Described as Yves Saint Laurent’s “muse,” Katoucha Niane was the first French supermodel coming from Guinea, West Africa, and an outspoken activist against female circumcision. She disappeared earlier this month and is feared dead.
According to official reports, on Feb. 1, Niane was returning to her houseboat on the Seine near the Alexander III bridge in Paris from a party when she went missing. Her purse was found outside the door to her boat. Detectives believe the mother of three lost her footing and slipped into the river accidentally.
Born in Conakry, Guinea, Niane modeled for Thierry Mugler, Paco Rabanne, and Christian Lacroix. In 1994, she turned her focus to activism and started the organization Katoucha for the Fight against Excision. In 2007, Niane, daughter of Djibril Tamsir Niane, a writer and historian, published her own book about her personal circumcision at the age of nine. “I grew up surrounded by hibiscus and ylang-ylang flowers.
I used to get drunk on the richest perfumes and saw myself as a perfumer or a model,” she wrote in the book. But her life changed forever after she underwent excision. “One day, mother said we were going to the cinema.
And I found myself the victim of a horror movie, an unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote In My Flesh. She said she saw her career as a top model as a form of ‘revenge’ for the horror of excision.
“I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of feminity, I who was supposed to be diminished,” Niane said. Niane, called the ”Peul Princess” for her ethnic group, was 47 years old.
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