Indaba hell-bent on ending the deaths of male initiates

The government has failed to prevent the deaths of initiates despite having had action plans in the past.

This was the view of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL Rights Commission), which is hosting a national initiation indaba in Ekurhuleni to focus on the matter.

“We’ve had a number of interventions to make sure we can scale down the deaths of initiates: strategies, awareness and all of that ... and they’ve not yielded any results,” said commission chairperson David Mosoma.

“Hence, we felt it important to bring [together] traditional leaders ... to say, can we allow this? If we value the culture, can we associate it with the deaths of our children? Because if that is the case, it means culture is implicated in this.

“How do you continue to promote and protect a culture which is implicated in the deaths of children? We wanted to separate that culture on its own doesn’t kill. Therefore there are processes that are leading children to die and let’s deal with that by creating strategies and making sure we agree that we mitigate against the deaths of our children.”

Some causes of death at initiation camps were illegal schools, dehydration and murder, with most occurring in the Eastern Cape. 

“We need to make sure that we eliminate illegal initiation schools. We also need to make sure that legal initiation schools comply in terms of mitigating the deaths of young people,” said Mosoma.

The commission said figures showed that more than 700 initiates have died since 2006.

Co-operative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) deputy minister Zolile Burns-Ncamashe said the law should be applied and perpetrators slapped with the maximum sentence to send a strong message to criminal syndicates operating illegal traditional schools.

“There are those who are hell-bent on criminalising and scandalising this age-old tradition,” he said.

In 2021 the Customary Initiation Act was signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to prevent deaths and injuries at initiation schools. The law sought to have initiation school operators screened for criminal records and discourage the use of alcohol, while imposing stiffer sentences on illegal operators.

Burns-Ncamashe said it was vital for young people and women to also actively participate in such discussions.

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