South Africa: doctor"s web site about botched male circumcisions criticised

The website aims to reveal the “dark secrets and techniques” of the circumcision ritual undergone by teenage boys from the Xhosa group. Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Photographs

A Dutch medical doctor in South Africa has published graphic images of penises mutilated during botched circumcision ceremonies, angering community leaders who accuse him of meddling in their culture.

Dr Dingeman Rijken says he set up a internet site to reveal the “dark tricks of the ritual” because conventional leaders had shown surprising indifference and incompetence to the annual toll of death and injury.

The leaders have condemned Rijken for breaking a cultural taboo and reported his website to South Africa’s Movie and Publication Board, demanding it be shut down.

Each year 1000′s 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 examine, undergo circumcision by a traditional surgeon and apply white clay to their bodies.

While a lot of initiation colleges are officially sanctioned, other individuals are unregulated and let bogus surgeons to operate with unsterilised blades. In accordance to Rijken, who operates in the area, 825 boys have died from problems considering that 1995 and a lot of much more have suffered from what he calls male genital mutilation.

Explaining his motives for going public, Rijken writes: “Winter 2012. Groups of young boys with white faces had been brought out of a secret dark world into glaring hospital lights. Sunken eyes from dehydration, flaky skin from malnourishment, bagged eyes from sleep deprivation.

“Usually you would smell the rotting when they had been strolling previous. I devote many hrs cleaning their wounds, attempting to insert urinary catheters in their botched penis, battling to explain 17-year-olds that they had misplaced their manhood.”

He adds that, following an additional catastrophic winter season in 2013, and with standard leaders unlikely to make a positive adjust, he chose to go to the media and set up the website to inform prospective initiates and the broader community about the dark tricks of the ritual.

Graphic photos display severely disfigured, contaminated or amputated genitals on the internet site, ulwaluko.co.za, named soon after the Xhosa language word for initiation into manhood. Guests are advised: “Please be warned that this website includes graphic medical photographs of penile disfigurement beneath ‘complications’ and ‘photos’. You could 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 been dealt with the matter differently. Nkululeko Nxesi, from the Neighborhood Development Basis of South Africa, informed the AFP news agency: “That web site should be shut down with fast effect. He must respect the cultural rules and processes of this nation.”

Patekile Holomisa, a former leader of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, took a related view. He advised AFP: “We condemn the publicity of this ritual to individuals who do not practise it. Ladies must not see what takes place at initiations.”

The Movie and Publications Board restricted the site for under-13s but ruled that it is a bona fide scientific publication with fantastic educative value.

It extra: “The internet site highlights the malice that bedevils this rich cultural practice. It does not condemn this rich cultural practice but tends to make a clear plea for it to be regulated so that deaths do not arise.”

South Africa: doctor"s web site about botched male circumcisions criticised