The National House of Traditional Leaders says it is planning public hearings on circumcision in a bid to counter the continuing deaths resulting from the ritual.
Chief Dikgale Solomon, head of a four-man task team on circumcision appointed by the house on July 6, said on Friday it was intended to hold the hearings before the December circumcision season.
”We want to change the pattern of doing things,” he said.
Nineteen would-be initiates died, and many more were hospitalised, some with gruesome genital injuries, during the recent winter season in the Eastern Cape, the province with the highest reported death rate.
Solomon said the house was arranging the hearings in cooperation with the South African Human Rights Commission and the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities.
Though no date had yet been set, the three bodies will meet in Johannesburg next week to firm up details.
He said the house wanted to follow up the hearings with another national conference of traditional leaders, similar to the major circumcision conference it hosted in 2004.
Asked whether the hearing and another conference would have any more impact than the 2004 event, he said the problem with the previous conference was that there had been no follow up on the resolutions taken there.
”This time we’ll make decisions, but follow up on all decisions,” he said.
He was ”100%” confident that the new initiatives will make a difference.
”We must bring a change, really. We can’t afford to lose lives,” he said.
Solomon said that since its appointment, the task team had visited both Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape.
He said that in the Eastern Cape, local traditional leaders had formed their own task team to work out a programme to prevent deaths.
He said he had been told that it was intended to establish an ”exemplary” initiation school in Pondoland, as a pilot project.
”They told me that deaths, during December, will be something of the past,” he said. — Sapa