South Africa’s initiation season ended at the weekend with a gruesome toll of 24 deaths reported to police and more than 100 teenagers hospitalised with gangrene and septicaemia after botched circumcisions and severe beatings.
One boy’s penis dropped off as a result of gangrene, at least one other had to have his penis amputated, and another will have to have both legs amputated, authorities said.
Teenagers have been attending initiation schools in the bush since the beginning of June for the rituals, seen in many black cultures as an essential rite of passage to manhood.
Problems arise when circumcisers use blunt and unsterilised knives, and when punishments for such lapses as forgetting the words of a chant become too severe — some boys are literally beaten to death.
In one bizarre case, police said a 77-year-old initiate was tortured to death at Mafikeng, in the northwest.
”He had injuries to the back and on the chest. He was tortured and beaten,” said police representative Keaobaka Moses.
Moses said the police were investigating the possibility that the elderly man was taken to the school by force.
The National House for Traditional Leaders said that if the government approved legislative powers for traditional leaders, they might be more able to control customs like initiation ceremonies.
”If government doesn’t want to give recognition to the institution … then you can’t do anything really,” said representative Sibusiso Nkosi.
Nkosi said he had never heard of a 77-year-old person being an initiate.
”We need to talk about how this tradition can be controlled… there is no uniformity anymore. It’s out of control. People are more interested in making money than respecting the tradition.”
”It’s not culture to beat a person.”
Other victims are as young as 12, although the law states that no-one under 18 may undergo traditional circumcision.
The traditional leaders are seeking funds to hold a round table conference with doctors, anthropologists and other experts on the initiation rites.
The annual deaths are prompting calls for the boys to be circumcised in hospitals while continuing to undergo the remainder of the ceremonies in the initiation schools, and this is already happening to a limited extent.
Several murder charges have been laid this season, prosecutions are being carried out under the Traditional Circumcision Act, and some schools were closed down.
In the Eastern Cape, provincial health minister Bevan Goqwana accused parents of laxness and said the parents of boys killed or maimed during circumcisions would be arrested along with negligent traditional surgeons and nurses.
”These boys and their parents do not know the law or are ignorant and these boys themselves are afraid to report to their parents on the bad treatment they receive,” he said.
”We have taken a decision that the parents of these boys are also going to be arrested, together with the surgeons and nurses.”
The youth league of the ruling African National Congress called for nurses, social workers and psychologists to be given free access to the camps.
”To say nurses must not be allowed in these schools because they are predominantly women and that they have never undergone the initiation process is utter hogwash which we reject with the contempt it deserves,” representative Khulekani Ntshangase told the Sapa news agency.
Zola Dabula, acting chief medical superintendent at the Umtata General Hospital in Eastern Cape Province slammed modern initiation schools as corrupt and cruel and unrepresentative of African tradition.
”The problem with the today’s schools is that they are more than anything a place of vengeance. People who got beaten to a pulp in their day are there to inflict upon others for the treatment they got,” he said.
But Dabula said a public education campaign in the province had improved the situation, and that the boys could opt to be circumcised at the hospital.
”We circumcise them and thereafter they go and finish their initiation into manhood in the bushes,” he explained. – Sapa