Excision: A Polemic That Hides Cultural Imperialism
By Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig

The tradition of excision and circumcision

A lot of stories have been told by the media about a tradition that is now at least 60,000 years old. And maybe if the priests of the African civilization didn't find any need to give any explanation about these traditions, the way a person raised in a society without culture might understand it, it is because the attacks that are done against excision expose more of the ignorance and especially the arrogance of those who think that a thing or tradition can only have a right to exist if they understand it.

In the following lines, I will pretend that the reader is an honest individual and that his questions are honest. I will pretend that he/she is simply trying to understand the Black civilization; a civilization that has set everything for the whole of humanity. After it has set the basis for the human genius, it found itself, very mysteriously, with a low rank in the modern society, and its children reduced to slavery.

But one should first try to recreate the context and redefine the values. For people of color, there are two great worlds, all of them defined by the cycles of the transformation of existence: the world of the Gods and the world of humans. The world of Gods is the one on which the humans lay their eyes while they are trying to construct their own world. In other terms, the world of the Gods serves to us as a model, and it is a perfect model of conception of the existence that transforms itself.

For the human being, the world of the Gods is and stays a place that is hardly accessible. This is why there are territories of reconciliation; territories that are, at the same time, enough de-humanized and de-deified that on which individuals that are pure enough could raise on the rank of half-Gods and brush with some categories of Gods that generally exist with humanized faces. These pure territories are conceived as the intersection between the divine world and the human world, and they are called djingili, meaning the sacro-saint or the saint of the saints of the temples in the Nile Valley or the Niger River Valley.

These places are the places of partiality for Gods that are having a direct impact on human destinies. According to the organization of temples and spiritual places, the djingili, or the saint of the saints, after being built, can only be visited by special individuals, and purity is the decisive factor. Excision and circumcision are the first steps of purification.

Excision and circumcision predispose the individual to the possibility of accessing the saint of the saints, meaning the possibility of brushing with the world of Gods. There are other acts of purification, but these simply become invalid if circumcision or excision is not done. This is why, until today, in most of the African languages, there is no word to mean excision that does not mean, at the same time, purification. In Soninke, excision is called "salinde", which means "purification".

In Gourmantche, the word is "kontiagu", which means Òthe opening of the gate of GodsÓ, etc. To understand the spiritual value of excision in the African civilization, in Burkina Faso, the Lobi tribe would even exercise excision or circumcision on a dead body of a woman or man that could not get it done before their death. In the Mossi lands, a Bilakoro, or a non-excised woman, will not give food to an elderly person or a priestÉ…the list of examples is endless. This is what the ignorance of the scholars is attacking, and every time they find themselves under fire, they are the first ones to say that no one can claim to have the monopoly on values. In the same way that our values, wherever we are from, appear logical to us, we should have the decency to admit that other peopleÕs values are logical to them.

Cultural Tragedies

For the last tens of years, the relation between Africa and the other continents has always been uni-directional. Everything happens according to the will of the White man; he wanted us as slaves and we ended up on slavery ships. What is left of the Motherland is reduced to a stage of a reserve of minerals and wildlife, denying us all aspects of our identity. All of the countries of Europe and America are ready to accept the Black person only under one condition: if he accepts to be defined by other people. All this leads to a question that many of us will find naive: why so much hate against us?

I think the whole of humanity should wake up from this madness and vicious hate against Blacks. One does not destroy a culture that has built pyramids. One does not destroy a culture that has calculated pi and phi, while the rest of the world was sleeping in the primitive stage. It is like killing the golden chicken. Even those who are orchestrating the division among people are forced to recognize the African civilization as the one that has set the basis for human knowledge.

From all the questions that are asked about excision, there are some that we find honest and we think are coming from individuals who are simply questioning the world. We must somehow realize that in one way or another, the questions we asked the world define us in general and mark our level of understanding of material and non-material values of the world we see. It is very easy to expose our ignorance to the world, especially if we believe that our limitations are also the limitations of the rest of the world.

It is clear that we always find explanations for our actions, and for us, as long as our explanations exploit all the potentials of intellectual capability, we become simply incapable of perceiving logic on the other side of our frontier. What we see and for which we don't find an explanation in our intellectual territory is simply perceived as unnatural, unreal, superstition, etc. This aspect of human nature is the one that conditions a degeneration of every civilization.

We can see throughout the world ancient monuments from which the elaboration and ingeniousity are a proof of the dedication of the people that built them; we also know that if these people have dedicated so much time, energy, and work to their construction, it is because these constructions represent something very important to them. But for us, they are nothing but the expression of a talent from which the results are added to the wonders of this world. It is then very easy for us to convince ourselves that these people are simply superstitious or believe on the basis of what they believe instead of on the basis of reality, or in other words: what we believe today.

An attitude or an act perfectly normal stays only normal as long as we can explain it to ourselves. It stays normal only if its intelligence does not elude us. An act is important only if it is perceived as important to the construction of the world that we want to see, and this is if we see it as practical as how the drinking of alcohol becomes an important act to the one that wants to get drunk and a disgraceful and incomprehensible act to the one that is sober; like how the act of eating is perceived as necessary by the one that wants to live; like lying, cheating, killing, etc.

All this is to say that the goal we give to life becomes what determines what we consider superstitious or perfectly normal and understandable. Every goal has its intelligence and every intelligence selects its values.

In the world that is purely materialistic and rejects the existence of the divine world, the practice of excision and circumcision simply have no place. The society in that case is focused on "today and now" and conditioned the individuals into the pursuit of pleasures and sexual orgies by convincing him that there is not very much left after death. With the notion of orgasm as the ultimate point of ecstasy, sexual pleasure becomes, in a way, a goal to pursue and reach without any risk of trying to understand why and what happens after, etc.

As long as the individual does not have the intelligence beyond these notions, it becomes very easy to convince them that there is a place on the clitoris of a woman that could allow them to reach that point of supreme ecstasy. Excision then becomes what the male has initiated to stop women from enjoying their sexuality as a way to materialize oppression on them. And we very intentionally forget to mention that the sexual frigidity exists a lot more in non-circumcised women that on the circumcised ones.

For a world turned towards Gods, our existence as humans is viewed as an apprenticeship for our access to the divine world. We recognize that our corrupt and corruptible nature is one of the biggest handicaps to our spiritual growth. Excision and circumcision are first acts of purification. At birth, we have sacrificed our umbilical cord to the Earth to announce to the world of the Gods that we have arrived and are ready to start a new cycle of reincarnation, ready to enter an active dialog with the cosmic energies. Our excision or circumcision will come to announce that we are ready to open the doors of reincarnation for our ancestors and our dead relatives.

The circumcision and excision present us as ready to express our maturity in the human and non-human world. It is after excision and circumcision that the spirit of the individual is seen as having past the first step of their earthly experience, meaning that they are being ready to pass the level that has been announced by the burial of their umbilical cord.

For more on this topic, be sure to read The Destiny of Becoming: From Reincarnation to Reincarnation that will be released soon by Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig.

© by The Earth Center
Source from: http://firefly.theearthcenter.com/