The Lowveld has once again hosted a successful initiation school (ingoma), despite a larger-than-usual number of initiates, after Covid-19 had restricted the annual event for two years.
The chairperson of Mpumalanga’s House of Traditional Leaders, Chief Mathupa Mokoena, said he regarded this event successful, seeing as all the initiates returned home “alive and healthy”. He put this down to the co-operation between parents and initiation school owners.
“Parents make sure that their kids are healthy before they send them to school, and those who are on medication make sure they take them accordingly,” he said.
He also said the induna regularly visits the initiation school and sends him a report as part of monitoring them. “Another thing that assisted us was that we had doctors who were always ready to go and check on initiates that were reported to be sick, and the people responsible for guarding the kids made sure they used all available resources to prevent fatalities during this initiation school,” said Mokoena.
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Earlier this year, three initiates died in Mpumalanga during such an initiation school due to the negligence of the school owners, and harsh measures were taken against them.
“Some of the people still want to use the old method of ingoma, which worked back then. But today, things are different since people who are going into the mountains are over the age of 10. They are young and they need one’s full attention and the old rules of the ingoma will not apply to them because of the modern food they eat and Western medication they take.”
He said to host a successful ingoma, initiation school owners should allow Western and traditional medicine to work together. “There are some diseases that you cannot heal with traditional medicine and then Western medicine must be used. That will make their school a success,” he said.
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Meanwhile, a school’s owner, Pieter Mokoena, said he is happy that the government allowed him to practise his culture after two years of being on hold, but the most important thing is that he made sure that he sent his initiates back home as healthy as they arrived. “I made sure that I did a thorough background check on all my students, fed them with healthy food, ensured they were always clean, and that medication was taken regularly,” he said.
Sinethembe Mogane (11) said he is happy to be a man and the treatment he received at school was the same as that he gets at home. “I do not regret going to the initiation school, because their treatment was good and I was not abused. They allowed me and the other initiates to enjoy and learn to be responsible men,” he said.
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