I read the article “The making of a man” (July 19). I am a Xhosa man who, like the anonymous author of the article, got initiated the traditional way.
I am proud of the road I took to manhood as we know it in the Xhosa tradition. It was a momentous and memorable event of my life. Among the things I was taught was the importance of secrecy about the intricacies of the ritual, which to me underscores its sacredness.
I am therefore amazed, but not disturbed, by the openness your author has displayed about what actually happens during initiation.
Clearly the impetus of your article is the endangerment that seems to accompany this ritual. I believe you have written your article with good intentions. And presumably it was triggered by the tragic events of recent times.
While half of your article describes, in fairly graphic detail, the intimacies of Xhosa circumcision, and the rest is devoted to decrying an age-old tradition of passage to manhood, nowhere in the article have you even attempted to examine the reasons for the tragic situations we are witnessing today. Your article is dedicated to openness about the ritual, and seems to assume that eliminating the secrecy will pave the way to solving the problems we have today.
Yes, we do have a problem because these boys are dying at tender ages. Yes, changes are required, such as possibly regulating the tradition so as to ensure that the job is done by legitimate personnel. Such as creating laws that will recognise that there is no such thing as a 13-year-old man.
But what goes on inside iBhoma (the home of the initiate) is sacred. It is the heart of the ritual. And baring it for public consumption is killing its very essence. So, instead of condemning the tradition that gave you the right to be called a man among your community, you should be condemning those unscrupulous and ruthless initiation “principals” who are making a mockery of that very tradition. You should be speaking out against the idea of 18-year-old aMakhankatha (traditional guardians). What in heaven’s name do they know about taking care of an initiate, when they themselves are barely ripe for manhood. These are the reasons for the tragedies and not the secrecy.
You make reference to “those who have no guts to oppose the rite with reason”. Well, if you want to show your guts, you can start by revealing your name in your article. Otherwise this amounts to little more than a half-hearted attempt at being courageous.
As for your remark “what should be spared, the teenager or the culture?”, perhaps we can save both the culture and the teenager by acting responsibly. Because, in this age where Western values seem to prevail over everything else, this is still the only thing some of us know to be the difference between a boy and a man. –Lungisa Noganta, Pretoria
Our society doesn’t give a damn about the disabled
I think South Africa is ready to host another Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this time dealing with the plight of people with disabilities.
I have been disabled all my life and the oppression we endured, especially as black disabled people, has always been conveniently divorced from mainstream politics in our country. Why? Because our oppression was not based on such clear-cut categories as race but something that cuts through race.
Our government and our society do not give a damn about the disabled. There is talk of integration of disabled people into the mainstream. But how can we integrate when we don’t even have the language to talk about our experiences positively?
Our experiences are seen as intrinsically painful and depressing, to be shunned rather than listened to. Of course, this is crap. No matter how eloquently, critically or intelligently we talk about our frustrations — of which there are plenty in South Africa — we are dismissed as moaners.
How can we integrate when the transport system is so inaccessible to disabled persons? It is not enough to say disabled people have a right to work when there’s no transport to carry them there. Take the Egoli 2002 project, for example. It has seen new buses come into Johannesburg/Gauteng but none of them are geared towards us. Why? We are to have a separate transportation system. What’s so integrating about that?
Last year I phoned to find out about these buses and was told that about 300 or more of them were coming in and only 5% would be accessible to us. I bet what they mean by accessible is that there is going to be some strong gentleman to lift us up into the bus. Our dignity is still left out of the picture of integration. Bafowethu!
Disability has a strong race dimension that is conveniently left out. You get a generalised statement about it in the White Paper on an Integrated Disability Strategy.
Black disabled people went through shit that this country does not want to know about. When I was at the special school non-disabled people came to watch us eat and would be very impressed and pat us on our backs for being so amazing. I mean we were just eating!
To achieve integration will involve spending much more money. It requires a complete break with cynicism, paternalism, ignorance and arrogance on the part of the non-disabled. Black disabled people must run an extra 100m before we even get to the start of the race. We are made to feel guilty or that we are lazy when our lives cost 10 times more than the non-disabled or than other, “privileged” disabled people. This sucks. –Mandla Mabila, Johannesburg
View from cloud-cuckoo-land
The estimable Mail & Guardian publishes comment from Richard Calland and now Jonathan Freedland (“Dubya’s bloody folly”, June 28) on the Middle East, which makes my blood boil and run cold at the same time. Quite a feat!
What is really fantastical is the alternative universe that Freedland apparently inhabits. Implicit in his sarcasm, and in most pro-Palestinian propaganda generally, is that Israel has been, and still is, expected to abrogate its security to a corrupt and terror-ridden regime, whose population is sponsored in homicidal fanaticism and the children officially educated in epithets of hate.
The Arab League, for all its recent “generosity” in reluctant acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist, has done its best for over 50 years of warfare and hostility to negate this right.
Yet Freedland persists in treating this conflict as if the present is being played out in an historical vacuum, with no responsibility and accountability demanded from the Palestinians, only from Israel. The language of “occupation” has allowed Palestinian spokespeople to obfuscate this history.
I would remind Freedland that the Palestinian Authority, in control over its own affairs and administration, has had since 1993 to get its house in order, as it was required to do under the Oslo Peace Accord as a prerequisite to final status negotiations, even to the amazing extent of being armed by Israel to help achieve this goal. This was before Israel has now been forced to act.
I would remind Freedland that the United Nations resolution 242 in 1967 called for withdrawal by Israel from territories taken, we might add, in a war of self-defence, as well as its right to secure borders.
Freedland’s selective amnesia, which trumpets the mantra of “military occupation” and unilateral withdrawal, feeds from the cult of victimisation and hysteria of the Palestinian voice.
He is right in one respect. The Middle East is not benign Scandinavia and he is living in cloud- cuckoo-land to expect Israel to treat it as if it was. –Stephen Paul, Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town
Education is the way forward
I would like to congratulate Shyaka Kanuma for the brilliant article on Africa’s problems, “Dreaming in Durban” (July 12). I agree with the reader who said last week that Kanuma should get the “journalist of the year award”. His article was indeed a breath of fresh air compared to what we normally get — namely finger-pointing journalism without any attempt to suggest solutions.
I agree with Kanuma’s proposed solution to Africa’s woes: that good leaders in Africa should dissociate themselves from rotten apples like Robert Mugabe and that African civil servants should start taking their jobs seriously if things are to improve.
Kanuma is correct when he says that we cannot have, nor expect, immediate results to our efforts to rebuild this continent. Governments must, among other things, invest in education, and the curricula offered in schools should be revised to meet today’s socio-economic challenges. We need textbooks that are relevant. An African student should be able to get the same standard of knowledge that students can in Japan and other advanced countries. An African student must be prepared for the highly competitive world. –Bulumko Ntsokontsoko, student, Wits University
I agreewith Kanuma’s assessment of the current state of affairs in Africa. It is high time President Thabo Mbeki and the African National Congress distanced themselves from the tyrants of Africa, such as Mugabe and Moammar Gadaffi. They did play an important function in the final liberation of South Africa from the apartheid government, but I think South Africa has said enough thanks to them.
On the issue of work rate, South Africans need to learn to work smarter and more effectively.
In the United States there are only about five public holidays and on many of these days most people work. There is no double pay. The situation is the same in Britain. Look at the thriving economies these countries have. People in South Africa need to forget about labour unions and start working so that all people can live well.
The government also needs to increase spending on education. The past is dead and gone, and we cannot make right all the things that went wrong. But it is time to live for the children of our country because, otherwise, they are the ones who are going to grow up into a crime-ridden and jobless market that will destroy the beautiful South Africa I love so dearly. — Clarence Choonoo, United States
Come and see the injustice
Our concern that academics and journalists visiting Morocco for a conference that coincided with the African Union (AU) summit might be abused by the illegal occupiers of my country was well founded.
Both Greg Mills of the South African Institute of International Affairs and John Battersby of the Independent Newspapers Group produced similar articles containing shopworn Moroccan distortions.
They said, in effect, that Morocco’s exclusion from the AU was a blight on the union. Morocco in fact excluded itself from the AU by storming out of the Organisation of African Unity in 1984 after the admission of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). African leaders have said that Morocco is welcome to return without preconditions, but Morocco has chosen not to.
We are not surprised that Mills has tried to obfuscate this. His article “Africa’s missing state” (July 12) repeats the same lies that he brought back from his first visit to Morocco last year. By not checking his facts, he has become a Moroccan apologist. Battersby is more disappointing.
I encourage independent journalists to visit Morocco to see for themselves the injustice being perpetrated against the Saharawi people. Despite his credentials, Battersby was the first South African reporter who expressed reluctance to meet human right activists in Morocco. I expressed my disappointment about this to JJ Cornish. There was no need to bug a telephone, as Battersby alleges. –Mohamed Beissat, representative of the SADR
In a muddle
John Matshikiza seems to have some of his Italian references mixed up (“A culture for everyone”, July 19).
Whoever called Brett Bailey “the Stromboli of community theatre” may have been comparing him to the highly active volcano just north of Sicily. He certainly wasn’t comparing Bailey to Pinocchio’s creator, whose name is Gepetto.
Matshikiza is also wrong in calling Pinocchio an “old European fairy tale”. It is a novel by Carlo Collodi, published in 1883. Nor does Pinocchio become “almost human” in the end. He becomes fully human. And the moment in which he does is one of the most wonderful in any novel I know. Indeed the whole book is a marvel and I strongly recommend it to Matshikiza. –Tony Eaton
In brief
It is not true to say (“What Cronin really said”, July 19) that my interview with Jeremy Cronin was not meant for publication. It was done for publication in the form in which it is published, that is, on the Web. — Helena Sheehan, Dublin, Ireland
While I am pleased the M&G believes it has a secure future (Leader, July 19), I’m afraid that arse-licking sycophancy is still arse-licking sycophancy. It’s a pity that the English Private Eye does not have a South African edition to keep you guys in check. I hope that, despite this aberration, you are allowed to keep up the good work. Empiricism rules! –Richard Lowndes
I believe it was naive for the Democratic Alliance and the Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane to call for the Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to resign. I am convinced they cannot even expand on their basis for this call.–Sicelo SS Mdletshe,Johannesburg
Hasn’t one of your journalists thought to ask the minister of defence this simple question: what is the health status (not how many have antibodies to HIV) of the military currently and what has it been over each of the past five years? Why don’t we see reports of actual health consequences to the military, workforce, etcetera, of having antibodies to HIV? All we get is HIV antibody BS. Could it be that there are no noticeable health consequences of having antibodies to HIV? The chronic absence of health consequences supports my claim that HIV is harmless. –David Rasnick, PhD, member of President Thabo Mbeki’s Aids Advisory Panel
Please include your name and address. Letters must be received by 5pm Monday. Be as brief as possible. The editor reserves the right to edit letters and to withhold from publication any letter which he believes contains factual inaccuracies, or is based on misrepresentation.