It’s that time of year again – winter initiation season – when thousands of young men in our country to ‘go to the mountain’. They are circumcised, schooled by elders and re-enter the outside world as adult men.

And as always there is distressing news, like this, from News 24 on 23rd June:

In the past 12 years, more than 800 men and teenage boys have had their penises amputated after botched traditional circumcision procedures. … In the same period, 714 boys died from botched circumcisions in the Eastern Cape alone. …The news comes after the death of three initiates in Libode, west of Mthatha, after attending illegal initiation schools. All three of the initiates were 15 years old. (Click here for more)

How do we general readers make sense of this? At the first sign of dangerous infection why don’t the young men save themselves by going to hospital? They would do this with any other sickness. Why isn’t circumcision done safely in a clinic, then the boys go for the lessons in manhood in the bush?

The Cursed and Exiled is an insider’s story about the powerful traditions and taboos surrounding Xhosa initiation. The story respects the tradition and does not tell of the secret rituals. It stresses how nearly all young men come home proud, tightly knit into bands of initiation-mates: amakrwala. Their whole families are also proud and honoured.

However, the story helps the reader understand why tragedy unfolds for many families. Their sons die, or are maimed, and unable to have a normal sex life.

Khayone is a respected, champion stick fighter. But his khankatha neglects him and his circumcision goes wrong. So, “I pursued refuge to the one place an umkhwetha is forbidden to go.” That is a hospital. There Khayone’s life is saved – but his penis is amputated. Due to this catastrophe, no fault of his own:

… back at Kwanoqabaka he is among the unmentioned. Men spit in disgust when the name Khayone comes up. Women’s chests are heavy with insults. Insult piled on insult wait to be spewed on his return. Words such as ‘nofotyela’, ‘nontywentywe’ and ‘ilulwane’, are used to describe him as a tainted man. … No-one will ever touch me again. Touching me is bad luck, the curse of nofotyela.”

And sure enough, when Khayone returns home: “That one is dead to me,” says Ngungunyana, Khayone’s father, spitting on the floor. “I have no son.”

The story shows us how, in some communities, belief in supernatural evil forces, ‘bad luck’ and ‘witches’ is deep. So deep, that yes, the family and community will send a young man away rather than risk bad things happening.

At the same time, we now understand how a young man might think: ‘If I don’t get circumcised, or am circumcised safely in hospital, or I go for treatment there, I might as well never go home. Life wouldn’t be worth living there.’

However, the story hints that things are slowly changing. Bantwini, Khayone’s best friend, tells the narrator (referring to the amakrwala):

I’m tired of these guys. They don’t know the basic meaning of being a man. A real man doesn’t go around picking on the powerless. A real man always picks up the fallen. Only the insecure man picks on the powerless. These are not men.

There have been problems with some initiation schools in recent times. They are run just for money, have heavy drinking, and untrained amakhankatha. Sometimes boys are even kidnapped into the schools. Many schools are illegal, taking boys younger than 18, and not checked and registered by the local traditional leaders or Department of Health.

The Department is working to make all schools legally registered, and safer. They have saved many boy’s lives by getting them to hospital. Kgosi SE Mahlangu, chairman of the National House of Traditional Leaders, said in June that “… we are calling for the proper training of amakhankatha to ensure they have the required skills. The same should goes for iingcibi…”(Click here for more)

In the other plot strand, about Sintu, the author presents another way in which modern human rights clash with traditional beliefs. Sintu is the chief’s son, but his father bullied him, and he had run away from the village. As he says:

He told me that there was a long way to go to make me a real man. He said I was ‘ibhenqe’ in front of everyone. He guessed what was in my heart even then. He instructed the traditional surgeon to arrange my second circumcision.

In the city, Sintu is out as gay, and in love. Gay love and marriage is a right and legal in our country. It is more accepted in town, but Sintu knows it’s impossible for the villagers where he comes from to accept. So another young man is ‘cursed and exiled’ through no fault of his own.

I remember what my father did to the two men who were accused by some villagers of being gay. They were called witches. Their homes were burned to the ground, on my father’s orders. He dispossessed their families of everything they owned. They were exiled from the village for good. Imagine what would happen to me?

Now his father is dead, and his grandmother uses powerful magic to draw him home to become rightful king. In the village, Sintu is drawn into the tragic fate of Khayone, now exiled and unable to be a husband to Onikwa.

“You and I are the same,” I said to him. “We are both in love with someone, but our love is impossible. Villagers will curse and exile me too if they know the truth.

Sintu has to make a choice. As he says in the end to his partner Mothusi: “Rather than being here, living as king and yet repressed, I choose love. I choose not to live without you.”

Despite the tragic suicide of Khayone, the story ends hopefully. In South Africa today we can legally make different life choices. Sintu, Mothusi, Onikwa, and her son Khayone, are now building a happy life for themselves ‘in exile’. As the narrator says:

A bad ending can sometimes lead to a beginning of something new and good, I see that now.