There was a period in my life when female genital mutilation (FGM) occupied a significant part of my thinking, my writing, and my time.
This was not my job. I was not employed by a charity. I was not attached to a university research centre. I did not receive funding, consultancy fees, or project grants. What I had was a conviction that the issue deserved attention and a growing awareness that very few people around me seemed willing to discuss it.
Between roughly 2012 and 2016, I wrote extensively about FGM. I maintained a blog, participated in public discussions, spoke at events, and published a book titled A Lost Youth. I donated copies of that book freely because I wanted people to learn. I advised families concerned about the safety of their daughters. I supported individuals navigating immigration and deportation cases where fears of FGM formed part of the wider context. I attended court proceedings when asked to provide guidance or information. I answered emails. I had conversations. I listened.
Most of this work was unpaid.
I never expected otherwise.
At the time, my concern was not professional advancement. My concern was the issue itself.
Looking back now, what strikes me most is how little of that labour exists in any formal record. There are no annual reports documenting the hours. No organisational histories tracing those conversations. No institutional archive recording the countless small acts of advocacy that occupied evenings, weekends, and spare moments between other responsibilities.
Like much grassroots work, it existed largely through relationships.
A conversation here.
A meeting there.
A blog post.
A phone call.
A request for help.
An invitation to speak.
A parent seeking advice.
A professional looking for information.
A woman trying to understand her rights.
The work moved through communities rather than institutions.
At the same time, I was deeply conscious of the limits of my own knowledge. As a Zimbabwean woman, I understood that Africa was not a single story. The continent contains fifty-four countries, diverse histories, languages, cultures, and social realities. I was always cautious about claiming expertise beyond what I knew.
This caution often placed me at odds with the way expertise is frequently performed in public spaces.
The more I learned about FGM, the more aware I became of complexity. The more stories I encountered, the more difficult it became to make sweeping claims. I attended conferences and educational events not because I doubted the importance of my contribution but because I believed that advocacy carried an ethical obligation to keep learning.
I spoke at events in London and Slough, while simultaneously attending other events as a participant. I listened to survivors, practitioners, healthcare professionals, and campaigners. I sought knowledge wherever I could find it because I understood that responsible advocacy required humility.
Yet the challenge was never simply learning about FGM.
The challenge was trying to make people care about it in places where it was not yet considered important.
Today, FGM occupies a recognised place within safeguarding frameworks, educational policies, healthcare guidance, and public awareness campaigns. Schools receive training. Organisations employ specialists. Charities secure funding. Conferences attract professional audiences.
It is easy to forget how different the landscape looked a decade ago.
In Oxfordshire, conversations about FGM were often difficult to initiate. The subject generated discomfort. Some people viewed it as too sensitive to discuss. Others regarded it as distant from local concerns. Raising the issue could feel like introducing tension into spaces that preferred silence.
The work was therefore not simply educational.
It was political.
Not political in the party-political sense, but in the deeper sense of challenging what a community considered worthy of attention.
Again and again, the task involved persuading people that the issue mattered.
Again and again, it involved explaining why silence was itself a problem.
Again and again, it required continuing the conversation when others wanted it to end.
For many years, I believed that visibility was the goal.
If more organisations became interested, that was positive.
If policymakers listened, that was positive.
If schools developed safeguarding procedures, that was positive.
If charities emerged to address the issue, that was positive.
And in many respects, all of those developments were positive.
Yet what I did not anticipate was how easily the history of grassroots labour could disappear once institutions entered the conversation.
Over time, organisations grew around the issue. Funding became available. Professional expertise emerged. Training programmes developed. Conferences expanded. New voices entered the field.
As the issue gained legitimacy, something else happened.
The people who had been carrying the conversation before institutional recognition often became less visible.
This is not a criticism of any one individual or organisation. Rather, it reflects a broader pattern that I have since observed across race equality work, disability advocacy, mental health campaigns, and community organising more generally.
Institutions have a remarkable ability to absorb knowledge that originates elsewhere.
They professionalise it.
Standardise it.
Package it.
Fund it.
Measure it.
Report on it.
In doing so, they often create the impression that expertise begins at the moment of institutional recognition.
What becomes obscured is the labour that existed beforehand.
The unpaid labour.
The relational labour.
The emotional labour.
The labour performed by people who had no organisational backing, no funding streams, and no professional incentives beyond the belief that something needed to change.
The issue, then, is not ownership.
No individual owns a social cause.
The issue is memory.
Who gets remembered once a movement becomes successful?
Who is recognised as having contributed to its development?
Whose knowledge becomes institutionalised?
Whose expertise becomes legitimate?
And whose labour quietly disappears into the background?
These questions have become increasingly important to me in my later work on race, disability, leadership, and institutional power. The more I study organisations, the more I recognise how frequently they rely upon knowledge generated by communities while simultaneously distancing themselves from the people who produced it.
What is often presented as institutional expertise frequently has much older roots.
Behind every recognised field of practice are years of conversations, acts of care, informal advocacy, and unpaid labour that rarely make it into official histories.
In 2025, I received an invitation to attend an FGM event.
For a moment, I wondered whether somebody had remembered that earlier history.
Instead, I discovered that I had been invited to buy a ticket and listen.
I was not offended.
I was not angry.
If anything, the invitation clarified something I had been struggling to articulate for years.
The issue was never simply FGM.
The issue was how knowledge moves.
How communities generate it.
How institutions acquire it.
And how the people who help build a conversation can become almost invisible once that conversation acquires value.
Long before the experts arrived, there were ordinary people doing extraordinary amounts of work.
Most of them will never appear in organisational histories.
Many will never be cited.
Some, like me, will eventually move on to other forms of advocacy.
Yet without their labour, many of the conversations we now take for granted would never have existed at all.
