Prologue: My ethnographic journey—Into isithetho

Encountering ethnography

In today’s world it is almost impossible to carry out classic ethnography. I argue however, that methodologically this book tells the story of my decades-long ethnographic encounter amongst the amaXhosa people (Mannay & Morgan, 2015; Vivian, 2011). In 1991 I left the UK as an undergraduate, anthropology student to begin this research in what was then ‘the townships’ in Cape Town. This journey brought me to confront the distinctive boundedness of racial grouping under apartheid and meant that as a white European, I was unable to live amongst the amaXhosa. I managed, however, with time and at considerable risk to go in and out of this urban isiXhosa-speaking community. In 2000 an academic appointment in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town facilitated access, but inescapably had other challenges. In engaging an amaXhosa patriarchy I learnt what it was to hold to vast arenas of silence. As Singh wrote of her ethnography in India, “Maintaining relationships has involved not only balancing patriarchy but also accepting bargains with privilege and working to model the assertive and self-assured presence of many of my interlocutors” (Singh, 2016, 20).

Taboo has silenced what I could say in medicine as much as it has in discussing issues related to Xhosa manhood and circumcision. I have seen the worst of psychotic illness in the clinic and, with Xhosa diviners, observed how dreams heal the psyche, mind, and matter. In seeking beneficence in sound psychiatric practices, I have seen the awful shame felt by injured initiates. Inevitably, I have embodied these profound, elemental experiences and endeavoured, ethically, to balance subjectivity with objectivity (Jelsma & Clow, 2005). In respect of my professional standards, I sought to do no harm to the people I met during my fieldwork: patients, the amaXhosa people, and the doctors and nurses who persistently bear silent witness to immense suffering (Vivian, 2012). Listening to stories about violence and injury, seeing the distress of those who suffer from psychotic illness, acts of harm and aggression have personal consequences. I liken my feelings to Singh’s description of how these, “seeped into her body logic” (Singh, 2016, 14). The importance of being self-reflexive is, however, underscored by the fact that in good and bad ways our anthropological journeys work outwards, beyond the self to affect our families and have moral, ethical, and socio-political implications (McQueeney, 2013).

Being more self-reflective about my anthropological research came about in 2012, when Associate Professor Margrethe Silberschmidt invited me to work on gender and circumcision practices at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 1 spent five years there and then returned to live in my intellectual home, Britain. As 1 look back from my home in Scotland, long after this event in the September of 2019, it is not this first journey in 1991 into a challenged, amaXhosa cultural landscape that has stayed with me, but my later encounter in 2000 with Xhosa ‘male’ patients in Valkenberg Hospital for the Mentally Unwell, Cape Town. Here, 1 found newly circumcised Xhosa men, suffering from psychosis, who struggled to find words relevant to that specific time, place, and cognitive space. My ethnographic description of engendering and resilience amongst the amaXhosa begins, therefore, with reading records of, or listening to the stories of 75 men linking circumcision to their suffering a psychotic breakdown. Still today, it is not the broad cultural landscape of the rackety shacks, children running on dirt roads, and women shouting hello, with which I became so familiar that is uppermost in my mind. It is these Xhosa men’s contorted faces and their jumbled words which registered the chaotic subliminal images so vivid with circumcision symbol. Sadly, like the Comaroflfs’ (1987) Tswana “madman”, their impoverishment in mind and matter outwardly manifested in their disordered clothing and the odd paraphernalia to which they desperately clung. This outward show of inner derangement clinically defined them as psychiatrically disturbed.

A naïve feminist scholar

My ethnographic journey into isithetho or the customary practice of circumcision amongst the amaXhosa people began the day I walked into Crossroads. I am cautious about how my ethnography intrudes into my personal story, but it is important to say that I was in my late thirties, and married with two adolescent sons, when I left London to fly to South Africa. As we flew in daylight hours across Europe with its patchwork fields, villages, and cities, the landscape transformed into the deserted, vastness of the African continent. South Africa, however, presented a different, more industrialised landscape with its vast, manicured farms and planned grid of urban settlement. This was especially vivid when, beneath a flat-topped Table Mountain, the harbour and city of Cape Town with its tree-lined suburbs spread out miles below and the townships come into view. These provided a home to many economically disadvantaged, Xhosa-speaking families. This view of the townships situated my academic and, indeed, naive, ideological stance. Intellectually I held to feminism and still had to get an academic qualification; intuitively I was African born, and privileged to have grown up amongst my large, Scottish maternal clan in Zimbabwe.

This research came about when Dr Mamphela Ramphele invited me to join her project on “Children in Crossroads”, and Professor Adam Kuper, the renowned South African anthropologist, facilitated my going. At the time, Dr Ramphele held a senior post as an anthropologist in the University of Cape Town. Ramphele had qualified in 1972 as a medical doctor at the University of Natal Medical School. She had been a student activist, a founder member, with Steve Biko, of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and was intimately involved in the African National Congress’s (ANC) fight against apartheid. In joining her project, I learnt how dangerous the townships were in the late 1990s. Despite the warnings, I foolishly braved the journey by taxi into Crossroads. Mrs Nomchato Mangesi was my interpreter; she secured my journey, three to four days each week, over four months into the townships. Once there, we visited homes, clinics, Spaza shops and here I joined in with activities, interviewed those who would speak to me and tried to learn what was happening to children living there. I discovered an amaXhosa world torn apart by apartheid but inspired by Dr Ramphele and, blinded ideologically by my feminist scholarship, I trod, unaware from a policed, ‘white safety’ under an apartheid patriarchy into an amaXhosa patriarchal domain (Cole, 1987). My British ancestry in this patriarchy was writ large on my person and in this xenophobic atmosphere, I did not appropriately consider my impact on people’s lives. Instead, given my age and need of a degree I focused on my academic project and crossed the border from a hegemonic apartheid into the amaXhosa townships. Tacit, yet distinct boundaries surrounded each racially designated domain and my crossing over as a white, meant the withdrawal of protection from the South African police. Once in Crossroads I relied on Mrs Mangesi, her family, and ANC networks. I am grateful for what she did as it put her life at risk. Furthermore, my naivety, and our action, compromised the project.

One night I went with Dr Ramphele into the townships to a political meeting to discuss the project and the implications of my intrusive fieldwork. I learnt then what decolonisation meant as the amaXhosa committee addressed the meeting in English for my benefit. Dr Ramphele rebuked them, saying that I could observe and learn, they would speak in amaXhosa of “African” matters. I quickly recognised that apartheid existed in Crossroads as a programme of verbal and non-verbal resistance. Like other African peoples, puberty rituals for manhood had continued and youth were still schooled in this moral integrity (Siweya, Sodi, & Douglas, 2018). Initiates would confront the designated “white” group area, ghostly apparitions covered in white clay, as they hid behind the bulwarks of the motorway that led to the airport. Despite it being illegal under apartheid law, older Xhosa women silently brewed huge metal drums of traditional beer, umqombothi. This would celebrate the new men’s return from the circumcision ground. Many years later in vivid, coloured oil paint I would compose three paintings of the children’s faces, of the Xhosa umqombothi maker and finally of two women and a man sharing umqombothi in 1991.