“When I was sixteen, the regent decided that it was time that I became a man. In Xhosa tradition, this is achieved through one means only: circumcision. For the Xhosa people, circumcision represents the formal incorporation of males into society. It is not just a surgical procedure, but a lengthy and elaborate ritual in preparation for manhood.”
“Circumcision is a trial of bravery and stoicism; no anesthetic is used; a man must suffer in silence.”
– pgs. 22, 24, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, Little, Brown and Company, 1994.
In his autobiography, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, Nelson Mandela detailed the nature of the rite of passage in his Xhosa tribe in South Africa. The “rite of passage” is a term which is used to refer to the process by which boys are initiated into manhood. For a boy to become a man, such a transformation would take more than one specific process, one would assume, but amongst Mandela’s people the single most important thing is the circumcision ceremony.
When a group of village boys reach a certain age, they are taken into a private section of the village territory by a small group of older men. After a period of group isolation and mental preparation, they are circumcised, one by one. The act of circumcision is done amongst African people without the use of anesthesia. Since circumcision involves the cutting off of the foreskin of the penis, which is an incredibly sensitive part of the male body, you can be assured that circumcision is a period of excruciating pain. A boy must bear such pain with bravery and dignity in order to be recognized as a man.
One aspect of the circumcision ceremony in such a tribal setting would be the forging of a unity and understanding amongst the boys/men in each age group, because they would have shared the male bonding of the circumcision ordeal.
In our Belizean culture when I was a boy growing into manhood, there was no such circumcision ceremony in the old capital. Christmas was a time when many young men became drunk for the very first time, and I suppose that was a rite of passage for some. But I think the area of sports provided most of the opportunities for older men to escort boys into manhood. The terror one experiences when one enters a field or stadium to perform for the first time in organized sports competition before hundreds of fans, is a time when a boy/man welcomes the solidarity of his contemporaries and the comfort of his elders.
I don’t agree with “skipping” bright children in school, as happened to me a couple times in primary school, because a boy loses contact with his age group. I will confess, however, that I don’t have a solution to the problem posed for teachers and school administrators by students who are too far ahead of their peers. Such “overly” gifted students become bored and then turn into distractions if they are not placed in an environment where they are mentally challenged.
As I look around me in Belize City and watch the deterioration of the sports programs with which I grew up – football, basketball, cricket and baseball, I feel that a lot of boys are becoming men, physically speaking, without the supervision of older men and without constructive contemporaries. This goes especially for all those young boys/teenagers who are not being integrated into a high school system. And the statistics show that half of our young boys do not attend high school.
If you were trying to pinpoint exactly the cause of Belize’s intolerable surge of juvenile delinquency and young criminality, you could look precisely to the problem with the rite of passage. There was a vacuum in this area in the ghetto neighborhoods which the gangs began filling some twenty years ago. It is within the homicidal confines of the gangs that Belizean boys have been processed into men for two decades.
What you must understand is that many of our community leaders and officials, who either are supposed to be addressing the problem or who explicitly claim that they are concerned about the young boys/young men crisis, have given up. Or they were not sincere in the first place.
It was always for sure that the racist oligarchs who dominate the Belizean economy were not interested in our youth in the first place. Yet such has been the nature of the collaboration of community leaders/officials with the oppressors, that all “responsible” leaders/officials insist that there is no racism and that there is no oligarchy in Belize.
Last year I told you the story of Justin Gonzalez and his New Site Erei program. I thought that it was a tragedy what had happened to him, because he had done everything right as far as I could see. The oligarchs claim they support healthy community initiatives that work with youth. So how come Justin got shipwrecked? That’s the question I would like Belize’s big bosses to answer. But, I will probably be waiting a long time for such an answer.