‘Ndiyindoda!” I shout on cue. I am a man. In split seconds the ingcibi, a traditional surgeon, crouching between my thighs severs my foreskin.
This is surprisingly painless, except that my penis itches. He hands the foreskin to my father, who suspends it before my face. I swallow, as told.
Today is the day I have feared all my boyhood years. A dozen or so men surround me, to restrain me if I decide to flee. Except for a few torches among them, there is total darkness. It’s a few hours after midnight and my teeth rattle in the blowing cold.
“Get in!” I’m told now that my wound is completely dressed. I cover myself wholly with the white-and-red blanket on my shoulders. “Legs apart,” I’m told gruffly by someone. As a man you do not beg an umkhwetha, a Xhosa initiate into manhood, for he is a subordinate. This command is to protect my wound against contact with my inner legs. This instruction I will obey religiously until the day I am fully healed.
And so, crab-style, I pass through the low doorway into the hut. In the centre is a red fire, to be kept alive around the clock until I leave the initiation school. Beside it is a patch covered with a blanket, my bed for the next five weeks.
I lie down, thighs apart. The fire plus the branches that make the walls of my hut combine to create a haunting fragrance. Somagwaza, a song sung on the procession to my hut, still lingers in my head as I’m drawn to sleep. I am left alone.
Four hours later I’m woken. The men have arrived. My wound is being undressed. I’m still uncomfortable about having to bare my privates before the dozen or so eyes huddled inside.
They explain the rules. I will not drink water for the next seven days. In that time I will not leave the hut. I will only eat samp cooked without beans. I must not disgrace myself and my family by escaping to a hospital. I must be stoic, like our forefathers who never used anaesthetics.
Anything that happens here is a secret: it is not to be discussed with girlfriends, brothers or friends, the uncircumcised, other nations, mothers. If I do I will be excommunicated from manhood.
I will be taught to speak in isiSomo, a language used only at the initiation school. I will be caned if I don’t master it — typical of Bantu education.
The next few days pass too slowly. My thirst intensifies. My lips are cracking and my eyes start to set deep into my sockets.
Finally, the anticipated eighth day dawns. I am too eager for them to arrive with the sacrificial goat that will beckon the time I can have, ahh, water and proper food. But they take too long. Our nqalatha, a young servant boy who brings us food from home and firewood, arrives with the same old food I’ve withstood all week. I tell him to go back home with it.
The men arrive and for the first time I am free to go outdoors. Like a mole, I squint at the sun. My eye sockets feel like they’ve been sprinkled with grit. The sudden fresh air inundates my lungs. I am getting high on the pure oxygen shooting into my brain. I am suffocating in reverse.
Suddenly I faint. Luckily my khankatha, a traditional guardian, is at my side and stops me from falling. His job is that of a nurse: to dress my cut and to give feedback on my progress to the elders. He was circumcised five years ago.
Out in the open a fire burns beside the goat being slaughtered. First I am offered amarhewu, watery pap, to rehydrate and finally I stick my tongue into the delicious salty goat meat.
This fast-breaking ceremony means access to more than just water. I now receive old newspapers every day and I get a portable radio, so I am able to recite the programme line-ups of a number of stations intimately because I’m up 23 hours a day healing my sore, dressing and undressing my wound at regular intervals. I get more varied meals.
Next I am taught replies to the frequently asked questions used by amakrwala, recent initiation school graduates, who will want to determine if I had a real Xhosa initiation or hospital surgery. These riddles are asked in a poetic and deceptive manner. One who has not gone through the traditional bush rite would not answer correctly, let alone understand the gibberish, unless someone with first-hand experience has tipped him off.
But woe to the man who sells bush secrets to the cowardly hospital initiate. A man has two witnesses, his mouth and his circumcised penis. If he fails to answer convincingly a physical inspection will be carried out in public, like it or not. Your chances of successfully resisting are minimal if you are outnumbered.
The wound is not stitched in the Xhosa rite. If the brief survey reveals “cats claws”, the scars from stitches that point to a hospital circumcision, you will be assaulted for avoiding the pain of the traditional rite but dressing like one of its graduates.
The dress code is a suit coupled with formal shoes and an old-style Scottish golf cap. How did this come to represent anything Xhosa and traditional? If someone is caught faking, his shoes are swapped, the left shoe to the right foot and the right shoe to the left foot, and his clothes are turned inside out. Only then is he freed to go home, bearing this badge of humiliation.
The next day I’m pressed to defecate for the first time. But this is impossible because the samp has cemented in my gut because of dehydration. By now my big toe and its neighbour have chafed from being rubbed against one another in reaction to the pain of wrapping and unwrapping my wound. My other involuntary action is shivering hands.
I often wished for a gun with which I could end my hell.
But the days dragged their feet quickly. By the third week I no longer shiver at the sight of my khankatha, for he can no longer inflict pain. My wound has developed scabs, which end most of the pain. I now adore him for having been strict with my regimen. Without anaesthesia, no pain means no gain.
The next goal is to get the scabs to fall by themselves, without help from my hands. To achieve this quickly the wound has to be exposed to the cold wind, found just past midnight and far out of my fiery hut.
I love rainy days because they mean I remain indoors. Ten days later the crusts had all fallen off. The circular ring that was once raw has turned into the smooth pink skin coveted by every umkhwetha.
Halala, yeeha. This means that I may leave this Saturday. Back home, they begin preparing for my homecoming ceremony.
The remaining days are the longest. In this time I begin socialising with other abakhwetha. We spend the days playing games, surveying the area or visiting other abakhwetha in distant camps.
We are particularly fond of visiting recent initiates and finding any excuse to show them our pink skins. Something my comrades love that I hate is to dress the wounds of these rookies, glad to inflict on others the pain that was inflicted on them. I didn’t want to be infected with HIV.
I have deliberately done what is unacceptable and have discussed the processes at work in the bush because this issue is hidden in too much sacred secrecy given the number of people who are harmed or killed undergoing it.
Let’s talk about initiation. Let’s recognise that we have a problem. Some, unable to cope with dysfunctional privates after this rite, have taken their own lives. And yet our elders resist doing things a little differently.
Should the brother with a delicate medical condition that might endanger his life undergo bush circumcision?
By writing this account I also mean to sensitise the men I meet daily who do not have the guts to oppose the rite with reason, for fear of being labelled a traitor to Xhosahood.
Just because most initiates survive initiation is no reason for complacency about its safety. There are too many casualties.
Most of the men I know become angry when they see journalists or medical staff of the wrong gender, culture, race or tribe on the news at an initiation school where a tragedy has happened. But they are not angered by the number of casualties. What’s going on?
It’s time we revised this part of our culture, which weakens instead of strengthening us. Surely we need to update this custom to meet modern medical standards.
Then surely the tara clamp or a hospital circumcision should not be rejected as unXhosa. If we do not this centuries-old rite will continue to take our young men’s lives. How long will this grim history repeat itself unchallenged?
What should be spared, the teenager or the culture?
Like “disgraced” next to “Hansie”, surely we have seen “botched” alongside “circumcision” far too many times in our newspapers.
The option of staying uncircumcised is impractical if you live among Xhosas because they won’t take you seriously. Even in his book Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela comments on how a Xhosa man who has not been circumcised is a paradox, because he is still viewed as a boy.
I dedicate this to those who have lost erectile function, sexual organs, lives, friends and brothers, and to the mothers who have lost their sons, sometimes without explanation, and also to the sidelined and silent because they are not men.