It's that time of the year again. As in every good year young men die in South Africa as a consequence of 'initiation ceremonies' - supposedly marking their coming into being as adults. Well, a short-lived adulthood it was for one boy who was successfully starved to death by his local traditional healer. Amusingly, the provincial health departmental spokesman in the Eastern Cape (the province notorious even in the country for this sort of thing) describes the bloke as someone 'posing' as a traditional healer, as if there was such a thing as a bona fide professional traditional healer.
Anyway, check out this link to the BBC news website for the full story, especially the 'See also' links, reporting deaths in July 2003 and May 2004, as the summer butchery going under the euphemism of 'initiation ceremony' continues.
One wonders what the cultural relativism crowd's stance on this issue would be like.
