Botched circumcisions are a mutilation of tradition

Last week, the launch of a website detailing the damage caused to hundreds of young men during traditional circumcision rituals in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa caused outrage among Xhosa traditional leaders.

They reported the website to South Africa’s Film and Publication Board, demanding that Dr Dingeman Rijken, the Dutch doctor responsible for setting up the website, pull it down immediately because it was taboo to meddle with their culture.

Dr Joyce Nyairo had a candid conversation on the issue with an East African expert on ‘masculinities,’ Dr Mbugua wa Mungai.

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You have looked at the website which shows graphic images. What is the likely effect of this digital mode of communication?

It doesn’t matter who you are, I’d be shocked if you didn’t retch upon viewing these blood-curdling images. They show that the acts in question do not have any value as tradition. It is simply mutilation. I only sampled the images up to number five, and quickly flipped to the end — number 155!

The immediate question that came to my mind as I raced through the slides was, “What must it have felt to the boys against whom these atrocities were committed?”

As Dr Rijken informs us, all the boys for whom these 155 images stand, and many more victims like them, are long dead, but look at the staying power of the still photo. We can study the digital image long after it was recorded, from anywhere in the world, and see the twisted meaning the word “tradition” has been given by the Xhosa community in question.

The digital image makes it impossible for anyone to hide crimes committed in the name of tradition in any part of the world.

If this website had a soundtrack, what would it be and what emotions would that soundtrack elicit from audiences?

It would obviously be one of those circumcision “hymns” I have often heard in bars! They are probably all bawdy, which is in order given the carnivalesque upside-down world in which circumcision takes place, but I cannot think of a track that suitably captures the macabre world that would allow circumcisors to get away with the murder of boys in the name of tradition.

The Bukusu “Mulongo” posted on YouTube or, even better, “Sioyayo” aptly emphasise the painful nature of the circumcision ritual, but their message sounds rather mild given the gruesome images on the website in question.

I also know that among the Bukusu (who pay keen attention to the ritual’s elaborate details) any traditional circumcisor who botches the operation, whether by way of disfigurement or amputation, is not likely to leave the scene of his crime alive.

I have avoided talking about my people, the Agikuyu, because universally their boys go to the hospital for the cut. In relation to the present case, it is necessary to ask where the educated Xhosa, especially their political leaders, take their boys for circumcision.

Why have they not come out openly to question what is apparently a self-destructive habit by their community? It may turn out that there is also a class angle to this matter.

One must then ask whether there is any level of training among the Xhosa circumcisors. The 155 cases in question suggest either gross incompetence or wanton and callous carelessness on the part of those who organise these rituals. This cannot be understood as circumcision any more; it is simply the mutilation of boys.

You have just mentioned Kenya, and that raises the question, can we compare this South African situation to female genital mutilation, which still happens in parts of Kenya?

If what I see in these images is what passes for circumcision among sections of the Xhosa, then it is a completely useless, wasteful ritual not worthy of the name!

If the boys were supposed to be turned to men, how did their killing through this macabre chopping up of their penises ensure their future role in the community?

Is it possible that this mutilation is part of ritual murder, with the victims dying slowly? If one cannot be circumcised properly then they are safer remaining uncircumcised.

The same revulsion is felt here when we think of the gruesome nature of female genital mutilation. Any sensible person has seen the lie that the cutting up of girls’ genitalia turns them into women.

Dr Rijken’s gut-wrenching images call us to rethink the oft-stated line that circumcision turns boys into men. Using the Kenyan context for instance, one must wonder why, if the above logic were true, today there are so many ageing, pot-bellied circumcised-in-the-river “men” taking schoolgirls to lodgings for a quick tryst.

If after circumcision one is supposed to grow up mentally, an aspect that should be reflected in measured speech, what would we say was the value of undergoing the ritual for the many circumcised “men” using juvenile language on public podiums?

Where is the maturity that supposedly comes with one’s circumcision? Seeing that we have moved so far away from the idyllic traditional world that some of these rituals invoke, and even as we emphasise its public health significance, we must earnestly ask whether in contemporary society circumcision has any real cultural value.

So are these still men, in traditional society, in the modern world? Is there more to manhood than physical wholeness, than complete and functioning genitalia?

The unfortunate equation of manhood with circumcision is part of a broader discourse in use in society today that seeks to construct dominant ideas of masculinity, but which in fact ends up fashioning flawed masculinities. According to this equation, a boy with an amputated penis cannot be considered to be a man; he doesn’t have the facility to engage in sexual intercourse with women. Manhood is thus reduced to sex.

Many tend to see this as a traditional prescription but the reality is that even in contemporary society heterosexual functioning is still considered a defining trait of one’s masculinity.

The circumcised boys represented here are thus “devalued” not just as men but also as human beings — they are non-human to the extent that they have lost the function to add to society’s numbers.

If this rationale were true, where would we place Catholic priests, gallant men of the cloth who never produce their own children not because they can’t but because they dedicate and subject themselves to a spiritual objective. What risks being forgotten in the case of the Xhosa boys is that someone has wilfully turned them into what they are now — either corpses or men without phalluses.

The traditional leaders involved are part of the social structures that preside over, and enforce silence about botched circumcisions. For those who survive and have to live with the undesirable effects of this mutilation, it is near-impossible not to degenerate into self-hate.

In a progressive society such as the one we aspire to become or pretend we already are, there are a myriad other ways in which men can still be men; physical wholeness and the strength to “penetrate” others (sexually or symbolically as in war and political conquests) is a backward way of thinking about the worth and definition of manhood.

Dr Dingeman Rijken has called some of these young men amputees. Can we now talk about eunuchs and the ways in which societies deal with incompleteness in male genitalia?

It is quite apt that he has called some of these young men amputees. Their condition has been forced upon them, their members having been unnaturally shortened.

I see this process as similar to that of created eunuchs. Yet there is a difference. When society created eunuchs, there was a specific role for them. Now, what role is society going to find for the amputees that it has created? This is a reasonable demand unless we are saying that the Xhosa are so singularly cruel that they are in the habit of “wasting” boys.

The other gender issue here is the question of women in the community, women whose sons undergo these rites, women who marry the men who have been shaped by these rites. Are they culpable in what has been seen as a violent, brutalising, sometimes fatal treatment of boys?

Women’s role in, and relationship to, the issue of phallic mutilation is interesting. It may very well be that women are not directly involved in these rituals, but then they are the ones who give birth to the sons who are eventually cut up in the manner we see here. The wielders of the knife are their sons and husbands.

How does the knowledge of what these men are and how their actions may have led to the deaths of boys affect the relationships that women have with these men? Ultimately, what is lacking is a women’s voice in this story.

If it were available, such a voice might hopefully shed some light on the conspiracy of silence that surrounds the deaths and mutilation of the boys. We need to find out if this silence, especially when their children die, is an act of complicity or a function of other processes of traditional authoritarianism.

One of the amputees mentioned that he had broken up with his girlfriend in order to avoid telling her about his challenges after the operation. He has not told his new girlfriend nor his brother about the operation. How do botched operations impact on relationships?

It is easy to characterise as sick the young men who keep quiet about the violation they have undergone. Perhaps they are, but then I think they are not. I would put this down to the need for one to form a protective shield around their ideas of manhood.

Once turned into amputees, these young men become more acutely aware, within a social framework that valorises the phallus, of their own shortcoming as “men.” The only way to preserve any vestige of their manhood is silence.

Attempting to engage in sexual relationships with girls is to potentially invite ridicule, and to tell a younger brother about this ordeal would lower the respect the boy has for his brother’s manhood. In a sense it is about avoiding opening up oneself to shame.

Looking at this website, what has been violated and what has been preserved?

In this whole situation of botched operations, the body is the primary site of violation but beyond it, as we have stated already, we see that one body is connected socially with others. The violation then extends to families, networks are sullied and meaningful relations with others are severely curtailed.

But the institutions that undergird the circumcision ritual are also violated in the sense that they are shown for what they are — incompetent structures that preside over the death and disfigurement of the community’s boys.

Something is preserved though. Through its silence in the face of the deaths, trauma and psychological scarring of these boys, the community’s belief in its authority over the individual, and in the instrumentality of violence as a weapon of social control, is preserved.

What is the place of cultural difference in a country like South Africa where the moral repugnance and physical brutality of apartheid poisoned race relations?

The tag “Rainbow Nation” masks many contradictions, and the photos in Rijken’s collection present us with a clear example of this dilemma.

Should circumcision be left to traditional practitioners or should it be looped into hospital work, so to speak? To what extent can people be left to practise their traditions, however deleterious, and how do these fit into the broader desire to fashion an identity that sits in productive engagement alongside other traditions in contemporary South Africa?

The tendency to practice tradition to the point of isolationism is clearly an issue here. To this extent for people to be allowed, or to demand, the freedom to practise traditions that needlessly kill boys is to indulge criminality disguised as tradition.

It is as if the Xhosa now claim for themselves, through this tradition, the right to exercise the power of death over others that was previously enjoyed by apartheid’s enforcers. If we must go there, then we must ask: In the name of tradition, where is the conscience? On this matter, moral shame must be felt particularly by South Africans of all races.

The website bears the name ulwaluko, the Xhosa word for initiation into manhood. But it is a website posted by a Dutch doctor. Does this matter? Are names sacred?

It matters. It often takes a stranger, an outsider, to point out things we cannot see because we are too closely tied up with them. There is nothing sacred about names, unless we allow ourselves to enter into the region of bigotry. Names are important signifiers that can be cleverly deployed to highlight certain ironies in life.

This is what the white Dutch doctor has done. He uses ulwaluko to show that whatever is happening among the Xhosa is really not initiation as it should be. For some of the boys in question — over 800 for the period he was working among the Xhosa — it is a pathway to avoidable death.

This point, that the deaths are not inevitable, is what matters to a public health expert. This is the point that should matter to all sensible human beings just as it needs to concern us when people in parts of Kenya and Nigeria come up with foolish stories against polio vaccinations.

In 2009, Thando Mgqolozana published his first novel A Man Who is not a Man, the story of a Xhosa initiate who is living with the shame of a botched circumcision. Does race matter in terms of who publicly speaks about these issues even if it is as fiction?

Race must not be invoked in trying to determine who speaks out publicly about the issue of botched circumcision. The cloak of tradition will be thrown over this matter merely to obfuscate issues. Even if it were true that this whole matter is about tradition, and I must emphatically submit that it is not, surely any intelligent human being knows that traditions are invented and with time they change.

No tradition is sacrosanct, least of all one that presides over a process in which boys are either violently ushered to an early grave or disfigured. What is amazing is that people who readily saw the overt and subtle killing processes of the apartheid state as immoral are not as quick to see the flaws in their own traditions. That is a fatal weakness.

What parallels can we draw between these violent circumcisions in South Africa and what happened in Mathare in 2008 during the post-election violence in Kenya?

These disfigured penises readily call to mind stories about the situation in Mathare and Dandora after the botched 2007 General Election. Non-circumcised men would be cornered and their penises chopped off; they were not being circumcised, their members were merely being reduced to stubs.

One sees here a perverse process in which the idea of circumcision is used to punish political foes, the body being turned into the battleground for the enactment of cultural ideology.

Coming from this point, it is possible for me to see how and why Dr Rijken says some of the organs are the result of abuse. Perverts can wield the knife in the name of culture. Is that not a legitimate point to worry about?

Dr Mbugua wa Mungai is a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Literature, Kenyatta University.
email: [email protected]

Dr Joyce Nyairo is a cultural analyst and managing director of Santuri Media. email: [email protected];
Twitter: @santurimedia

The article first apperared in The East African.