A week ago, Pope Francis brought pagan idols into the church. This may well be a vital tipping point in the history of the Catholic Church, dogged by corruption of all kinds for years now. But the orthodox are pushing back, and by throwing the idols into the river, they have finally drawn their swords again in a long battle that has been waged on their tradition since the antichristian revolution of 1789. Better writers (more acquainted with Catholicism than I) have tackled this matter. But the loss and corruption of the institutions of virtue is not only a Catholic thing, but seems to be universal.
I once heard an upperclassman refer to the University as a liberal finishing school. There was a certain truth to the characterisation. After all, finishing schools had the aim to prepare young men and (mostly) women for the social expectations of adult life. Now that intersectionality is dominant, both in corporate HR departments and public institutions, knowing how to attack your colleagues for microaggressions and avoid their inquisitions yourself while advertising progressive virtues could be a vital skill. But the relationship between the school and the social environment are backwards. Finishing schools aimed to prepare people for existing, traditional social norms and the universal conditions of society – home economics, self-maintenance, good manners and public etiquette.
Modern “[identity]-studies” courses (and the departments which have absorbed their poison) do not teach these things. They teach a narrow social toolkit for ideological persecution in the name of a theory of justice that has no capacity to do justice to real, tangible, individual human beings, but promises to do justice to their abstractions. The results are now clichée, and well-trodden. But it is not only the West that has been hurt by modernity. The West was lucky enough to have social structures like churches which developed gradually enough to provide a path to community-conditioned adulthood in the modern world. In Africa and elsewhere, the change is happening so rapidly, they have no need for the instrumental relativism of academic activists to wreck their traditional mores. Urbanisation can do that by itself.
1.
Some years ago, working behind the bar of a Jamaican-themed student restaurant in Cape Town, I had a most interesting conversation. It isn’t often that one has particularly detailed conversations about ulwaluka (the traditional Xhosa male initiation ritual) with a man who has passed through it. Like most Anglos, I felt it was rude to pry into these private matters. But I had recently been told several details by a roommate of mine’s cousin, and one feature stuck out to me – part of the ritual involved the spreading of margarine on the boy’s skin. Needless to say, this struck me as out of place. At the bar, I mentioned this to a regular called Sne, who had some strong opinions. He came from deepest Transkei, where traditions are held onto rather tightly, and maintain a great deal of their original nuance. He explained that the embrocation was supposed to be rendered goat’s fat, from the animal sacrificed to the boy’s manhood, and white ochre. It’s hide was to be made into a cord to tie the antiseptic aloe leaf to the fresh circumcision wound, while the meat would be eaten.
The margarine in place of goat’s fat is not the only plastic hammer in the toolbox. The loss of ritual components, with the increasing urbanisation and disruption of traditional communities since the end of apartheid, have contributed to some utterly egregious abuses. Those who would preserve the tradition are thoroughly aware of the troubles facing their community, and a stark, but informative website provides us with several details, such as the climbing mortality rate, and the proliferation of charlatan practitioners. But Sne added a dimension I had not considered.
He told me that the vast majority of the young men who go to the bush, as the euphemism goes, do not get the necessary moral preparation, which he regarded as the most important. All the elders of the boy’s family would gather him and explain to him not just the birds and the bees, but the correct moral treatment of ones friends, business partners and wife, with all of the intergenerational psychological knowledge the men and women had to share. The loss of this connection to community life then, has not just eroded the Xhosa vocabulary, but the knowledge of how to live in a way that makes one a decent member of the community, a neighbour, businessman, a lover, a man. In many cases, the untrained traditional surgeons will amputate the whole penis by accident, robbing him of his manhood in so many more ways than one.
But much like in the West, urbanisation isn’t the only thing killing the tradition. Feminists and other people detached from reality have offered the usual misandrist analysis that by “constructing masculinity”, the ritual reinforces evil gender stereotypes and excludes men who are not sufficiently, or “traditionally” masculine. They say that its mores encourage gangsterism, misbehaviour in class, and any other shallow male stereotype they can conjure up. While I have no doubt that a shallow initiation, stripped of its moral and spiritual content, can give rise to delusions of status and entitlement which have not been appropriately earned, to smear the whole tradition because of a prejudice against masculinity shows the worst aspects of Westernised thinking.
This two pronged attack, from modernity and postmodernism, has other victims. The traditional medicines used by Xhosa tradition, while never wholly based in a rigorous modern empirical tradition, were at least based in a reasonable body of contextualised knowledge. The people who were even allowed to enter the sacred thicket where the necessary herbs were to be harvested had to be selected by the gift of visions and go through a ritual training passed on by experienced elders with knowledge of the effects of the herbs. But modern “traditional medicine” is packed with egregious abuses, some of which are conspicuous because they involve the use of invasive alien species. Often, it can cause death, as in the case of the use of impila, which has caused countless deaths.
Anywhere you go in the cities or small towns in South Africa, there is evidence of a multi-billion Rand industry (or so estimates GG Alcock), where markets are packed with the products of the stripping of eHlati by people who often have little connection to the traditions or cultural institutions which they rely on to reproduce their business model, which is often supported with cannabis dealing. What they sell can include the bark of endangered species of tree, which are stripped until they die, and the environmental impact of this industry has been scarcely paid attention to. While there have been calls for the cultivation of these plants to reduce the ecological burden, solutions have not been forthcoming.
This has not been helped by the proliferation of Foucauldian tertiary curricula, which has legitimated “other ways of knowing” or “other knowledges”; that is to say, encouraging academics to publish works promoting alternatives to empirical medicine, even arguing for impeding research into traditional medicine on the grounds that it would count as market exploitation. The globally infamous video (“Science must fall!”) of the stupid young girl accusing Western science of bankruptcy because it can’t explain how baloyi can use lightning to strike people, is not a wild exception. There are many people in South Africa with authority to make lasting decisions in politics who believe that Western medicine is all a capitalist fraud designed to kill off black people. It is widely believed that AIDS was a white invention designed to eradicate blacks, and we are all still recovering from the consequences of Thabo Mbeki’s belief that it’s very existence was a Western hoax. The expansion of traditional medicine “hospitals” under President Zuma has led to hundreds of deaths each year from liver and kidney poisoning, or else of lack of effective treatment for fatal illnesses like tuberculosis. The irony is intoxicating.
Much like the loss of the substance of the male initiation ritual, women have also lost touch with their education, and intonjani (the Xhosa rite of womanhood) is often seen as archaic, or inconvenient to engage in due to the expense of the animals for slaughter. Like ulwaluka, it involves leaving the family, but unlike its male counterpart, it is not an endurance test in the wilderness, but a sort of caccooning, wherein the young girl prepares for marriage, motherhood, domestic duty, and wider social functions under the guidance of older women who instruct her on everything from cooking to hygiene. Like religious confirmation in the west, virginity before marriage is stressed. When all is said and done, the young woman returns to her family changed, and prepared to be a resourceful and virtuous emblem of the community.
It is sad to read what modern Xhosa students write in reflecting on their heritage and the modern cultural changes:
Things are however different in this contemporary time where both men and boys pursue relationships with young girls and women for reasons of sex rather than marriage or even love. In these days there is no interest in the welfare of these females or in their personal character outside of the satisfaction of lust. This is evident in incidences witnessed particularly at night in some townships in East London where the researcher lives and work. Young girls are often seen being manhandled and dragged away in tears to be raped, abused or molested.
When I was a student, a rather radical young black woman disparaged me, and then my ethnicity by offering the now-jaundiced epithet that whites have no culture. I laughed at the time, but in a way it is true. She was referring to communal rituals, the ties that bind and ensure cultural continuity and the inheritance of moral fibre. We, particularly as the deracinated descendants of colonial settlers, are indeed impoverished. But a journey to the countryside can likewise remind us where we came from.
2.
We abeLungu have our own traditions, though these are lost to most Western Europeans, except in the upper classes. The Boer who kills his first animal with his father must eat a piece of the raw liver, and the young Anglo will be smeared on his cheeks with the animal’s blood. But these rituals, needless to say, do not survive in an urban context. Yet much of the moral content of adulthood was at least preserved through the ritual of religious confirmation and “The Talk” given before the honeymoon. This tempered much of the urbanised transition to modernity with a moral framework capable of giving youngsters some ladder to hold onto as the ascended into maturity. Universities were centred around theology, and bore strong connections to the monastic scholarly tradition that birthed them. But in the wake of the secularisation of society, churches held less and less grip. After the loss of religious instruction, what do we have left? We get by on the ritual acknowledgment of first payslips and graduation ceremonies. But what morality do either of these institutions confer? At least with the first payslip one has shown evidence of elementary self-reliance and personal responsibility.
Graduation, now more than ever, provides evidence of even less. Our contemporary culture is scarred by the caustic byproducts of academic cultural relativism, ideologically instrumental skepticism of our most basic institutions. For generations now, manhood and womanhood have been problematised into near oblivion, just at the time when we needed to be firm in their expression more than ever – the urbanisation and atomisation of the community. This of course began long before third wave feminism. The abolition of curfews, alcohol consumption and gender segregation in university dormitories, and the promotion of drug abuse casual sex as not only normal but liberating, has led to the transformation of the former instruments of Christian enlightenment into systems of socialisation whose moral resemblance to actual LaVeyan Satanism verges on a cosmic joke.
Almost none of the graduates will have much memory of what it meant to be a man or a woman before these things were thrown into question. And yet there are so many places to look.
3.
Many people will be acquainted with the famous work of Rudyard Kipling, “If – “. It bears quoting in full, but as you read it (in case you find yourself feeling a creeping leftist superstition), rather than picturing it as merely the aggrandising words of a colonial jingoist, imagine it is being recited to a new Xhosa initiate. Would it be so out of place?
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
While not as well-known, the contemporary poet Elizabeth Lincoln Otis responded out of admiration with her own version, “An ‘if’ for Girls”, offering us a glimpse into the feminine ideal, as seen from the perspective of a woman of the same cultural persuasion:
If you can dress to make yourself attractive,
Yet not make puffs and curls your chief delight;
If you can swim and row, be strong and active,
But of the gentler graces lose not sight;
If you can dance without a craze for dancing,
Play without giving play too strong a hold,
Enjoy the love of friends without romancing,
Care for the weak, the friendless and the old;If you can master French and Greek and Latin,
And not acquire, as well, a priggish mien,
If you can feel the touch of silk and satin
Without despising calico and jean;
If you can ply a saw and use a hammer,
Can do a man’s work when the need occurs,
Can sing when asked, without excuse or stammer,
Can rise above unfriendly snubs and slurs;
If you can make good bread as well as fudges,
Can sew with skill and have an eye for dust,
If you can be a friend and hold no grudges,
A girl whom all will love because they must;If sometime you should meet and love another
And make a home with faith and peace enshrined,
And you its soul—a loyal wife and mother—
You’ll work out pretty nearly to my mind
The plan that’s been developed through the ages,
And win the best that life can have in store,
You’ll be, my girl, the model for the sages—
A woman whom the world will bow before.
4.
What will strike anybody who hasn’t had their brains shaken out by modern feminist thought, is that many of the same characteristics mentioned in these poems are admired in both sexes. Not only that, but women who eschewed the modern gender-neutrality espoused by their distant descendants did not see themselves as inferior or incapable of sharing tasks and duties of men. If anything, the standards Otis holds her sex to overlap considerably, taking into account the same self-reliance and self-assuredness the man is expected to embody. Far from encouraging a supplicant submission to domesticity, womanhood is seen as a public beacon of virtue that shines through the ages with a magical, even divine power.
Self-restraint and humility, focus and peace of mind are considered virtues which accompany and augment self-confidence and self-expression. Today this would be an oxymoron. To enlightened progressives, they are considered toxic or oppressive, the crassness and egoism of self-actualisation and consumptive hedonism are seen as entitlements for the previously marginalised, and self-confidence and self-actualisation are signs of unrecognised privilege that need to be checked. Those feminists who encourage men to eschew self-development, physical exercise and competition, to remain emotionally vulnerable and cultivate fragility while denying them sympathy and love, will tell them that it is for their own good because the strengthening of the young boy into manhood is somehow a toxic process.
“Keeping one’s head” is a microaggression against the “non-neurotypical”, and learning to cook or sew is seen as a mark of domestic servitude, and shunned even though it is of great personal benefit. But unlike the unalloyed virtue of self-assertion promoted by feminism, which requires no more than demanding others adhere to your childish demands and treat your whims as principles, the traditional picture of womanhood is rather demanding. Of course, that is no longer seen as a good thing. But it treats women with respect by raising expectations. I can imagine nothing more crippling than having parents who expect nothing of one. That’s not loving nurture, it’s pet ownership. How ironic that, once again, an ethic evoked to empower should so weaken it’s intended recipients.
Much like the Xhosa, we can see how the acceleration of cultural change has eroded our culture. Their sangomas have forgotten how to avoid poisoning their charges, their boys and girls are made into stunted man and women by the modern cities and broken school systems, to abuse one one other and think only selfishly. Our highest institutions positively encourage egotism and hedonism, except where political matters are concerned, wherein utter submission to current fashion is demanded. Even our churches are bankrupt. Nondenominational Protestantism has given rise to the prosperity gospel and televangelism, to charlatans and hollow masters of gratification who preach whatever fills their pockets. Even the venerable Catholic Church has strayed, with a pope encouraging the erosion of every aspect of the religion for which he stands – inviting Marxist Sociology into the seminaries, and pagan idols into the churches. While this may seem superficial gripes to outsiders, to many Catholics, it is a horror.
Perhaps like so many ordinary South Africans, the loss of culture and the deaths caused by traditional medicines do not tally up. Most people do not engage in this kind of research, and many do not even realise they have lost anything. But those who try to find their roots through the academy do realise, and their feeling of loss is just as tangible as the fears of the Catholic layman, as he watches pagan idols taking prime of place in holy Mass.
The Eccentric Flock 