ADVOCATE FOR CHANGE: SHIELDING OUR BALLS AND KEEPING THE BODY ALIVE. A friend once remarked that culture is nothing sacred. It is there to facilitate solutions to various problems in life. Once that ceases to be the case, we need to perform outside of it. Put another way, once times change and a new set of problems not previously encountered by a culture arise, we ought to alter our ways and seek a better way to perform solutions. That is to say, the culture has to adapt. There was a time when there was no corn in Afrika and we today in the south, ate soghurm as our staple food. Corn reached us and we adopted it and soon we would devise various way to prepare and eat it - umngqusho, a corn and beans soup, etc. Similarly, customs would migrate from pure mqombothi (traditionally fermented beer) to brandy and whiskey as gifts. This evidence for change in the tools to perform traditional and customary behaviour is further seen in the change of lobola currency, from live cattle to Western money. The symbol of lobola is still the same however. The question which I suppose Xhosa people might ask is, are we not due a migration of methodology regarding how we perform circumcision? This question might then be generalised to all stakeholders of the tradition of circumcision to symbolise and mark the transition from boyhood to manhood amongst southern Afrikan populations, indeed the entire continent. If the department of health or the particular ethnic cluster were to develop a branch within the medical framework that specifically deals the issues of circumcision, and there would be all the necessary parties to perform the same roles as in a native setting. In case you do not readily pick up the theme, it materializes as: Is it not time to modernize the process, thereby circumventing needless deaths of young men and manhoods? I think it is.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 07:25:26 +0000
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