Cutting edge
Aidan Hartley
0Nairobi ur son Rider, as in Haggard, was born in Nairobi last week. All went well but hours later the doctor asked me what we had decided to do about circumcision. 'If you want it now, we can use a local and he won't remember a thing,' he said. 'Later on, we'll have to use a general.' I was stumped. In my 37 years I've not given the matter any thought, despite it being under my very nose every day of my life. When I held Rider in my arms I just melted. 'We can't decide yet,' I told the doe.
To cut or not to cut? The day after my son's birth I was driving downtown to buy nappies when I saw a mob of naked youths on the highway, their bodies decorated with white clay, singing and waving hibiscus flowers. They were bleeding profusely from their groins. These are apocalyptic times in Kenya. The annual circumcision season is upon us and it doesn't apply only to boys. This week, the Mau Mau-inspired Mungiki cult declared that God is directing them in dreams to cleanse the Kikuyu of social evils, including mini-skirts and the abandonment of female circumcision. Police are on red alert after Mungiki vowed to invade churches, girls' schools and homes in order to infibulate females aged between 18 and 40.
As Christians, Acts XV releases us from God's covenant with Abraham, father of the Jews, which appears in Genesis: This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; every man child among you shall be circumcised ..
As a goy, why do I personally regard circumcision as normal? At least three Hartley generations have circumcised their boys. I can't say it goes further back than that because family portraits stop at the shoulders. It was the Victorians who promoted the operation in England, mainly as a cure for masturbation. My family were big imperialists and for all I know it saved them chapped hands in the Malakand. The operation later declined in metropolitan Britain, where circumcision was in any case less frequent among the workers than the middle classes — giving the term 'Great Unwashed' new meaning but whites in Africa stuck to the tradition. Along the line we convinced ourselves circumcision identified us with our black compatriots. Such sentimental nonsense remains prevalent among Anglo-Kenyans of today.
My friend who expounds with authority on the subject is the superbly named Willie Knocker. Willie says, 'It's a big no no if you take your shorts off on safari and the Samburu see you naked ... in their eyes you won't be a man.' Quick, I thought, call the rabbi. We can't have Samburus scandalised in the bush. Absurd prejudices abound in Kenya, which is made up of cutters — the Bantus, Nilo-Hamites, Cushites and Muslims — and a few tribes of Nilotic non-cutters at whom everybody else laughs. Circumcision is so deeply rooted in Africa it appears in 27,000-year-old rock paintings. Mediterranean cultures picked the habit up off the Egyptians. It was a blood offering to the gods, a symbolic as opposed to authentic human sacrifice.
But I feel no link with Pharaohs or Victorian schoolmasters. What of medical reasons? I logged on and found the web was awash with sites. This is the perfect Internet topic: sexual, emotive, bundled together with useless information, a playground for loonies. Wading through it, I decided that there are remote links between foreskins and nasty cancers. The connection to Aids is established. A 1999 Kenyan study compared cut and uncut men from one tribe. It discovered 26 per cent of those with foreskins were HIV positive, while 6 per cent of circumcised men were infected. Other sites claimed men with foreskins enjoy intercourse more and are less likely to want oral or anal sex. Some hinted that circumcision encourages homosexuality. One study recorded six out of seven women preferred sex with 'anatomically complete' men. That depressed me. I felt like suing my parents and interrogating my wife and all my ex-girlfriends. I cheered up by remembering various women friends from cutter peoples who told me they were disgusted by foreskins. Circumcision gives my son more chances to sleep with the world's exotic ladies, including observant Jews, Iranian heiresses and Ethiopian good-time girls. A foreskin will lump him with Dinka refugees, the Finno-Ugrian linguistic group and people who read the London Review of Books.
We've decided to leave the decision to Rider. When he's 12 I'll have to sit him down beside a camel well thronging with Samburu nomads and say, 'Son, it's time for you to decide. Do you want to be a man, or are you going to be a kid for the rest of your life?'
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