Mothers say ‘no’ to bush initiation
Rural Vhembe mothers in Limpopo have refused to send their sons to bush initiation schools this year saying they valued their sons lives more than they did the age-old tradition.
The mothers said there were no guarantees that their sons would come back in good health – or alive. They said they would rather take their sons to a medical professional at a clinic or hospital to get circumcised.
From this coming Friday (june 25) initiation schools in the Vhembe area will start to operate for a period of three to four weeks. During this time young boys are encouraged to participate in the initiation. In recent years, this tradition came under the spotlight however as the media reported more amputations and deaths from infections among initiates.
Mothers had enough
Now some mothers have had enough and said a blatant “No” to sending their sons to the “bush”.
And the MEC for Cooperative Governance, Human and Traditional Affairs in Limpopo, Makoma Makhurupetje, has issued a strong warning to initiation school owners not to abduct boys in order to force them to take part in initiation ceremonies.
One mother, Maria Muhanganei, said: “I just wish all the mothers out there would stop sending their boys to the bush initiation schools. It is a risk. We are now living in a world where they are various diseases out there like HIV and sending our kids to the bush schools could result in them coming back sick.”
Shirley Munyai, a mother of two boys, aged nine and seven, said: “I do not know why some mothers still choose to send their children to the bush schools where they will be exposed to various diseases and even death.
“I will never send my sons to the bush initiation school, mine will go to a professional medical doctor where they will be treated with care,” she said, adding that her sons would get circumcised later this year but not at a bush initiation school. “I cannot put the health of my boys at risk by sending them to the initiation school. Besides that they won’t get healthy food or a nice place to sleep at night.”
Illegal bush schools
Illegal bush initiations school came under the spotlight in recent years because of botched circumcisions that caused the death of boys who went there hoping to return home as men. This year the Limpopo House of Traditional Leaders turned down 51 out of 376 applications for the 2016 initiation school period due to non-compliance.
Medical male circumcision, done correctly, reduces the risk of HIV infection by about 60 percent. The World Health Organisation also recommends medical male circumcision as a strategy to reduce the risk of HIV infection.
In Mpumalanga, an innovative group of young doctors and traditional leaders have come together to find a solution to these problems, to ease parents anxieties. Watch this Health-e News video report on the Ingoma Forum and their work to reduce initiation deaths in the province. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE_87FCGFJU – Health-e News.
An edited version of this article was published on health24
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Mothers say ‘no’ to bush initiation
by NdivhuwoMukwevho, Health-e News
June 22, 2016