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Vice Blog

UGANDA - TEENAGE CIRCUMCISION THROUGH THE YEARS


Before we went in and totally blew the lid off the Mamasaba people's mass-circumcision rite/drunken village rampage, the most authoritative document of the practice was a documentary shot in 1968 by Richard Hawkins for the Royal Anthropological Society called Imbalu: Ritual of Manhood of the Gisu of Uganda. Except for a few taped copies floating around university libraries, the film is almost impossible to dig up, so as a little late-mid-week present to you the reader, we're making available a couple selections for you to feast your peepholes on.

Hawkins stuck to the same MO as we did, following the circumcisees from the beginning of the ritual to the final cut (although, as you'll see, he totally pussied out/showed a modicum of restraint with his depiction of the actual act). In addition to looking really awesome in the way that anything shot in color in the 60s generally does, the film makes a nice counterpart to our series (or vice versa really), because it allows you to trace the evolution of Imbalu over the past 40 years. From what we can tell, the basic ceremony is more or less unchanged, but the participants have gotten approximately 8,095% more wasted.

See? I mean it's possible they just picked the chill village to shoot in and all the other places were orgies of goat shit and yelling, but doesn't everybody in that clip seem a bamillion times more laid-back and encouraging toward the initiates? Ain't nobody getting lynched there for serving mediocre food. Now, admittedly, I don't know much about getting Imbalu'd. Maybe having the living shit hazed out of you for three days by everybody you're remotely related to helps condition your brain to take the blade without flinching. But if it were up to me, I think I'd go with the village where everybody's sober and, instead of badgering me with the permanent shame I'm going to heap on my family if I fuck up, my parents just go off into the bush and consult the entrails of a freshly-slaughtered chicken to figure out whether or not I'm going to poon out. You?