Kenya: Sparing the knife and spoiling the child is abuse

[Guest guest]

Sparing the knife and spoiling the child is abuse

by Wandia Njoya

Posted December 4th, 2011

Now that Kenyan media have made it their mission to attack women's empowerment

campaigns in the name of concern about the boy child, I have decided, as a

Kenyan woman, to now fight for the boy child. My first target: traditional

initiation rights.

As people outside Kenya may not know, the long December school holiday is the

season that parents have picked on to graduate their baby boys into manhood. In

many parts of the country, 12 and 13-year-old children are being herded for

initiation rites (i.e. circumcision). The idea is that they should join high

school as men.

That's right. No adolescence. No wet nights, no crushes on girls, no dates, no

heartbreaks, no dreams, no self-fulfillment. At 14, a boy is told he is a man

with all that means: marriage, career and dominance.

And with the thugs and exploiters as role models of men in Kenya, we are

essentially promising to 12, 13 and 14 year olds the impossible: they should be

driving Mercedes Benz, haranguing poor Kenyans in public and proving their

manhood on as many women as possible. So how do we expect a " man " wait, wait,

wait and wait for these goodies, when we told him at 13 that he is no different

from his father, since there now are two " men " in the house? If the " man " can't

get the house, the wife, the car and the power now, he'll go for what's easier:

drugs, alcohol and violence.

Surely, we should also accept that modern life has delayed adulthood. Before the

white man blessed us with his " civilization, " people could get married in their

late teens and comfortably raise families. That has changed. These days, one

needs at least a post-secondary diploma and preferably a degree to make it in

life. And it's not just about the job; it's also about the fact that life has

become more complicated. For instance, one must have basic knowledge of IT if

they are to progress. We are living in a global era where one must think of how

they are positioned globally, not locally. If all this complication is too much

for 22-year olds whom we are now being told to mentor aggressively, how is a

13-year old " man " supposed to cope?

To a large extent, we protect girls from these vagaries of life. Urban parents

will tell you that they are indignant when their 18-year daughter complains she

is being treated like a child because she is not allowed to hop into a car with

some man and drive off into the night.

When the girl says she's coming home at midnight, we hit the roof, but when the

boy does it, we ask if we should cut for him house keys. In other words, we are

telling boys that we don't care, and that they are on their own. We are

communicating to boys that if they don't know how to deal with something, it is

because they have failed as men; not because they are still young.

And this hurried maturity is not " African " or " traditional. " Initiation was our

equivalent of the Western-originated age of majority. That means that after

initiation, a man became a warrior to defend the community, and could soon after

take a wife. Ask men born before independence - most of them will tell you that

they were between 18 and 22 when they were circumcised. And the Kenyan

communities that are not suffering cultural angst are still circumcising men at

that age.

The lessons from our ancestors is that we cannot fast-track adulthood. As Fanon

showed us in The Wretched of the earth, we need to be protecting our youth from

laziness and Western cultural decadence. Wielding the knife cannot replace the

hard work of intelligently assessing African philosophical principles and

analyzing what life is really like so as to prepare our boys to be men and our

children to be adults.

I urge all opinion and political leaders to campaign aggressively for initiates

to be at least 16 or 18 years old before going through the initiation rites of

passage. Political goodwill is required because high schools are complicit in

this abuse. One high school headmaster even sent some students home for not

being circumcised, saying he wanted to protect them from bullying. He sent the

victims, rather than the bullies, home. And he taught the young men that manhood

is bullying.

And let not my male fellow citizens accuse me of being Westernized. It is better

to listen to their sisters, now, rather than cry imperialism later after Amnesty

International and Human Rights Watch start waving the UN charter to fight the

cause we can fight for with our own culture and resources.

It is the right of every child to mature, not to have maturity imposed of them.

Unless a boy can leave the initiation home straight for an identity card,

straight for the Kenya Defence Forces, or straight for the ballot, straight for

a profession or straight for marriage and fatherhood, he shouldn't be getting

circumcised. He should be going to school, getting an education and developing

into an independent human being. His voice should be breaking or broken by the

time he faces the knife.

Blog: http://www.zeleza.com/blog/wandia-njoya

[Guest guest]

Sparing the knife and spoiling the child is abuse

by Wandia Njoya

Posted December 4th, 2011

Now that Kenyan media have made it their mission to attack women's empowerment

campaigns in the name of concern about the boy child, I have decided, as a

Kenyan woman, to now fight for the boy child. My first target: traditional

initiation rights.

As people outside Kenya may not know, the long December school holiday is the

season that parents have picked on to graduate their baby boys into manhood. In

many parts of the country, 12 and 13-year-old children are being herded for

initiation rites (i.e. circumcision). The idea is that they should join high

school as men.

That's right. No adolescence. No wet nights, no crushes on girls, no dates, no

heartbreaks, no dreams, no self-fulfillment. At 14, a boy is told he is a man

with all that means: marriage, career and dominance.

And with the thugs and exploiters as role models of men in Kenya, we are

essentially promising to 12, 13 and 14 year olds the impossible: they should be

driving Mercedes Benz, haranguing poor Kenyans in public and proving their

manhood on as many women as possible. So how do we expect a " man " wait, wait,

wait and wait for these goodies, when we told him at 13 that he is no different

from his father, since there now are two " men " in the house? If the " man " can't

get the house, the wife, the car and the power now, he'll go for what's easier:

drugs, alcohol and violence.

Surely, we should also accept that modern life has delayed adulthood. Before the

white man blessed us with his " civilization, " people could get married in their

late teens and comfortably raise families. That has changed. These days, one

needs at least a post-secondary diploma and preferably a degree to make it in

life. And it's not just about the job; it's also about the fact that life has

become more complicated. For instance, one must have basic knowledge of IT if

they are to progress. We are living in a global era where one must think of how

they are positioned globally, not locally. If all this complication is too much

for 22-year olds whom we are now being told to mentor aggressively, how is a

13-year old " man " supposed to cope?

To a large extent, we protect girls from these vagaries of life. Urban parents

will tell you that they are indignant when their 18-year daughter complains she

is being treated like a child because she is not allowed to hop into a car with

some man and drive off into the night.

When the girl says she's coming home at midnight, we hit the roof, but when the

boy does it, we ask if we should cut for him house keys. In other words, we are

telling boys that we don't care, and that they are on their own. We are

communicating to boys that if they don't know how to deal with something, it is

because they have failed as men; not because they are still young.

And this hurried maturity is not " African " or " traditional. " Initiation was our

equivalent of the Western-originated age of majority. That means that after

initiation, a man became a warrior to defend the community, and could soon after

take a wife. Ask men born before independence - most of them will tell you that

they were between 18 and 22 when they were circumcised. And the Kenyan

communities that are not suffering cultural angst are still circumcising men at

that age.

The lessons from our ancestors is that we cannot fast-track adulthood. As Fanon

showed us in The Wretched of the earth, we need to be protecting our youth from

laziness and Western cultural decadence. Wielding the knife cannot replace the

hard work of intelligently assessing African philosophical principles and

analyzing what life is really like so as to prepare our boys to be men and our

children to be adults.

I urge all opinion and political leaders to campaign aggressively for initiates

to be at least 16 or 18 years old before going through the initiation rites of

passage. Political goodwill is required because high schools are complicit in

this abuse. One high school headmaster even sent some students home for not

being circumcised, saying he wanted to protect them from bullying. He sent the

victims, rather than the bullies, home. And he taught the young men that manhood

is bullying.

And let not my male fellow citizens accuse me of being Westernized. It is better

to listen to their sisters, now, rather than cry imperialism later after Amnesty

International and Human Rights Watch start waving the UN charter to fight the

cause we can fight for with our own culture and resources.

It is the right of every child to mature, not to have maturity imposed of them.

Unless a boy can leave the initiation home straight for an identity card,

straight for the Kenya Defence Forces, or straight for the ballot, straight for

a profession or straight for marriage and fatherhood, he shouldn't be getting

circumcised. He should be going to school, getting an education and developing

into an independent human being. His voice should be breaking or broken by the

time he faces the knife.

Blog: http://www.zeleza.com/blog/wandia-njoya