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A coordinated social media campaign defending female genital mutilation (FGM) emerged across Malian platforms in August, days after a national NGO put up anti-FGM posters in Bamako.
Anonymous accounts responded with their own images, which shows men smiling, thumbs up, wrapped in Mali’s national colours, captioned “In Mali, yes to excision! Let’s protect girls and build their future.”
The campaign reverses the anti-FGM movement’s message, casting the practice as protection rather than harm, in a country where cutting girls’ genitals, often without anaesthesia, remains widespread. It is difficult to trace who is behind it, but journalists and Malian feminist organisations have linked much of it to accounts sharing AI-generated content.
According to UN Women, roughly 89% of Malian women aged 15–49 have undergone FGM. Mali has no national law that specifically bans the practice, and advocates say the country has become a destination for families from neighbouring nations, including Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Niger, that have already criminalised it. A 2023 study estimated FGM causes around 44,000 excess deaths annually across 15 African countries, including Mali.
UNICEF data also shows that the women who primarily suffer from the harm are not unanimously against it because fewer than one in five Malian women and girls believe FGM should stop, and opposition is even lower among men and boys.
Support for ending the practice is concentrated in regions where it is already rare and among the more educated, meaning the “yes” campaign is pushing into a culture where resistance to cutting is thin to begin with.
The campaign also leans on a familiar move, which is framing opposition to FGM as a foreign import, and cutting as a defence of national sovereignty. It echoes usual rhetoric, where the legitimate rights of African women are recast as Western imposition, and traditional practices are framed as evidence of cultural strength, even where those practices are lethal to the women and girls they claim to protect.
Malian activists have long organised campaigns against FGM independent of outside pressure, a history the “yes” campaign’s framing seeks to erase. For now, no law protects Malian girls from the practice, and a well-funded and coordinated disinformation effort is actively working to keep it that way.
