What the human tribe needs to chop off is only the ‘foreskin of the mind’
What you need to know:
- Circumcision is the Mount Kenya form of initiation. But the Kikuyu elite’s new demand that it be made a national requirement is as if Tom Mboya had become President and immediately laid down a law saying that nobody could succeed him unless he or she had had his or her six lower front teeth extracted – the Luo form of initiation into adulthood.
- Beyond East Africa, no Bantu community – except the Ndebele of Zimbabwe – circumcises its boys. Even within East Africa, the extraordinary Baganda do not circumcise.
- The Israelites later made circumcision an injunction by Jehovah himself, although Europe has recently edited God’s words a tad to make circumcision a personal choice – just as Mount Kenya has edited the Nilotic deity to say that you cannot be a leader of human beings unless you “edit out” the foreskin of your male organ.
Even within the tribe, women must actively reject the primitive patriarchal notion that the male organ – not the brain – is the human instrument of thought.
That such Palaeolithic thinking remains current in the 21st century just fills you with trepidation.
Yet – even educated men utter their ethnic bigotry as freely as they utter their gender bigotry, and without raising any national intellectual uproar. A young MP called Moses Kuria said the other day that male Luos are not capable of national leadership because they are uncircumcised.
The basic premise is that, among the Mount Kenya Bantu, to be uncircumcised is to remain a child (kihi) and, therefore, to be incapable of any national political office. As long as such a belief remains strictly ethnic in context, I have no problem with it and no outsider should comment snidely on it.
INTRA-ETHNIC INJUNCTION
However, meanwhile, although Europe has forced more than 40 disparate ethnic groups into a single commonwealth called Kenya, the Kikuyu elite has sought to make circumcision – a strictly intra-ethnic injunction – to apply even to ethnic groups, like mine, which have never put any premium on “the chop”.
Circumcision is the Mount Kenya form of initiation. But the Kikuyu elite’s new demand that it be made a national requirement is as if Tom Mboya had become President and immediately laid down a law saying that nobody could succeed him unless he or she had had his or her six lower front teeth extracted – the Luo form of initiation into adulthood.
In short, only in a strictly ethnic context does the Kikuyu traditionalist have a right to insist on male circumcision as a leadership qualification.
He has no right whatsoever to impose such a qualification on a country composed of ethnic groups not many of whom see anything socio-religiously compelling about that rite.
Yet a bitter past irony is concomitant with that fact. For, in real history, it was the pharaonic Egyptians – ancestors of all such East African Nilotes as the Kalenjin, Luo, Masaai and Teso – who invented circumcision. The coeval ancestors of Kenya’s Bantu – the most militant advocates of circumcision today – never circumcised their sons.
DO NOT CIRCUMCISE
Beyond East Africa, no Bantu community – except the Ndebele of Zimbabwe – circumcises its boys. Even within East Africa, the extraordinary Baganda do not circumcise. The Kalenjin scholars Taaitta arap Toweett and Kipkoeech arap Sambu show that it was the Nilotic Kalenjin who introduced circumcision to the Mount Kenya Bantu.
Bethwell Ogot and other historians describe the compelling material circumstances in which the Baganda influenced even the Luo – when the two came into the prolonged contact that produced such institutions as the Kabaka, the Kyabazinga and the Nabongo – into dropping circumcision.
But a well known habit of history is that borrowers of powerful theo-cultural practices often become even more ferocious about their borrowings. For instance, Europeans became a million times more excited about Christology than the Nilo-Judaean Qumranites who had bequeathed it to them through Constantinian Rome.
The Jews became umpteen times more militant about circumcision than the Nilotic Copts from whom, as slaves in Egypt, they had borrowed that practice. Toweett and Sambu minutely describe the circumstances in which the Mount Kenya Bantu borrowed circumcision from the Nilotic Kalenjin when the two first met just north-west of that mountain.
The Israelites later made circumcision an injunction by Jehovah himself, although Europe has recently edited God’s words a tad to make circumcision a personal choice – just as Mount Kenya has edited the Nilotic deity to say that you cannot be a leader of human beings unless you “edit out” the foreskin of your male organ.
But – as Jack Miles points out in his history of God – what the 21st-century human tribe direly needs to chop off is only the “foreskin of the mind”. For this is what leads our Moses Kurias into their bewildering straitjackets of thought.
