Author: James Whitmore

Somewhere in the highland villages of Rwanda and Uganda, and across the lake shores of Tanzania, an old practice endures — one that most of the outside world has never heard of, yet which has shaped the lives of women across generations. It has no single inventor and no founding date. It grew the way oral traditions do: passed from aunt to niece, mother to daughter, elder to girl, in quiet moments before the wider world could interrupt. This is the history of labia stretching in East Africa — one of the oldest forms of deliberate female body modification recorded on the continent, and one...

Long before Rwanda appeared on colonial maps, long before missionaries built their first churches in the hill country, and long before the modern nation-state drew its borders across Central Africa’s Great Lakes region, there existed a body of knowledge passed quietly between women. It moved mouth to ear, mother to daughter, aunt to niece.