Do the rite thing: Reflections on the transition to manhood

Mail & Guardian

3 days ago

Rites of passage are funny old things. Whether religious, societal, or based out of another construct within our lives, the human need to mark transitions from one phase of life to the other is nothing short of fascinating to me.
Yes, celebrating the birth of a child is simply a must-do. If a child enters the world into a loving family that is enriched by their arrival, of course we would want to give voice to our joy.
Yes, gathering to mourn the death of a loved one is also a must-do. Death is the big one, the ultimate of the great divides.
A person we once loved and cherished is gone forever, irrecoverable and irreplaceable and we need to give voice to the grief rising from the void they leave in our lives.
But, between birth and death, we feel the need to mark various transitional milestones in our lives by various means. Hence the term 'rite of passage'. We are making the passage from some point in our lives or version of ourselves to a different one.
And while I am not attacking the belief systems — religious, cultural or otherwise — of anyone at all, when one views everything from a detached, logical point of view, many of these rites of passage do not make a whole lot of sense.
But we imbue them with meaning, because we know we are now crossing a great divide, a tipping point in our lives after which there is no going back to the way it was before.
I was born into, and brought up in, a faith and underwent its requisite rites of passage. I got married and had two children. I got divorced.
All of these are transitory phases in one's life, all of them important, many of them marked by some sort of procedure and/or celebration.
And yet, the rite of passage I remember more fondly than all of the above, barring the birth of my wonderful children, happened in 1998, at the age of 19.
This was my first year staying at Knockando Men's Residence, established by the now-defunct Johannesburg College of Education for its male students.
While I did not attend JCE, I had family ties to Knock, as it is fondly known, and so wound up as a resident while attending Wits.
And as with many university residences, one does not simply start living there, one must earn the right in a variety of ridiculous ways.
Knock's orientation was a truly mild version of what other student residents underwent.
We ran a lot and sang a lot and were deprived of a lot of sleep but, in return, we were fed a lot of alcohol and introduced to a lot of young women. A fair trade, to most of us.
The only event that even came remotely close to other residence initiations was Status Night.
This was the final night of our two-week orientation, and as the name implied, was the night you earned your status as a true Knockandian.
Without going into too much detail, Status Night involves much running, shouting, darkness, water being thrown from great heights, singing to a stuffed goose which everyone insists is a duck, a staggering amount of alcohol and an unfortunate amount of public male nudity.
But after that, you were done, and could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with senior members of the residence with nothing distinguishing you from one another.
And, while it is in no way equal in importance, it is this event which most frequently popped into my mind while reading Jeffrey Rakabe's debut outing Led by Shepherds.
The novel is bookended by Rakabe's experiences during koma, the rite of passage that Pedi men undergo to transition to adulthood.
But in-between these slices of his recounting, Rakabe goes into further detail about his experiences during tertiary education and slightly afterwards, and it is in this part of the book that the magic occurs.
To be perfectly honest, up until about the halfway mark of this book, there was nothing remarkable about it. Rakabe's language is fluid and descriptive, and he creates similes and metaphors that are enlightening, evocative and in some cases laugh-out-loud funny.
His choice of words and writing style definitely stood out. But until he starts ruminating on how his life changed during the Covid-19 lockdown, the book is a standard memoir, a recollection of the events of his life to that point.
However, during Rakabe's lockdown recollections, the book emerges from its cocoon. His life is markedly different now from the time when he underwent koma — he has encountered people, places and intellectual concepts that he did not even dream existed as the young boy who went off into the mountains to become a man.
And these new introductions into his life, his consciousness, have caused him to re-frame all his previous experiences, including koma which, up until that point, had been the most important and influential event in his life.
When we return to koma after Rakabe's intellectual re-framing, we find it to be a markedly different event. The fear and uncertainty of a young boy facing a terrifying, unknown sequence of events remain, but are now viewed through the lens of a grown man who is realising some of the unfortunate downsides to this long-standing tradition.
I confess — Rakabe zigged where I thought he would zag. I expected this book to be a loving recollection of a rite many South Africans undergo.
Instead, what Rakabe presents us with is a stark revisiting of this rite, of its many implications, spoken and otherwise, and how it shapes those who go through it, for better or for worse.
Merely for the way it bucks tradition, this book should receive kudos.
But it should also receive kudos for what it is — one man reviewing a pivotal event in his past, now in possession of knowledge that he didn't have at the time, and realising how a rite of passage might echo through one's life with unintended consequences.
A worthwhile read.