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In the article “Cultural warriors are not rational” (City Press 2 August 2009), Andile Mngxitama seems to be disgusted by the “slave mentality” that induces Africans to “kill young men in the name of a mythical and idiotic thing called manhood”. He suspects “this madness is a result of spiritual and material dispossession” that resulted in our “backwardness, fear, superstition and irrationality”
A belief system as an aspect of culture is a subject that has over time intrigued anthropologists. It is simply repeated, learned and acquired behaviour that sometimes consolidates into rituals. These rituals need not be “rational” or scientific. Nor do they have to be “proven” in newspaper columns or academic platforms for them to be accepted. Those who may have an affinity to impose Karl Marx’s statements where they least apply may be interested to find out why Marx never cut his beard in the first place.
Belief systems are critically important for group affiliation, social acceptance and self-affirmation. The rejection and social sanction against those who despise our way of life is what sometimes compels inkwenkwe to join his peers entabeni against the wish and readiness of his parents.
All societies have their share of “irrationality and idiocy”. There is for instance nothing “rational” in shaking hands; covering your body for decency and walk naked in the beach among the same people; shaving your head and beard hoping to be handsome. But no matter how idiotic it sounds, no American male candidate would win a presidential election with a face hidden under a forest of hair and beard. It makes me wonder if it is the same concept of rationality that makes Mngxitama not to wear skirts.
Granted, some aspects of cultural practice could be dangerous. Yet the beauty of culture may be located in that very same quality. Europeans spend valuable time fighting and sometimes killing or getting killed by bulls. I have yet to hear someone screaming about the idiocy and cruelty caused to animals by this culture.
Car racing, rugby or boxing are all “dangerous” and perhaps “idiotic” sports. But “rational” people call not for their abolition but regulation. By the same token, stringent regulation and control of ulwaluko must be imposed to curb the deaths that have the effect of drowning the social importance of the practice. Amakhwenkwe are never meant to be killed at the mountain – ayadlangwa. If we were to heed the socially reckless call to abolish ulwaluko because of the “neglect and incompetence” visiting the practice, there would be no public hospitals today.
The cut is a small aspect of ulwaluko. It is a powerful institution where you learn the values of ubuntu. That is also where the writer learned to be an African and umJwarha. I came to appreciate the knowledge of science by the indigenous people. Umkhwetha smears lime (calcium carbonate) all over his body. This substance has anti-perspirant and anti-deodorant properties, which account for why umkhwetha does not have a foul smell despite not washing for months. It also serves as a sunscreen.
I doubt if anybody could be proud of ridiculing Africans for lack of originality by wearing “Czechoslovakian beads” and eating “Latin American maize” as though there is nothing African these nations are using. They are using our mathematical formulas, singing our jazz and eating our meat. They are still colonising our artifacts in their museums. Be that as it might, we traded with other nations on equal par long before Christ was born. We were not done any favours.
Sadly, Africans are often the first to attack their own value systems in such exaggerated viciousness as would make Verwoerd turn green with envy in his grave. We are the first to distort and attack ilobola as reducing women to commodities when it has nothing of the sort in its undiluted version. We are so obsessed with departing from ourselves that we even walk, talk, laugh and eat in the manner and style of other people. Talk about slave mentality"
