Can You Honor Culture Without Being Confined by It?

By: Augusta Osmatu Bangura

She was born in innocence, believing she would be the master of her own life. Little did she know her path had already been carved by tradition.

From the moment her tiny hands could grab tin cups for “play cook,” her parents—rather than handing her a pencil to write—offered her something they thought was better: an abackor to cook. When her innocent body began to change—breasts like calabash, hips swelling like cherries—they declared she was now a woman. It was time. They cut her, taking not just pleasure, but a piece of her. Leaving her incomplete.

It didn’t end there. As she grew, the eyes of predatory men followed her, piercing through her garments. Once again, her parents claimed to have a solution: they married her off.

You see them carrying water, I see them carrying the weight of tradition.

Now imagine how suffocating that was. Imagine being born with no say in your own life. Imagine being treated as a vessel, a tool anyone could use. Imagine watching your dreams and hopes wash away—not because of anything you did, but because you were born a girl. You didn’t choose it. You see nothing wrong with it. Yet society does.

Done imagining? Suffocating, wasn’t it?

This is no isolated story. In Sierra Leone, millions of girls are bound by such brutal traditions. Rugiatu Neneh Turay knows this cruelty all too well.

They say you don't heal from it, but she did and she came back stronger.

At just nine years old, she was taken to the sacred Bondo bush in Kono District and subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), a rite carried out by the secretive Bondo Society—one that marks nearly 9 out of 10 women in the country. She endured days of bleeding, infection, and pain no child should know. But from that trauma grew a fierce determination to protect others.

In July 2024, Sierra Leone passed the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, criminalizing the marriage of anyone under 18. For the first time in the nation’s history, the law stood against centuries of harmful tradition, protecting girls who had been silenced in the name of culture. This change was part of a movement fueled by activists like Rugiatu. After surviving the cut, she founded the Amazonian Initiative Movement (AIM-SL), turning personal pain into a nationwide crusade.

Rather than rejecting culture outright, she engaged traditional leaders and cutters, proposing a “bloodless initiation” that preserved the ceremony’s cultural significance without the blade.

Culture was never meant to fracture

Today, dozens of villages have embraced this alternative, sparing girls the physical and psychological scars Rugiatu endured.

In 2018, the government also launched the Free Quality School Education Programme, giving every child—especially girls—the right to sit in classrooms instead of kitchens.

This is what generational breakthrough looks like

By 2023, according to the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, female enrolment across primary and secondary schools had significantly increased.

These may seem like small victories, but they are life-altering—winds of change breaking the generational voices that once said culture must define us and bind us.

Culture is not our enemy. It is part of us—a legacy of names, styles, languages, and stories. But when did we allow culture to become a cage? When did it begin to strip away our rights, our dreams, our voices?

Culture is beautiful, it's a living tapestry of stories, colors, and traditions that connect us to our past and inspire our future.

Culture should not confine us, but reflect us. And when we accept that not all parts of culture deserve preservation, but transformation, only then will we be free—free from the unwritten rules that have quietly held us back.