Challenging circumcision

Gasa (2003) writes of the substance of historical contention amongst the amaXhosa;

Custom is not spiritual but is a question of spiritual practice and has to happen in the context of the ancestors. Circumcision is to ritual and binding to the ancestors and is a constant process of reinvention in Xhosa. Going to the mines was more important than circumcision. Today mate identity is in crisis and any ritual gives belonging. Some beliefs are in conflict.

A brief historical perspective

An historically based African moral philosophy about humanism, “uBuntu”, which advocates that “a person is a person through other people” underpins Mr Gebe’s and Gasa’s rationale (Tangwa, 2004). Mr Gebe, as a nurse practitioner, juggled this moral philosophy with his professional role to ethically judge issues of harm in the rite of passage. Accordingly, he, along with Xhosa officials,arranged to hide the hospitalised initiate from his peers, and to educate him before he re-entered seclusion. Respecting a mandate for equality amongst persons he incorporated me, as an academic researcher, into this conversation, bolstering a socio-political intervention. Mr Gebe sought, like many amaXhosa, to negotiate and reconcile difference and address harm (Bell, 2002). Yet, this juggling of discourse potentially breaks orthodoxy; the local falls to the global, and the amaXhosa, to their detriment, interface with an international human rights mandate to ban circumcision practices.

The history of the amaXhosa people, as evidenced in oral tradition, academic and governmental records illustrates how a strategic juggling of social and political affairs has endeavoured to assuage the harm brought by change. Whilst Gasa (2003) today writes of tenacity in a resilient practice, her predecessor, the Reverend Tiyo Soga (1829-1871) questioned its value in schooling adolescents in the 1880s (Attwell, 2005). As an uncircumcised Xhosa man, he was intimately aware of why “beliefs were in conflict” but respected a rite of passage fundamental to being amaXhosa. Soga knew well the harm Gasa wrote of in men going to the mines for he spent his boyhood in Scotland with a missionary family, the Burdens. Here, he adopted Christianity and married Janet Burden. In rejecting the practice, Soga advocated for social change and western education, only to stand accused by some amaXhosa of colluding with the colonial authorities. Interestingly, having given his spiritual life to Christianity, he did not recognise that circumcision practices embodied an engendering of amaXhosa personhood. Before he died, Soga contradicted his early work and wrote a document for his children which, “laid out aprogramme for the preservation of the Xhosa as a Christian nation in defiance of the white settlers’ claims of racial superiority and the alleged doom of his people” (Brock et al., 2015, 45). By the time of his death. Brock et al (2015) describe him as torn between his isiXhosa-speaking cultural identity and his office as a Christian minister. It was Soga, however, who in courageously confronting the amaXhosa about the value of circumcision in schooling adolescents, secured an oratory and academic tradition to debate forces for continuity and change.

Mayer & Mayer (1961, 1971) argue that, by the early-twentieth century, Soga’s advocacy had resulted in divisions between educationalists or “School amaXhosa” versus “Red” traditionalists in the Eastern Cape Province. Displayed by the former in European styles of dress and missionary schools for children, they differed to traditionalists wearing of cloth, red ochre and white facial marking and schools for adolescents. Schapera (1956) argues that by the middle of the century, industrialisation meant harm had incurred into amaXhosa traditional spaces. In becoming migrant workers, authority relationships between children and parents had shifted and circumcision ceased to be about schooling and instead became about achieving manhood and getting work (Mayer, 1971). The new man’s cloth jacket, and the flat cap of a nineteenth-century British factory worker speaks to this adaptation and a shift in strategy and intention. Furthermore, the historian, Mager (1995, 1997) describes how increasing violence permeated the practice in the Eastern Cape Province from 1945 onwards. Historically now, from facing inwards, the amaXhosa turn to face outwards, and circumcise youth to engage with diversity. Mager asserts, however, that, “Initiation, with circumcision as the key element, remained the touchstone of Xhosa masculinities ... Initiation signalled changes in personality, manliness, and identity” (Mager, 1999, 133).

By the 1980s, Cole (1987) writes that the apartheid government had instituted diverse prohibitions on a traditional practice in Cape Town. The social injustices this brought further fragmented amaXhosa communities resulting in youth, as comrades rejecting the authority of elders. Militant youth, in ridiculing their elders as traditionalists, compromised an autochthonous sense of egalitarian relatedness with its careful negotiation of authority in reciprocity roles and behaviour. The emergence of the African National Congress to address injustices meant that at local, national, and international levels, amaXhosa families became judged in respect of class and educational status (Beinart, 1991). In Cape Town, it is still the case that status in manhood is about the size of a new man’s coming out party rather than a communal celebration of his peers (Vivian, 2011). Lee offers an alternative perspective, arguing that amaXhosa women developed a sense of rootedness in the city, improved their homes and “attuned to the benefits of mobility” (Lee, 2005, 611). Describing current funeral practices, Lee observed that an amaXhosa sense of cultural identity came to incorporate migratory opportunities. This holds true in how women today orchestrate circumcision

Negotiating harm 165 practices and reciprocity relations with men to ensure relatedness in the extended family.

In resisting apartheid, the amaXhosa upheld practices such as circumcision, showing as Soga told, that they persevered through contradiction by choosing what they embraced. In this, orthodoxy did submit to reinvention and potential injuries were ignored. A new democratic government placed the amaXhosa people as one ethnicity within a nation state. Yet, in holding to circumcision and adapting by incorporating change from colonisation, apartheid, or post-modernity as a people they sustain a robust socio-political identity. By 2018, the film ‘Inxeba, The Wound, in staging family custom as exotic ritual, exposes adolescent vulnerability in this engendering of identity and sexuality to a globalised media audience. In breaking taboo and orthodoxy, this undermines amaXhosa engendering which is enculturated in an African morality and worldview (Ainslie & Kepe, 2016).