Curses as the ancient cut dies

By Edward Indakwa

Across large swathes of western Kenya, this is the season when young boys are converted into men, courtesy of the village circumciser.

But having spent two weeks here, I’m alarmed that elders are not turning their sons into men, unless they are doing so under the cover of darkness.

I have only seen three boys, hardly aged ten, ringing bells in the age-old practice of summoning guts to face the knife. And even then, those boys were not dancing and prancing with a large retinue of excited followers. They were sitting lazily on the back end of a boda boda while two small boys followed at a half-hearted trot.

They could be two explanations for this. One, we’ve stopped giving birth.

But that is doubtful because my home district, Kakamega, is the most populous and our fair women the most fertile in the land.

Fair and fertile women

The second explanation, which I imagine to be true, is that a combination of poverty, (foreign) religion and ‘civilisation’ has dealt a deathblow to the ancient rite of passage. These days, a cut has been reduced to a perfunctory exercise to control the spread of HIV, not turn boys into responsible adults.

Curiously, while the male cut assumes irrelevance, the female cut, which is illegal and serves no useful purpose apart from causing marital strife and enhancing maternity bills, remains.  Rumour even has it that in some parts of Kenya, the people who chop little girls are not dirty old women but trained nurses.

So what is the boy child to do under the circumstances? He got circumcised in hospital where the only thing the medic said was, “Lie still!” meaning he practically remained the lad that he was – no life lessons passed on.

That left him with one option: School. But if his father is too poor to lay out an expensive circumcision ceremony, then it follows that he won’t afford to take him to school either.

The result is that we have an army of Standard Eight dropouts who are neither boys nor men. Their options in life are limited.

They could get hired as motorcycle taxi operators and quickly spill their brains on the tarmac. They could hitch up a village beauty and sire a bunch of kids, without knowing the first thing about what it means to be a man or a husband.

Or they could become petty crooks, perpetually high on illegal substances, their intoxication made possible by the disappearance of a chicken here, some scrap metal there and bumming and begging. It is a crying shame because the old circumciser made everyone equal, but the Standard Eight exam only churns out winners and losers.

The winners migrate to Nairobi, but the losers remain in the village, doing nothing and waiting for nothing. They only increase the fortunes of chang’aa and bhang traders, who, together with livestock thieves, are the only people making money in the village.

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Where true hate speech abounds

I’m beginning to think we worry too much about the ability of politicians to incite us to violence. I would even suggest that as we strive to ban hate speech, we should forget about politicians.

Mzalendo Kibunjia may not know this, but the vilest hate speech is not delivered at political podiums but in marital homes.

A man staggers home and his wife calls him a useless ‘dog’. In the West, that would not be considered hate speech because their dogs are ‘sweet’ creatures, not our flea-ridden mongrels that eat anything and everything.

The man doesn’t turn the other cheek. He calls his a wife a harlot whose family is so poor that she would be destitute if he had not, out of mercy, married her. “You are here because of food!” he spits.

Unbeknown to him, he has just pocked his finger in a beehive. “And you? You call yourself a man, you useless dog? Today, I will say the truth. These six children, not a single one of them is yours! And if I’m a prostitute, it is because I feed you. When is the last time you bought anything in this house you useless drunken dog? Wuuuuwi!”

And so, while Kibunjia is trailing politicians, in thousands of households in Kenya, hate speech hits the rafters. Husband and wife lock themselves in an epic battle and the next day, we wake up to a gory headline: “Man butchers wife and six children”. Or, “Woman stabs husband to death and poisons six children”.

In our usual preoccupation with politicians, the MP’s vile vote-fishing attempt at political humour lands him before the magistrate. Meanwhile, we bury the real perpetrators and victims of hate speech and impotently wonder what the world has come to.