Activist Edna Adan Ismail
Edna Adan Ismail: A Hero to Women and Girls Everywhere
By Emma Burd
As a child growing up in British Somaliland in the1940s, Edna Adan Ismail was taught reverence for the medical field by her father, a beloved Somali doctor. The only physician around for miles, he worked relentlessly, often letting Edna tag along and help him. She witnessed up-close the dedication and compassion he had for his patients, and it inspired her life’s trajectory. “[It was] the first time I had seen an adult dealing with adult issues with so much patience and kindness. The hours of work he put in doing something for other people left a great impact on me,” says Edna. “It gave me a benchmark, something to aim towards. It gave me the example of good qualities in a human being, and I admired that.”
When Edna grew up, not only did she pursue a career as a nurse, but she eventually opened a hospital in her country. These amazing accomplishments were all the more significant considering that the Somaliland she grew up in, there were no educational institutions for girls; it was highly uncommon for them to receive schooling of any kind. But Edna’s father saw the value in education regardless of gender and encouraged Edna to listen in when he hired a tutor to teach a few local boys how to read and write. After some time of quietly observing these lessons, Edna was sent to school in a neighboring country, Djibouti, at around seven years old.
Edna’s life changed irrevocably at the age of eight when she was home on school break. One day when her father was out of town, Edna’s female relatives seized her and performed a destructive “purity” ritual known as female-genital mutilation (FGM). The procedure involves the partial or complete cutting of a girl’s external genital area as a way of preventing sexual pleasure. In some cases, like Edna’s, the girl’s remaining genitalia is sewn back up, leaving only a small hole for urine and blood to pass through during menstruation — proof that she is still a virgin upon marriage.
Edna’s relatives intentionally waited until her father — who actively opposed FGM — was away and unable to protect her to perform the cutting. Culturally in Somaliland and throughout much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, FGM is defended as a way of “cleansing” young girls and ensuring their virginity until marriage. Although the procedure is performed on over 95 percent of girls in Somaliland alone, the subject was highly stigmatized and hardly ever discussed publicly at the time. Edna was entirely unaware of the practice until it was done to her.
After she was cut, Edna suffered physically for several weeks and mentally for the rest of her life. The one positive outcome of her trauma, however, was that it propelled her into a life of activism. Edna began advocating for the elimination of FGM, even when it was embarrassing to do so, because she felt strongly that the procedure was a violation of a young girl’s body, especially when done without her consent. “Talking to men about women’s issues and women’s private parts is not easy,” says Edna. “But then that child who is cut up is experiencing a much bigger pain than we are facing only just talking about it. We are not bleeding, we are not becoming infected, we are not dying from hemorrhage, our body is not being changed. But that little girl’s body is being changed. So as distasteful as it is, we need to talk about it.”
Edna continued to practice medicine alongside her father and worked diligently to excel in school. At 17, she won a scholarship to study nursing internationally in England. After nursing there for many years, she then went on to work extensively with the World Health Organization (WHO), advocating for the eradication of harmful practices like FGM on a global scale and training more nurse-midwives before returning to her home in Somaliland.
At the age of 60, Edna officially saw a childhood dream of opening her own hospital come true. The Edna Adan Maternity Hospital, built on land donated by the regional government, works to treat patients and deliver babies, as well as train the next generation of nurse-midwives. She now has over 1,000 students learning under her professional guidance in different medical sectors.
Edna’s main goals for the hospital were to end preventable child and maternal deaths in Somaliland, both which happened all too often, and to eradicate the practice of FGM. To date, she’s been successful. Since the hospital’s opening, the national infant and maternal mortality rate has decreased by over a quarter, and although FGM statistics are difficult to verify, it’s generally believed the numbers have gone down.
Edna’s healthcare activism didn’t stop with her hospital. To create change at the national level, she became involved in politics, and in 2003 became the first female Foreign Minister of Somaliland, a position she maintained until 2006.
Edna wrote about her amazing life journey as a politician, hospital owner, nurse-midwife, and her experience with FGM in her book, “A Woman of Firsts” (HarperCollins Publishers) published in 2019. Since the book was the first time she put her very personal experience with FGM into writing, she struggled immensely with how much detail she should include. “I took that part out,” she says about her graphic procedure. “Then I put it back in. Then I took it out again, over and over and over. I finally decided to keep it in. People, especially those who are unfamiliar with FGM, need to know what is really going on.”
Even now, at 84 years old, Edna continues to serve as the director of her hospital and an advocate against FGM. She hopes to leave behind a legacy of people who have the same drive and dedication to the field of medicine as she does. Surrounded by promising nurses and doctors devoted to her and her life’s work, she’ll still be a hard act to follow; very few individuals have dedicated their lives to caring for others the way Edna has. But she has no regrets: “I don’t miss whatever I have had to give,” Edna says. “I think what I get out of my work — the compassion, the satisfaction I get out of it — far outweighs whatever I have given.”