Male circumcision occupies an important place among many Kenyan communities, especially those living around Mt Kenya.
Why a form of genital mutilation that leaves a life-long scar should be so glorified is beyond me, especially now that much of the operation is carried out in hospitals and under anaesthesia.
At least in earlier times, when a knife met a boy’s flesh without any soothing intervention beyond a dash of cold water, it could be said that circumcision was intended to instill the bravery that was needed when armed young warriors met on an open field.
But then customs are customs, and men still brag in pubs that they faced the knife without flinching, many years ago.
Many years ago, my then editorial director and I were experiencing difficulties in producing the newspaper. With the aim of perking up the gloomy mood in the newsroom, I remarked that no difficulty could daunt someone like me who had been to the river and endured the ‘cut’ with a blunt knife.
The director — a fellow slopes man from the Nyeri side of the mountain — obviously a man with warrior blood coursing through his veins, took this as a challenge and said that he had not only been to the river, but had insisted on a saw being used on him instead of an ordinary knife.
I had my doubts of course, not just about the saw but even that had been any river. I rather suspected surgical equipment and an operating theatre at a hospital somewhere in Nyeri.
There was a time though when matters of the ‘cut’ were never the subject of jest. The story is told of an ancestor of mine who was bow-legged when nthaka’ the newly circumcised warrior class were expected to be ramrod-straight and to endure any amount of pain without showing it.
When the time came to choose a wife, the young men would engage in a communal mating dance where, under close inspection by the village’s maidens, they would leap up and down in the manner of Maasai morans.
This way the maidens would be able to identify the most desirable suitors. When it came to my ancestor’s turn to perform the leap-dance, the maidens broke into laughter because the bow legs made him look ridiculously awkward.
In those days, there could be no greater insult than this. In humiliation, my ancestor went home and looked for a tree with a forked trunk on which he could correct his deformity. He inserted one of the limbs responsible for his humiliation into the cleft made by two limbs of the tree and gave a violent jerk. Instead of the bone straightening to take on the desired shape, there was a loud cracking sound and it broke into two.
There is a limit to the amount of agony even a circumcised man of old could endure, and my ancestor’s resolve to correct nature’s unfairness ended with the broken leg that left him with a nasty limp for the rest of his life.
Well, we have come a long way from the days when young men needed to be as straight as an arrow and to leap like antelopes to win a maiden’s heart.
I suppose that nowadays, a healthy bank balance and a nice car will do the trick.
There is no premium to physical courage either.
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Indeed, young men no longer need the fortitude of a Spartan and the occasional public display of emotion might be regarded by members of the opposite sex as a sign of a man whose heart is in the right place.
After all, in Kenya most of the inter-ethnic battles are waged on social media platforms and the ballot box. Which perhaps explains why we have been coming up with justifications for male genital mutilation.