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So, the story behind this video and song (or part of the story — there’s so much going on!) is that Wanga felt that he was being coerced into a form of ritual circumcision by his community. It’s sort of taken for granted within his ethnic group that you must do this, so much so that if you are a young man and you do not participate, you are ostracized, as the band explained to me.
The thinking, and this is communicated very directly to the young men, is that if you don’t participate, you’re gay. You’re effeminate. You’re not a real man. You never mature from being a boy to being a man.
He struggled with all of this in real life: with what it meant for his personal and cultural identity. And he came to a point where he was like, you know what? F*ck you all. The fact that I won’t consent to having my penis sliced with an unsterilized knife, out in the bush, and risk infection or worse– that doesn’t mean “I’m gay,” as you say. I reject this tradition. If that’s what being a man is, f*ck it, I don’t want to be a man. I’ll be an “evil boy for life,” even if it means I am ostracized from my community.
- Via BoingBoing.net
terrible , made my ears bleed. Follow @adamvibez on twitter