South Africa: boys’ lives are cut short Traditional rituals at initiation schools clash with modern medicine by Greg Nicolson Last winter Sizwe (not his real name), 20 years old, went to an initiation school, a place where boys are circumcised as part of a traditional rite of passage to becoming responsible adults. “I wanted to go because in my culture a man is a man by going there,” he said of the school in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. Over 80,000 boys went to initiation schools in 2012, up from 30,000 in 2008, said Lechesa Tsenoli, traditional affairs minister, in…
