The UK Daily Mail ran a curious story out of Kenya about an annual festival where men are stripped naked and forced to undergo circumcision Sounds like fun?
Yes it certainly appears to be one of those crazy primitive people kind of stories, which the mainstream Western media is so fond of (it makes us here in the West feel so smugly advanced and entitled) and coming from the UK Daily Mail, which is known for printing nonsense about Black folks including this reprint of a bogus wives tale about a spider in a Black woman’s weave, I don’t doubt that some shenanigans were involved (and judging by the filed archived pictures they used on a story, which is unrelated, I’m probably right). However there is video with what it sounds like a native voice. Thankfully the video doesn’t show the big chop, but it is of the poor men being carted around the town naked before undergoing their initiation.
So let them tell it:
A dozen men were seized and stripped naked before they were forced to undergo circumcisions in western Kenya as part of a ‘ceremony’, it has been reported. The 12 men, from the Luo, Turkana, Iteso and Luhyia communities, were reportedly subjected to the procedure after their wives revealed they had not had it done previously. A number of women in the town of Moi’s Bridge, in western Kenya, where the incident took place, said they were pleased the men went through the procedure because it made them cleaner and [able to] perform better in bed.
According to Kenyan radio station West FM, the men who underwent the procedure had either previously avoided having it done or had come from a Luhyia sub-tribe which did not carry it out.
A crowd reportedly sung circumcision songs as they gathered the men up before taking them to a nearby medical centre where the operations were carried out.
One of the wives, Anne Njeri, who witnessed the incident on Friday, told the radio station: ‘We are happy with the move to have such men cut because uncircumcised men are dirty and do not perform well in bed and thus we are sure their wives will now enjoy their marriages.’
Each of the men have been provided with money by others in the town for treatment, according to the report.”
Gives whole new meaning to the urban euphemism about tucking one’s chains in the wrong neighborhood. For real though, I don’t want to make light of this too much as I imagine that for many men, this is all traumatizing (this was certainly the impression I got from the men in my Facebook timeline, who balked at the suggestion of having that procedure performed as an adult man. Plus there is a serious discussion to be had around getting snipped.
The whole thing seems silly considering that male circumcision is so common place here in America that it is almost a given that boys are supposed to not have their foreskins. But in other parts of the world, particularly in Southern and East Africa, the procedure is largely a new thing, being spurred on by the World Health Organization, also known as the WHO, who have recommended to removal of the foreskin as part of HIV prevention strategies. According its website, the recommendation is based on off the results of two studies – one from Kenya and one from Uganda – which have shown a reduction in the risk of sexual transmission of HIV from male to female from anywhere between 60 percent (in Kenya) to 73 percent (in Uganda).
As a result of this recommendation, several African nations, particularly those most effected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, have embraced and promote the procedure as part of their Anti-HIV public health campaigns, including Botswana, Swaziland, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa, among others. The results of this movement, according to this article from last year, is that an upwards of 5.8 million men on the continent, have done the snip in the last three years. And according to this report by UN AIDS, the number of new infections have decreased by as much as 33 percent in 17 countries on the continent. It should be noted that the decline has been happening since 2001, which predates the WHO’s recommendation. Nor does it say if the decline is a direct result of the new circumcision movement.
Moreover, the push has not been without its controversy and challenges. In Uganda, reports have surfaced of naked men being chased through the street by angry mobs, trying to cut off their foreskins. In Kenya, reports have surfaced about increases in HIV along coastal towns where men had recently been circumcised. The same is being observed in Botswana, where a senior health minister has raised alarms about the rise among HIV among recently circumcised male. The fear is that men in particular are gaining false confidence about their unprotected sex activities due to public health campaigns, which crudely promote circumcision as the answer to the spread of the disease.
Be it for tradition or for public health reasons, it does appear that forcing – or strong encouragement (depending on how you want to look at it) – men on the continent to undergo a procedure seems kind of ill-advised – or at the very least, haphazardly implemented. And traumatic. And I do wonder if this weree female genitalia mutilation, would folks be so willing to turn the other way at what might just be a serious invasion of privacy and will – to say the least.
It should also be noted that according to the CDC, the number of cases of people living with HIV infection have actually decreased by almost a one-third over the last decade. The rate of male circumcision in America has also decreased from 83 percent in the 1960s to 77 percent percent in 2010. I’ll let you draw your own correlations.
