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Articles By Zubeida
| MAMISA CHABULA – A WOMAN INTERFERING IN A MAN’S WORLD. |
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| Written by Administrator |
| Sunday, 12 April 2009 20:59 |
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MAMISA CHABULA – A WOMAN INTERFERING IN A MAN’S WORLD. Zubeida Jaffer Special writer The fathers wait until nightfall. Then, with their sons by their side, they knock on her door, desperate for help. At first, Mamisa Chabula, does not quite know what to do. She had just set up her medical practice in Motherwell, a township in Port Elizabeth. The year was 1989. The fathers were bringing their sons from the bush where the traditional circumcision rites had gone horribly wrong. “Oh! The sceptic wounds,” said Dr Chabula. “I cannot forget the expressions of these young men.” She decided to ask her brother to assist her with the removal of bandages and dressings of the genitals. A penis completely caked in yellow pus. Another shrivelled up, black, charcoal-like as a result of infection. Then the complete absence of genitalia. Nothing. Dead. ‘I tried to give them some sense of dignity but it was too terrible,” she said. “Fear, anxiety, horror. Torn between loyalty to custom and excruciating pain.” Every six months, young boys throughout the country attend circumcision or initiation school. In Port Elizabeth alone, about 15,000 boys are annually involved in this age-old rite of passage from boyhood to manhood .It is an affirmation of identity, an assertion that the African mind has not been colonised. Unlike the trend in Soweto where children are increasingly undergoing surgical circumcisions in hospital, this is rare in the Eastern Cape and most other provinces. During the last session in December last year, 11 initiates are known to have died in the Eastern Cape. Forty more were admitted to hospitals and one initiate had his penis removed at the Provincial hospital just days before Christmas. “Those practitioners involved in performing the circumcisions were not dressing the wounds properly,” said Chabula. “They were not using herbs and were not nursing the initiates.” Dehydration and septicaemia were the main reasons for the deaths. She believes that traditional practitioners knew what they were doing was wrong but some were motivated by commercial interests. “They were circumcising more boys so that they could be paid more and were not taking the time taken in the past.” As the patients piled up, she decided something had to be done. She started talking to the traditional practitioners and encountered resistance. “I could see they were wondering whether I wanted to make money, to take their jobs away from them,” she said. “Although they did not publicly agree with me, something told them that it was not right. But they did not want to listen to me. I was a woman interfering in a man’s world.” After more than a year of talking, they slowly came round. “We could then together decide that the boys must be medically examined before the circumcision and that an association had to be formed,” she said. The Motherwell traditional surgeons and attendants Association became the backbone of a campaign, which continues to grow. It set up a register for all practitioners (iingcibi). Chabula trained them in wound management and insisted on pre-medical examinations of all young boys. The iingcibi agreed to carry a registration cared to prove their credentials to the public. But then fathers and sons started arriving from other areas. She tried knocking on official doors for the city to help but had no luck. The breakthrough eventually came in 1999. Govan Mbeki, former deputy chairman of the Senate, advised her to take the local mayor to see the boys in hospital. “When the mayor saw the botched circumcisions, he said to me: “Mama, is this the struggle we are letting you go through alone?” He was shocked. He immediately established an intervention committee, which included Chabula and other local councillors. Chabula was appointed as the Director of the Western District Council serving a large section of the Port Elizabeth community. This gave her the official platform to drive the campaign for controlled circumcision across several residential areas. “We have so far registered and trained 200 practitioners and plan to do more,” said Chabula. She and her colleagues also went on an aggressive radio drive to make the public aware of the dangers they were facing. But she generally found that while she privately enjoyed the support of most of her colleagues and the public, there was little public defence of her controversial position. After all, she had entered into an area traditionally preserved for men and intimately bound up with tradition and custom. She further unleashed controversy when she discovered that the Malaysians had invented an instrument called the Tara Klamp, which guaranteed safe circumcision. “I read about it on the internet, contacted Dr Singh who invented the instrument who then invited me to visit Malaysia,” she said. The Western District Council sent Chabula and a group of traditional surgeons to visit Malaysia. Local Muslim doctors allowed Chabula to perform 40 circumcisions on young boys between the ages of eight and ten using the Tara Klamp. The clamp is a pre-sterilised disposal plastic device that clamps over the penis separating the foreskin from the flesh. The foreskin is cut with minimal or no bleeding and the clamp remains on for a few days. Chabula is convinced that the clamp, which costs R100 is the answer to the surgical problems experienced for most set against attending hospitals. “This can be used in the veld and people can be easily trained to use it,” she said. So far, she has not been able to win enough support for the Tara Clamp to be brought to South Africa. But her work has won the support of the Eastern Cape Health department. The MEC for health, Bevan Gowanda has issued stern warnings not to take their children to iingcibi not known to them. He has drafted a proclamation aimed at clamping down on unregistered iingcibi performing the operation. The proclamation has to be signed soon by the president and the health minister for it to become law. “The Malaysians eliminated the problem. We can too,” said Chabula. “They had the same problems and it took them 20 years to develop the Tara Klamp.’ Unfortunately, the problem is only being spoken about in the Eastern Cape. “It has to be on the national agenda,” she said. “It’s happening in other provinces too but not spoken about.” Her long-term goal is to pilot a circumcision village which could provide a model for best practice. If properly handled, Chabula believes that circumcision school provides a “golden opportunity” to intensify HIV/AIDs education. “The young boys are at their most receptive,” she said. “It is not only about the removal of a piece of flesh but about teaching values and spirituality,” she said. It represents a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, which over the centuries has contributed to social order. “At the moment we are stuck on the sepsis and not the erosion of a very important custom where boys are taught to be men,” she said. With the painful faces etched on her mind, she drives herself to win more and more to her cause. “When I think of their expressions especially those whose organs we have had to remove, then I somehow get the strength to stand up and say it is about time that this thing is stopped,” she said. “One death and one botched circumcision is one too many.” Ends.
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 12 April 2009 21:00 |
