In the Somali desert where raiding parties were frequent the nomads murdered even pregnant women in the hope that the unborn child might be a male. Slain enemies suffered castration and phallotomy.
-Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, Edward Rice
The hero carries home the trophy of his prowess and his wife, springing from her tent, utters a long shrill scream of joy.
-First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
Edna Adan is a born and bred Somalilander, but in her Hargeisa hospital you will not find her ululating after a phallotomy, prostatectomy, or complete bisection of the vas deferens, because you will not find many men in her wards. She runs her own womens hospital and her mostly female doctors and nurses, who she chose and trained herself, have other kinds of cases to attend.
I was there for a few days to write about her work and met many of her staffers. One told me how she had been questioned by Edna when she first applied for training. What would you do if while you were getting her case history, a patient were to vomit on you?, Edna asked. I said, I would clean it up and keep talking as if nothing had happened. Edna liked her answer, and Shukri Mohamed Taher is now the hospital’s top gynecologic surgeon.
Somehow I doubt that Richard Burton would have even bothered to write his book if he’d witnessed such an encounter upon taking his first footsteps in Somaliland. Not the kind of thing that sold African adventure stories back in London, not a cause that the British imperial army would have considered worth dying for in the land of the Mad Mullah, and not a scene that Ridley Scott would have put in his Black Hawk Down. Not enough blood and no severed testicles.