South African traditional leaders attack graphic male circumcision website

Dr Dingeman Rijken said he had set up a website to reveal the "dark secrets of the ritual" because traditional leaders had shown "shocking" indifference and incompetence to the annual toll of death and injury.The leaders have condemned Rijken for breaking a cultural taboo and reported his site to South Africa's Film and Publication Board, demanding it be shut down.Every year thousands of teenage boys from the Xhosa group embark on a secretive rite of passage in Eastern Cape province, spending up to a month in the bush to study, undergo circumcision by a traditional surgeon and apply white clay to their bodies.While many initiation schools are officially sanctioned, others are unregulated and allow bogus surgeons to operate with unsterilised blades. According to Rijken, who works in the region, 825 boys have died from complications since 1995 and many more have suffered from what he calls male genital mutilation.Explaining his reasons for going public, Rijken writes: "Winter 2012. Groups of young boys with white faces were brought out of a secret dark world into glaring hospital lights. Sunken eyes from dehydration, flaky skin from malnourishment, bagged eyes from sleep deprivation."Frequently you would smell the rotting when they were walking past. I spend many hours cleaning their wounds, trying to insert urinary catheters in their botched penis, battling to explain 17-year-olds that they had lost their manhood."He adds that, following another "catastrophic" winter season in 2013, and with traditional leaders unlikely to make a positive change, he chose to go to the media and set up the site "to inform prospective initiates and the broader community about the dark secrets of the ritual".Graphic images show severely disfigured, infected or amputated genitals on the website, ulwaluko.co.za, named after the Xhosa language word for initiation into manhood. Visitors are told: "Please be warned that this website contains graphic medical images of penile disfigurement under 'complications' and 'photos'. You may only enter this website if you are 13 years of age or older."But critics argue that Rijken has betrayed their culture and should have handled the matter differently. Nkululeko Nxesi, from the Community Development Foundation of South Africa, told the AFP news agency: "That website must be shut down with immediate effect. He should respect the cultural principles and processes of this nation."Patekile Holomisa, a former leader of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, took a similar view. He told AFP: "We condemn the exposure of this ritual to people who do not practise it. Women should not see what happens at initiations."The Film and Publications Board has restricted the website for under-13s but ruled that it is a "bona fide scientific publication with great educative value".It added: "The website highlights the malice that bedevils this rich cultural practice. It does not condemn this rich cultural practice but makes a clear plea for it to be regulated so that deaths do not occur."(theguardian.com)ANN.Az