you very much for being this week's Difficult Woman you're amazing thank you baby

46:35that line from her own teacher who she had confronted about what had happened to her, this is what happens to girls like you, will stay with me for a very long time thank you for listening to another episode of my Difficult Women podcast just remember to subscribe and to download wherever you get your podcasts to make sure the latest episode is always ready to go every Friday afternoon. Bye.