In a suit, with his dreadlocks, earrings and a tiny stud in his nose, documentary filmmaker Sipho Singiswa cuts a cosmopolitan figure. He assures me that the suit is unusual. He has just returned from a meeting.
Our interview is about his film, Umgidi (The Celebration). Co-directed and produced by Sipho’s wife, Gillian Schütte, Umgidi is part of the Project 10: Real Stories from a Free South Africa series and traces the journey of his recent, belated circumcision ceremony.
In the late 1970s Sipho became one of the youngest political prisoners on Robben Island. After the school boycotts of 1976 — and having been in and out of prison as a member of the African National Congress Youth League — Sipho and his friends Projack Mziwonke and Joe Phatshwa were sentenced to five years on Robben Island. But, with extra time spent in detention and awaiting trial, they ended up spending about seven years behind bars. Sipho effectively missed out on his youth, and his official circumcision ceremony along with it.
When the time came for him to join the thousands of young Xhosa men in the bush, he had to undergo this rite of passage in secrecy, in prison. The practice was considered illegal.
“If you were found out you would earn an additional six months on your sentence,” he says.
“The bathrooms were used as the hut. And although you had just been circumcised, you had to go to work. So you would have to walk and pretend nothing was wrong,” Sipho demonstrates, shuffling his feet. “Others would walk around you, so that the officials could not see anything.”
The circumcisions were performed by a prisoner called Tata Mgabe, who was an inyanga.
It is customary after circumcision, having survived “the jaws of the lion” and having spent time in the bush, to go back home for a celebration. This involves making an announcement to the ancestors and clan elders that the circumcised boy has become a man.
When Sipho was released from Robben Island he intended to complete the ceremony. However, he never found the right time until 23 years after his compromised circumcision when he returned to Guguletu, in Cape Town, to “complete this unfinished business”.
There was a cloud looming though as Vuyo, Sipho’s 27-year-old brother, had not yet been circumcised, nor did he want to be.
“I am not really against tradition,” Vuyo says. “If you feel like you want to follow it, it is really up to you. But it is my personal choice. I have never really thought about it as a rite of passage. I don’t get it, the ritual. The fact that you have to go to some bush camp to learn about manhood.”
His sister Mahogany Singiswa says: “As an individual he doesn’t see the relevance of it. He feels that to be a man you don’t have to cut your penis. You have to prove it in other ways. Your way of thinking. Your way of doing things.”
Their parents and Sipho, however, are disappointed. Their mother, “Ma” Gwen, takes a philosophical position: “What can I do? You can take a horse to the river but you cannot force him to drink.”
Their father, “Tata” Stanford, is more pragmatic. The Singiswas’s uncle suggested they do it by force, that they take Vuyo to the bush against his will, but as his father says: “The Constitution doesn’t allow us this, we would be arrested for abuse. In our African culture, yes, but these days you would get arrested.”
While growing up, Sipho clashed with his father, particularly over his political activity. But now his father is grateful. “Before we were not allowed to speak freely. Because of their bravery we are free today.”
He adds: “For a long time now the issue of [Sipho’s] ceremony has been a source of pain to me, because I fully appreciate the value of honouring our cultural heritage. The ancestors have not been happy.”
With regard to his brother’s resistance, Sipho is concerned about his family’s image in the community.
“We don’t want others to think this is becoming our habit. Although I got circumcised on Robben Island, it was at the right age to do it, the only problem was I took too long to do the announcement ceremony. I don’t want people to think we have started a habit of getting circumcised in secrecy and then making public announcements when we are old.”
But mostly, it seems, Sipho is hurt that his brother showed no interest in his ceremony or in going back to Robben Island with him.
“I asked him to please be at the meeting with the elders so he can hear what they are saying, how they look at things. I asked him to come to Robben Island, so he can see where I was, what it was like. No interest.
“How is he expecting to learn anything about it if he just closes himself off in the bedroom, and insists in a rigidly naive way that he sees no importance in this history?”
Although the brothers are from the same generation, their experiences are worlds apart. By the time Vuyo was born in 1976, his brother was 16 years old, and fighting his oppressors for a better education.
The siblings even speak differently. Vuyo’s language is that of popular psychology — he uses more contractions and speaks about his feelings. In the face of the Xhosa culture of respect, he seems petulant and perhaps younger than his 27 years.
Other significant differences are that Vuyo was adopted. And he is gay.
He talks about how his mother found him abandoned as a small baby. “She told me that I had ants walking all over me.” Because his umbilical cord was still attached, his mother, a nursing sister at the City Park hospital at the time, is convinced he was just a day old. She took him home until the district surgeon was able see him, and in the space of a few days fell in love with him.
Yet, Vuyo still feels empty. He believes his family is keeping information from him and he is searching for his biological parents. If he finds them, he seems to suggest, he may be able to understand why he feels so alienated from tradition and exiled from his true self.
The answer, however, may have more to do with the times he lives in and the changes that have taken place in the short space between his brother’s youth and his.
From a Western view, Vuyo’s feelings would probably be considered completely normal. His discovery, in his early twenties, that he was adopted, and the obvious scars left from being abandoned as a baby, deserve attention. As do the difficulties of his being gay in a highly patriarchal society where sexuality is not discussed.
As filmmaker Rudzani Dzuguda says, the battle in 1976 was for human rights, now it is for self-expression at home.
But the day does not belong to Vuyo, who has unfortunately chosen this moment to draw attention to himself. Sipho has been waiting for this celebration for more than 20 years.
Part of the reason for the trip back to Robben Island, where the men will drink special beer brewed by the women and blessed by the ancestors, is for Sipho to show his clan where he was held for all those years.
He sits in his mother’s living room in the circle of elders, with his sunglasses hooked on to the front of his T-shirt, which reads, “What does it take to build a movement?”
One of the old men asks: “For those of us going tomorrow, are we strictly required to take our ID books?” A hangover from the old days of the pass laws. Someone else suggests mischievously: “You should carry your ID book, because if you should drown in the sea, it would be used to identify you!” There is laughter all round.
Unlike his uncle, Sipho’s four-year-old son, Kai, is perfectly happy to participate in the preparations for the celebration. As Sipho calls him from his skateboard to stir the beer he explains: “This is for your ancestors. By doing this you are also talking to all your ancestors. From your father’s side, your side, from my mother’s side, from your mother’s side.”
Kai stirs the pot with all his concentration for a few minutes and then asks his father, “Who is it going to be now?”
Sipho has told his wife that he would like their son to be circumcised when he is 18, “but that is really up to Kai … I will obviously encourage him to go to the bush. But I cannot force him.”
Says Gillian: “I don’t mind Kai going to the bush when he comes of age as long as he is psychologically prepared for it. You can’t bring up a child in one way and then impose tradition on him.
“He will have to spend more time with his Xhosa family and learn the language and culture … I will always let him know that he has to make it his decision. And I may have a course of antibiotics hidden in his rucksack should he choose to go to the bush.”
For his part, Kai has already informed his parents that he refuses to be circumcised in the bush, because he is afraid of snakes.