How Can We Respect African Rituals That Kill?

We’ve all heard about the on going practice of Female Genital Mutilation. There is another traditional practice that is help spreading the HIV/AIDS epidemic in some rural parts of Africa. In Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya a husband’s funeral has concluded with ritual sex between a relative of the husband and his widowed wife. This ritual is supposed to break the bond with the husband’s spirit and to save the village from disease and insanity. This ritual is called cleansing.

In South Africa, traditional healers and witch doctors are spreading the idea that having sex or raping young virgin women will cure them of AIDS. Babies as young as five-months have been reported raped. There are re-education programs that are attempting to reverse this trend as well as cleansing.

There is no question that both of these practices must end. But how they end is still in question. It is frustrating to hear the rationales for these practices from seemingly reasonable people. Just because it is tradition is not enough to justify them. They are dangerous and are killing people or scarring their lives for life. Of course, they are dangerous to me. How can African-Americans persuade Africans that these practices are dangerous or that some of your traditional practices should end? We know the dangers of colonialism as well as Africans. It seems we will be looked upon as no better than any other Westerner intruding into the lifestyles of Africans.

What can we do?