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City Press
6 September 2009
Review by Gail Smith
Boys to men
Thando Mgqolozana’s debut novel has done what no one has dared to do before: shatter taboos around traditional male circumcision, writes GAIL SMITH
A Man Who Is Not A Man is a coming of age story. It’s a novel about a boy’s transition to manhood, set in the context of contemporary South Africa.
Its main character, Lumkile, is an average South African lad: raised by a single mother, sent to live with his neglectful and abusive father in Cape Town, he enters a life of crime, gets sent back to his mother in the rural areas and then goes to the bush.
Thando Mgqolozana transforms Lumkile’s narrative into a powerful exploration of masculinity. He says the novel came from his own struggle to make sense of what traditional circumcision means in a modern day context.
“Our prison cells are bursting at the seams with recently circumcised men. Our society is strewn with the wreckage of emotionally and psychologically traumatised young people. Men are dying and getting amputated. We need to acknowledge this. In the past circumcision was how responsible heads of household were made. But is it working today?”
Mgqolozana, a graduate of the University of the Western Cape, is a qualified nurse, and also a prestigious Mandela Rhodes scholar. Scarily eloquent and intense considering his age – 26 – the young author embodies a new South African masculinity grappling with the wisdom of customs and culture as they pertain to manhood. “I wanted to write about the humiliation men go through when their circumcisions are botched. I was aware of the sensitivities around the issue, and that I could be disowned or hated. But there are things that need to be said.
“There are people out there who need to be protected. They are fearful of further transgressing the boundaries of culture that they have already contravened by not becoming men in the expected way.
“When initiates come out and meet in the street, they use a coded language. If they fail to master this language, or show that they didn’t do things correctly, or are inarticulate, then they are humiliated in unspeakable ways and some of them get murdered. This is what I wanted to write about.”
Mgqolozana doesn’t succumb to the salacious appetite people have to peek behind the blanket of an initiate whose circumcision has gone horribly wrong. He avoids the Sarah Baartman booby trap where all people want to know is what was going on ‘down there’.
Instead Mgqolozana crafts characters that are human, believable, funny, horrific and sometimes unpredictable. Lumkile’s father is a nasty drunk, more concerned with his pretty girlfriends than he is with being a father to his son.
His mother is a tired, overworked, single mother who believes that sending a boy to his father is the solution to helping him make the segue to being a man.
Lumkile’s character borrows heavily from Mgqolozana’s own biography. Like his main character, the author was also raised by a single parent.
He says he chose the novel’s epigram from EL Doctorow – “there’s no longer any such thing as fiction and non-fiction, there’s only narrative” – because he wanted to reference the similarities between the book and his own life.
He agrees with the idea that the novel offers a stinging critique of parenting in our society, especially of fathering. “I wanted to create the scenario of the absent fathers and single mothers who are struggling alone. An absent father has consequences for a boy’s initiation.
“If your biological father is not present, then it makes it complex. For people, who know the initiation process, not having a father present, is an anxious moment and things are likely to go awry.”
Lumkile is not the most likeable of characters. When the reader first encounters him, he is already a failed man, hospitalised for a botched circumcision. The deed is done. But with careful crafting Mgqolozana entices the reader back in time to Lumkile’s early life as a petty thief in Cape Town and along the path that leads to his inevitable trip to the bush.
Male circumcision is shrouded in so much secrecy that the novel is repeatedly overshadowed by the controversy generated by botched circumcisions and initiate deaths.
The novel’s Johannesburg launch at Xarra books was heated and fiery. Many people wanted to vent about the transgression of cultural taboos, to declare boundaries around customs, or to mobilise for the abolition of circumcision. Few had read the book, or wanted to engage the author. This is a frustration for Mgqolozana, a fledgling writer, who wants to be engaged on his craft.
“I’m starved for engagement. I don’t know if I can write well or not. People just want to talk about the political issues. I want to know if my book is a good contribution to literature, if it works as a novel, as a work of art. I want to know about my writing. Of course I’m interested in the subject matter, but I’m yet to get a critical review that engages with the text, rather than the subject matter.”
Mgqolozana’s debut novel may have hit a raw nerve and thrust him straight into the centre of a major national debate, but he doesn’t betray the secrets of the custom.
“I leave the reader to create their own images. People expect me to go into graphic detail, to write about being circumcised with rusty knives, but I believe that reading a good novel is like rewriting it for yourself. You fill in the gaps.”
He also doesn’t pontificate or take a stance for or against circumcision. And he says while writing it, he didn’t know where it would go.
“Writing is like riding a car in the mist, you can only see as far as the lights go. I wanted to write about a failed man who has to deal with ostracism. I didn’t take a position because I was unpacking the issues for myself. People think writers know everything and that’s why they write. That’s not true, writers know nothing and that’s why they write. They want to know things.”
A Man who is not a man is a well-written, engaging novel about a young boy’s journey to manhood. Mgqolozana skilfully crafts a community of characters, a sense of time and place, and takes you into an unknown realm, without resorting to voyeurism.
The novel makes a stinging, but subtle critique of masculinity and of our society and our abandonment of male children, left to flounder and search and find their own understanding of what it means to be a man.
Mgqolozana’s personal and professional insights make it a plausible tale that elicits a range of emotions while telling a very simple story about very familiar people. You laugh, you cry, and there are no sacred cows.
And the courageous young author is not done yet. He’s about to assume a post with the Dean of Research at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, where he’s hoping to conduct research on circumcision.
“I’d like to find out if there is an irrefutable correlation between an accepted definition of manhood and traditional male circumcision compared to being circumcised surgically or not circumcised at all. I’d like to find out if, and how, traditional male circumcision defines manhood today.”
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