Initiates seen at a circumcision school in Mthatha. Picture for illustration: Gallo Images / City Press / Denvor de Wee
Several Eastern Cape families are in mourning as 20 initiates have died since the province’s summer initiation season started in November.
The Eastern Cape launched its 2024 summer initiation season on 15 November 2024, and it is now in its fourth week.
Following several developments, the Eastern Cape provincial government and the Eastern Cape House of Traditional and Khoisan Leadership hosted a media briefing on Friday afternoon to communicate the latest information about the season.
Eastern Cape Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) department MEC Zolile Williams announced that the province reported eight illegal deaths and 12 legal deaths of initiates.
Williams said dehydration, septicaemia, gangrene, hallucinations, and respiratory problems – where the initiates couldn’t breathe – were the main causes of the loss of lives.
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“Besides the manageable cases of dehydration, septicaemia, gangrene, and hallucinations, we suspect that other cases are related to withdrawal symptoms from initiates who stopped using their medications due to stigmatisation by other initiates and those who have already undergone the tradition,” the MEC said.
Conservative views in the Eastern Cape consider initiates who drink water and take medication as “lesser men”.
Williams attributes the deaths of initiates from unrelated conditions to these views.
“Our advocacy campaigns have focused on these specific issues, but the conservative beliefs have completely undermined our advocacy to the detriment of the lives of the initiates,” he said.
Williams said this misinformation on not drinking water is so deep that some initiates were motivated not to drink water by their teachers at school.
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As such, some spent weeks at home not drinking water, only to collapse and die of dehydration when they got to the traditional initiation schools.
Meanwhile, in relation to illegal circumcisions, the MEC said authorities have made 25 arrests out of 22 cases reported.
“The South African Police Service (Saps) has acted swiftly in attending to all illegal cases this season, and we wanted to ensure that illegal cases are handled expeditiously in order to dare to deter wrongdoers from continuing to destroy innocent young lives,” he said.
The department prepared for both the 2024 summer and winter initiation seasons by training more than 300 traditional surgeons and their assistants.
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However, despite this, parents send their children to illegal schools for circumcision by untrained surgeons without proper screening.
“These illegal schools have become schools of death, where it is almost guaranteed that initiates in such schools were going to perish due to ignorance and shared disregard of the law,” Williams said.
The MEC holds parents responsible for their children’s deaths at these illegal schools.
This is because these schools are located in unreachable areas far from the reach of the department’s monitoring teams, and they only know about them when there is a crisis of death.
Meanwhile, Gauteng Cogta says that its Provincial Initiation Coordinating Committee (PICC) has approved 149 customary initiation schools to practice across the five regions of the province.
Gauteng’s initiation season started on 22 November for non-school-going initiations, while initiates who are still in the school system started on 12 December.
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MEC Jacob Mamabolo has instructed Gauteng provincial departments to prepare for a safe initiation season.
“The loss of lives and sometimes severe injuries incurred by initiates during the initiation process is preventable. We owe it to our children to keep them safe and protected at all times,” Mamabolo said.
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