Coming of age

After nearly 40 days here, I feel like we've experienced a number of the more stereotypical aspects of Capetonian life. We've watched the surfers at Muizenberg, sampled wines at Klein Constantia and Steenberg, nursed cappuccini on Lower Main in Obs, eaten a vivid curry, and visited the penguins at Boulders Beach. And Ouma's buttermilk rusks, you ask? We're well into our second box.

That said, we had somehow not encountered the drone of the vuvuzela, the horn so familiar from last summer's World Cup - until this past weekend, which we spent in Worcester, a provincial city about 90 minutes east of Cape Town. We went there with L.'s students, who stayed in the homes of several residents of the black township; on Friday, the whole group took a large walk through the township, and on Saturday L. and her students went to a discussion of HIV/AIDS in the township, and then visited a sangoma, or traditional healer. We thus got a hint of a largely overlooked part of Worcester (one local history's entry on rugby in Worcester was five times as long as its entry on Zwelathemba, with its several thousand residents). But that hint was never clearer, perhaps, than in a raucous parade of young men that we saw on a sidewalk as we left the township on Friday evening. Vuvuzelas blared, the men seemed to sing or to shout, and L. immediately identified the group as part of a critical Xhosa rite: the rite of circumcision, that is, that represents young males' entry into manhood. It's a controversial topic, apparently, in public health, largely because it involves conditions that are far from sanitary - all candidates are sometimes cut using one blade - and because its history has led many Xhosa to see circumcision at birth as an assault on their traditional culture. Regardless, though, the combination of horns and tightly knit men was quite potent; it evoked images such as this for me, and thus spoke of sanctity, and powers that lie beyond our ken. We were mere outsiders, of course. But isn't that part of the point of a ritual? Those who are on the inside know, and those who are not, know only that they do not.


In thinking about the image of the men afterwards, I realized that Cleo has experienced very few formal rituals. Sure, that's partly because she's only two, and it's also due to the fact that she is being raised in a largely secular environment. And perhaps you could argue, too, that in fact a great deal of her life is comprised of modest rituals: walks to Whole Foods, when she was still so small, to get her daily muffin; Sunday trips to the farmers market; birthday cakes frosted to look like animals. Certainly, though, none of these were loaded with the sheer import or significance of a circumcision ceremony.

And yet, despite the lack of dramatic rites of passage, Cleo learns, and grows, and changes. Safe and quiet in her car seat, she saw the parade, too - just as she, as well, has seen penguins, eaten rusks, and wandered the vineyards. And is no doubt changed, irreversibly, by all of it.

Ask not for whom the vuvuzela blares. It blares for the bleeding young men, it blares for Cleo - and it blares for you.