The Culture Confusion

I have been completely engaged in writing up about the new season I feel God wants me to step in that I have not been able to make time for writing about anything else for weeks now. That includes posts that needed completion and I feel I am not in the right state to complete them appropriately.

This is the reason you may have realized that the last posts have been quite small with a simple message, different from the comprehensive nature most expect from my messages as a teacher of the word.

But I feel that what I was working on is nearing completion and will soon be resuming to my way of posting messages. And this message will not be much different. I just want it to prompt us to ask questions and look for the right answers.

In the last month or so there has been an uproar concerning deaths during the initiation process and many other related abuses.

I will start with this question, do you really know why initiation? Why not just circumcise like some tribes do? Why not do it to infants like the Jews do?

Why do we pursue culture before knowing its implications? What and who is culture answerable to?

The saddest part is that the church has joined that bandwagon instead of writing a spiritually enlightened new script in view of the new realities. The church should create culture, not modify it slightly like the Catholic Church did to heathen traditions to fit as opposed to radically following Christ. That is why we are struggling with some things whose causes we do not understand.

I have written elsewhere about initiation and so will just highlight a few factors to help us understand what is happening and why.

Blood is covenantal. That is the point at which circumcision makes the connections to the demons of the tribe (call them spirits if it will make you comfortable).

That is why some tribes have hallowed grounds for that purpose. Some will fly their children all the way from Europe and America so that the covenant is made at the right place and time. And it would be impossible to fight tribalism effectively if we do not start with those covenants.

Initiation is another thing altogether. That is why there are tribes that circumcise and others whose circumcision is different. The difference is the initiation process.

The initiation was actually military training. The tribe took advantage of (or created) the pain of circumcision to thoroughly train the initiates on what was required of them as the tribe’s defense force. And it had to be thorough because they actually took the responsibility of the security of the tribe.

It was a time to harden them. Think of what a policeman goes through in the police college so that he can rescue people from a mangled wreck in an accident and collecting the spattered remains from the road either as evidence or to take to a mortuary. Think of encountering armed thugs in a slum to rounding up almost naked harlots from dingy lodgings.

Then you may understand in a small way what the initiation process prepared the initiate to undergo.

When it is said that Meru men don’t cry, it is not because they are given treatment to dry tear buds. They are simply trained to handle pain and emotion in the initiation process.

Initiation entailed increasing one’s pain threshold. And you can’t do that without going through intense pain. Whoever told you military training is easy?

During the 2007 clashes, there were people who had Kalenjin neighbors. A pastor told me that a member of his church advised him to travel heavy and added ‘please’ weeks before the clashes. They were able to keep the secret of what they had planned for long. That is what military training brings out. Incidentally you realize that their initiation is among the toughest we have. They are therefore trained to keep secrets just like any military. The Maasai kill lions as proof that their training is satisfactory.

And that kind of training has casualties, though not from unsupervised or careless training.

You see in the past, the age group that was to be handing over the military role would be in charge of the training with an elder or two supervising to ensure compliance. They would be there, even if occasionally to ensure that the trainers do not employ too much of a heavy hand. He will be there to note the progress of the training. And there will be many trainers with one being answerable to the elders. That is why initiation is a high budget affair as the mother has to feed all the trainers.

That is what we are lacking in our headfirst rush to validate a culture we do not understand.

We release a child to give military training to another child without supervision. And then we become shocked when an initiate dies! If even in actual military training recruits die with the best in verification and health supervision, why are we shocked when an unsupervised and unprofessional trainer takes solo charge of the training?

The church MUST model a totally different initiation process.

We have a police force. We have an army. But we need mature and responsible young men and women. Let us stop training fighters. Let us train warriors valiant for the truth of the Gospel.

Whereas the world seeks to make macho men, men who must test their masculinity at every level, the church should aim at producing men who are truly spiritual, able to handle their spiritual responsibilities accordingly. Military training produces men who are dare devils as they are trained to be ready to die at any time. No wonder their mantra is war, wine and women. And that is what we see after initiation. Sadly, the ‘men’ being produced are just children. Worse still, they have no possibility of facing war in their lives, unless they will join the military after their studies. We are therefore releasing fully charged warriors for a nonexistent war, or enemy. But we are doing worse because we are insisting on that training in the name of culture.

No wonder we have issues with drugs and gambling. No wonder we have irresponsible men unable to hold on to anything.

You see, we released them to go and fight when there was no battle. And like soldiers everywhere they started looking for things to spend all that energy on, wine and women. Because there is no foreseeable war they do not have anything to hold their brakes and so will continue rioting until they have wasted all their energy.

It was the same for female circumcision. The cut was the covenant to signify a process of training a girl into womanhood. On this, we threw out the baby with the bathwater because we removed the cut and forgot to bring a replacement for the training.

That is why you see girls still opting to be circumcised secretly because in those communities it is known that only a cut woman can make a good wife. And that is due to the training after that cut and not the cut itself.

The sponsor epidemic, where men and women are paying children younger than their own children for sexual gratification is an indictment of our failed systems. These sponsors and the sponsored never learnt about boundaries. There are things I can’t even imagine, not even consider, and not just because I am a minister. I was raised to be acutely aware of those boundaries.

Let us pray that the church wakes up to handle this responsibility of transitioning children into adulthood, both girls and boys.