Circumcising Tradition: The Politics of Becoming a Man in Eastern Uganda
Prepare yourselves.
If you’re fascinated by culture then this will provide you a glimpse into ceremonializing circumcision in Eastern Uganda.
If you’re a man, you may want to prepare for the eventual shudder that will creep up your back as you experience sympathy-pain.
If you’re a practicing Jewish man living in the West, you may want to thank the stars that your own circumcision ceremony is now a painful memory now lost to the abyss of your developed brain.
In Eastern Uganda, boys get circumcised when they graduate from lower-to-mid high school at sixteen. Circumcision signifies their passage into “manhood”.
The ceremony lasts up to two days with dancing, drinking, food, and visitors. It’s like a big birthday or graduation party if celebrations of this sort involved machetes to the genitals.
Circumcision is an operation where the foreskin is separated from the glans (or penis head) and removed.
As I write this, I sit totally upright from my laptop, with my head so far away from the keyboard as if the recollection of that ceremony will jump off my screen.
It’s October 2018 and I’m sitting on the mud-floor of a handmade hut, being offered rice and chicken served in banana leaves.
His boy is eighteen. He will be circumcised tomorrow. Today marks his pre-celebration, the man of the house explains to me as I take a chunk of rice in my bare hand and stuff it as best as I can in my mouth.
Others create a spoon with their fingers successfully gulping the rice down at quadruple the speed as I do.
Eating with your hands is truly a gift to be mastered. So is circumcision without anesthesia, apparently, and the man of the house explains to me how a doctor who “excels in circumcision” will be invited tomorrow to cut his son.
In Mbale, Uganda, excelling in circumcision, is both a gift and a talent.
The boy’s father continues to explain how his son was late to finish high school because their finances couldn’t cover him consistently throughout his secondary education.
Because of this, his son will be circumcised at age eighteen, having only just completed his high-school diploma.
On these Eastern, temperate peripheries, however, the eighteen-year-old was lucky to have received any education at all. The fact that I am given a balanced meal in a house with a strong outer structure is yet another sign of the family’s relative wealth.
“Money,” — the man of the house continues to tell me — “We have invested a lot of it for this ceremony”.
They must pay the expert doctor (who, may the record hold, is not a certified doctor and more like a man with a knife), buy all the food and drink, hire a village priest, pay musicians for the ceremonial ‘run’ that takes place the night before the procedure.
To make matters worse, they must host this foreigner who drops rice on the floor.
For other circumcision ceremonies, hiring instruments isn’t the norm. Music with instruments is actually symbolic of the financial situation of the family. That they are able to accompany the boy’s run around the village with hired music is another signifier of wealth. For the others in the village, the run is usually done with simple chanting.
After we eat and drink from a fermented millet bowl — multiple long straws sticking out of the basin that tastes exactly what you’d expect fermented millet to taste like, only it gets you as drunk as a bucket of beer would — I am beckoned to meet the boy.
I think some part of me has reduced this boy to mere body because I don’t remember his name.
In fact, the whole ceremony has such a deep focus on the body that prior to the circumcision they paint and cover the boy’s torso in millet and beads per tradition.
Tomorrow, when the boy is to be circumcised, he will wear nothing but a cloth around his lacerated skin.
After the operation, I am told that he will have to wear the skirt-like cloth until the healing process is completed. In the days following, he will wear only the skirt with nothing covering his bare chest and naked feet, both crusted over with eighteen years of farm labor. I must have frowned, giggled, or reacted in another inappropriate way because I am immediately countered:
“No, no, the skirt is a sign that you have gone through this ceremony. It is a sign of strength.”
Fair enough, because when I finally meet the boy he stands like a man ready for battle.
His eyes have a slightly red tint from drinking too much millet. I can’t blame him: this is the last night of his childhood.
I ask him how he feels, but since being reduced to nothing but his skin, the boy has no voice, and his words are supplanted by my translator, who himself went through a similar ceremony twenty years ago,
“The ceremony is a symbol of how strong you are. If you shout — you are weak. If you cry — you are weak.”
I look at the boy who is standing as if statuesque, his hands crossed over his big chest, representing something akin to manliness already. His lips sealed shut.
Mbale is host to the notorious Mt. Elgon, with Kenya just a stone’s throw away. That is — if you can throw far enough not to hit the heads of the nomadic Karamajong tribesmen that navigate the volcanic base of Mt Elgon.
Suffering from decades of corruption under Amin’s violent rule still fresh in people’s minds, Uganda nonetheless shows promising signs of development.
The country is abundant in natural resources, and her people are starting to believe in a new wave of democracy inspired by university students in Kampala and the ever-revolutionary Bobi Wine (who will run for president in 2020).
Yet despite this, it’s in the rural peripheries of Eastern Uganda where you see how much progress is stunted. Circumcision ceremonies (“Imbala”) are a tradition that many still believe are of absolute necessity to a boy’s life.
Of course, this patriarchal mentality isn’t confined to Uganda. We see this inconsistent indoctrination everywhere: tradition is harder to do away with if we are talking about hurting a man’s pride.
Many Ugandan households are still male-dominated. In Mbale, in particular, I noticed how inequality leaked into the division of labor and people’s language. Women complain tirelessly about their husband’s alcoholism.
Ugandan women are strong — I mean physically, carrying 5 liters of water for kilometers to then wash dishes, clothes, and their families. But also mentally because there’s no alternative for their situation.
While Mbale’s women tend relentlessly to their farms and take their kids to school, their husbands will sit for hours in tiny sheds, drinking fermented millet and listening to music. Not all households are this unlucky.
But the majority I saw revealed a fundamental flaw in Mbale’s rural society: the women work while the men drink.
The fermentation of millet forms an equivalent 40% of alcohol and gets people so drunk they inevitably start swapping straws and swear words. Domestic violence is also a huge issue in parts of the community.
At end-of-year graduation parties, boys who await their diplomas and pre-circumcision parties sit expectantly on stage.
They wait for their father’s name — their name — to be called out. Looking proudly from the crowd are their mothers. The entire graduation attendance is exclusively female. Fathers drink the day away and don’t attend.
Yet, when their sons forego their foreskin in the days to come, the fathers will, without a doubt, be present.
Many boys have tried to escape their circumcisions. I was told, laughingly, — laughter surprising given the context — that when boys escape to the cities, their families will follow them, and drag them back to the village for a forced circumcision.
“Why do the families care so much??” I asked, incredulous.
“It is a rite of passage — and everybody does it. If your son escapes the ceremony, then he is not a man, and this brings great shame on the family.”
We encircle the boy and the village priest covers him in white paint.
Millet is rubbed on his chest. His clenched fists remind me that he is eighteen and will remember this moment for the rest of his life.
The boy’s sister and mother are ushered into the middle of the circle and they too are covered in millet that washes down their foreheads and onto their bare shoulders.
Before I could ask, my companion offers, “it is a tradition”, as if fed up with my questions (if Ugandans would ever appear to be fed up), “the mother and sister cannot wash until the circumcision is over — tomorrow”.
The night after the boy’s pre-circumcision party, I lie awake under the comfort of my mosquito net, listening to the bellowing and drumming of the party as they run around the village keeping people up with their rattling footsteps and drumroll.
They run until the early hours of the morning as if the boy is trying to extend the night and delay the inevitable pain and probable infection that will follow with sunrise.
I’m unsure if I want to watch it or not. For my Ugandan companions, they’ve seen enough of it, and take it as it comes.
“Is there blood?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Is it painful?”
My companion refuses to answer questions of pain — twenty years after the fact, and he still wants to show his strength.
But Ugandans have never been ones to complain. They dance at every occasion, smile at every daybreak, and say “I love you” to strangers after only a few days of chatting and laughing with them.
Lying in bed, I imagine all the thoughts that must be going through the boy’s head.
Is he thinking of the pain? Or power? Does he want to run away? Or is he looking forward to passing into manhood in front of his peers and parents?
What I know for sure is that there will be blood. And pain. The machete (or elongated, semi-sterilized knife) will slice the tip of the boy’s penis as he stands, hands on his hips, holding back any semblance of a reaction.
His entourage of friends and family will clap and dance. Wrap the genitals. Chant. Pump the chest. And it’s over.
The boy is no longer a boy but a man.
I’m still sitting back from my screen, trying to block memory and make sense of tradition, remoteness, culture, pain, and patriarchy.
But at the end of the day what makes more sense is to accept that what you don’t understand doesn’t always have to make sense.
The customs that belong to the rural community of Mbale are grounded in decades of practice by the Bamasaba tribe. To try and deconstruct something that feels foreign is to do damage to the true breadth and depth of tribal tradition.
What strikes me about this tradition above anything else is that it still reinforces gender inequalities in society by placing emphasis on the man as powerful, strong, and absent of pain. But what may seem to empower actually feels disconnected, leaving the boy silent and subjugated.
In the end, what does it mean when patriarchal practices cease to make sense or transcend countries?
I look at the boy with pity. Circumcision could harm the boy if carried out in unsterilized conditions, leading to infection. But maybe he looks at us with pity as our buddies make ‘slut’ jokes, and our Presidents ‘grab pussies’.
However, it doesn’t help that as I write this story down, I am miles away, sitting at a pristinely cleaned desk with two screens on either side of my visual periphery, a cold draft emitting from the cosmopolis outside.
It doesn’t help that here I am, halfway across the world, shuddering at an event that wouldn’t have happened to me, even if I was born with a penis.
