June
2009
Rites of Passage
Here in Kongwa, it’s the time of the year when girls and boys are ushered into adulthood. Drums, whistles and songs can be heard at all hours as everyone practices and celebrates for the festivities to come. Despite how brown and dusty everything has gotten, everyone’s in a good mood. The rains have long finished, all the crops have been harvested and the locals have more time and money on their hands than at any other time of the year. Yesterday, led by the sounds of the music, I wandered down to the enclosure built for selling off surplus corn and found that several vendors were set up selling goat meat and alcohol made from every conceivable substrate: milk, bamboo juice and hibiscus to name a few. People were happy, friendly and pretty drunk for the mid-afternoon. I was welcomed to the community by a number of older men and women in typical fashion:
“We are your parents; this is your home.”
“Let me know when you get married so we can throw you a party.”
“You are a Tanzanian now.”
“Can I have 20 cents for some moonshine?”
For the new, youngest members of the adult community (ages 12+), this is the time of their lives when they learn about their tribal history and traditions and are physically marked out as being adults. Among the Wagogo (the dominant tribal group here) this often includes facial scarring, cirumcision for boys, and (all too often) genital mutilation for girls. I remember my first Swahili teacher, Jumapili, telling me about his own initiation ceremony and circumcision. After being cut, he and the other boys were led into lake Victoria where small fishes, drawn by the blood, came to feed on their fresh cuts. Any boys that tried to flee were driven back into the lake by the older men, armed with sticks. At least here in Kongwa town, it is typical for boys to be brought to the district hospital for circumcision. The level of hygiene in this practice obviously deteriorates as one travels further out into the villages. One of the reasons I was told this was an ideal time of the year for circumcision was that the weather has finally cooled down. However, it seems to me a slight consolation to feel a pleasant breeze as your foreskin is getting chopped off.
As for the girls, the practice of female genital mutiliation is illegal and therefore there exists a great deal of reluctance to talk about it. However, in all of Tanzania, it is most widely practiced from this area of Central Tanzania up to the north towards Arusha. Traditionally it was quite common among both the Wagogo and the Masai, still highly populated in those areas of Tanzania today. One NGO associated with battling this practice is the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) in Tanzania. Although the organization’s programs in Kongwa are quite limited, they are the only group doing anything here on this front.
In our own project on the ancillary benefits of Azithromycin, we are looking at sexually transmitted infections (STIs), among other disease categories, and are therefore asking women about pain with urination. Given not only the existence of female genital mutilation but the taboos against its open discussion, this naturally poses a research challenge. Finding out more about the prevalence of this practice and its disease consequences would be both important and logistically-challenging medical research. It is a topic long overdue for study here and one that ought to be implemented in the context of a broad-based series of preventative, educational, women’s empowerment programs.