Lesson in how culture develops from my son’s interest in my penis

What is permissible and what is forbidden in African tradition and culture has been in the news headlines a great deal in the last few weeks in South Africa.

Many a personal shame, prejudice and anxieties about bodies and raising children have been submitted as a defining part of African culture.

But beware of the modern African primitivists.

Even then, the space opened up by the row around Zuma’s exposed genitals has an upside. We can now talk again freely, I trust, and to a wider audience, about how we understand African traditions and culture.

My understanding is it some of the claims made by the traditionalists in the name of Africans and their bodies are just absurd. The unwitting or purposeful aim of these claims is to retribalise us in the fashion of colonial and Apartheid ideology.

My greatest and most recent lesson in the development of tradition and culture has not come from Cheikh Anta Diop, Cabral, Biko or the Africana encyclopedia.

I also didn’t get it on the internet, even though I find it a terribly absorbing thing the primitivists might find would immensely contribute to African cultures were they to appropriate it.

Actually, it’s my relationship with my son.  More specifically, from his interest in

his “doggie” and mine. That is a name I playfully used for a penis and he has not forgotten it, even though he has known from that first moment when he enquired that mama and girls have vaginas and dada and me have penises.

A few months after he was born and could touch himself I started to notice while changing his nappy that my son finds immense pleasure in touching his penis.

I know from studies of children that they do not merely need food and sleep and being taken care of. They actually find bodily pleasure in a host of things in their environment adults have long forgotten to find interesting at all. Using boxes as caves, eating dirt, jumping up and down, running around in circles, tasting their own snot, climbing trees for its own sake, are all part of the fun.

But it was still a surprise that sometime after he could walk and follow me around the house my son developed a wonderfully strange interest in my doggie.

He wants to know when he will be able to see the head of his penis. He follows me into the loo. He finds a good position to have a clear view while I urinate. What are you trying to see, I would ask him? His answer would come: I want to see. He was going for two.

This interest of a boy in his father’s penis is said to be disallowed by African tradition and culture, some have argued in the media and courts lately.

I am unable to confirm whether African tradition and culture discourages children learning about their bodies. I missed that lesson.

My son’s interest in my penis has waned, although we bath together as often we can. But last week his mother informed that he asked her again when he might get to see his penis’ head.  

The boy’s fascination with his penis and mine has immensely fascinated from the first moment. I think his fascination stems from observing a difference even though we both have a penis. Like all of the things he is interested in, and his growing competence and knowledge from one day to the next, I consider his learning about bodies as an opportunity for me to understand more about how as people we become the way we are.  

I watched him learn to jump onto the grass from the first step of the stoep and moved to leaping from the top step. I remember I couldn’t wait to tell his mother and he could wait to show her.

I just can’t get enough of how he sits us down and makes us tea from his little tea set he got from his uncle.

I observed him, and was flabbergasted, in his preference for Cinderella over other stories, although from that too I learn how preferences get nourished and reinforced. Lately, he has taken to listening to stories on his mother’s phone, and I know that it is whole new world altogether when I see his little finger swipe the screen to page over.

Let’s play kung-fu dada, he says, and I have gotten to know far more than I ever could from empirical research on child development that, contrary to simply being rough play, when a boy and his father play sword-fight or boxing or any of the sort, the child is in the process of learning to control aggression and to know when he is hurting another person.

I feel privileged to be in the ringside seats and to see each one of these small steps in his developing years. I take each one the moments I am around him as an unrepeatable moment for me to pass on something useful for him when I will not be around.

My mother says that when I was around three I saw my father’s penis. She also says he took a bath with me while we lived together. I have no memory of his bare body. That might because from some point there wasn’t any of him to see, let alone his nakedness while we bathed together. Consequently, there was forgettable tradition handed down from him to me about whether or not seeing his penis was unSotho, circumstances about fathers and their offspring common to that of over two million African children in South Africa today.  

However, I can’t say I have suffered very much for seeing my father's penis or taking a bath with him. I think things turned out well, and I have been told I am, on the whole, pleasant company.

I know that I could have used some generative fathering when I needed to learn about homework and hormones. I know that many boys and girls can use some positive nourishing traditions about being rejected, dealing with anger, and self-esteem.

I would have liked my father to have been present to tell me before I started having an interest in girls that it is cool not to rush things, to have feelings and not be unnerved by them. I would have saved myself and others a lot of unnecessary trouble of finding out for myself, and that was well into my adulthood.

The open attention of a father, it seems to me from raising the boy and observing his curiosity about the world around him, especially when it comes to things like penises, is undeniably important.

Of course this is not the same things as saying children raised by single mothers or a lesbian couple will suffer because they have no immediate access to seeing real penises.

The father, to be sure, does not have to be biological. He doesn’t have to be married to the child’s mother. He doesn’t have to be gay or a president.

However, if a man wants to learn about intimacy and how it becomes part of family traditions and wider culture, especially one who didn’t have much of it from other men while growing up, there is nothing to beat availability to his child: open, vulnerable, consistent presence.

The traditions of intimacy I have in mind imply that a man has to be willing to prepare the bottle. It might not be non-stop fun, but if he sticks with it, a man who wipes the bum, changes nappies, and potty-trains soon realises how vital this stuff is to learning about how you learn to be comfortable with your body.

He can grumble, in fact unless he is some kind of Gandhi he must complain, but waking up in the middle of the night to soothe and rock the child to sleep is all part of not just raising a healthy child, but also building traditions. Let’s not forget making time to take the child for his vaccination shots, it’s in there too.

Then there is the bit about reading to him, doing puzzles, taking him to the park, the football games, and going to the parties where you meet parents of his school-friends whom you would not choose to know if you had a choice.

Fatherhood, in a word, has its own traditions. Their defining paradoxical characteristic is their changeability and consistency. I have learned much from this about him, myself and culture. That lesson is that my son needs me to be consistently around; but his world as a growing boy is one of continual new things; and I better be prepared for that. 

Fatherhood is about learning to fail – repeatedly. It’s about learning about your own limits of knowledge and skills. Learning that you don’t know about traditions or culture except what you got from your parents, and they got from their parents, and it can amount to not very much. It’s about failing to satisfy many of the child’s needs. About saying I don’t know how this works, I don’t know why, over and over again.

There is no mystery to differences in fatherhood in different cultures, then: it is daily practice, daily accidents, daily failures, daily little wins.

It is my view that the modern African primitivists, most of them in positions of power in government, universities, and what are called traditional communities, push the view that tradition and culture prohibits children from learning from seeing their father’s or mother’s undressed bodies are doing an injustice to our lives.

Clothing themselves in the garbs of culture and tradition, but driven by repression, fear, miseducation, defeatism, racist wounding or God knows what, I think they suspect children will see that many of us are really small, existentially naked, and worse still, unworthy of just a tad bit more than donating sperm and eggs.

Speaking as if they represent all of African tradition and culture, these retrogressive traditionalists want us to think that all Africans have a natural disinclination to look at their bodies and call it tradition and culture. It is not true.

However, to be fair, perhaps the retribalisers have seen the rapidly changing society and can’t make head or tail of it. Or they just don’t like the look of it.

The problem is that instead of being open and saying, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, son, but let’s try to figure it out together”, they want to close the gates to all this wonderfully new and strange knowledge

This article first appeared here:  

http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2012/05/31/lesson-in-how-culture-develops-from-my-sons-interest-in-my-penis-ilive

Black men and women are the most post-modern subjects of all

References to African traditions and culture in the context of the controversy over The Spear, the painting portraying President Jacob Zuma with his penis showing, has brought back to mind one of the relatively big media stories of 2011.

This was the story triggered by the comments made by Mr Jimmy Manyi, President of the Black Management Forum and Head of Government Communication and Information Services.

I suspect the story went big because, in addition to Manyi, the other central protagonists involved in the event, were the minister in the presidency Mr Trevor Manuel, and Mr Paul Ngobeni, at the time legal adviser to the minister of defence.

But it also got traction because it was, like the perceived insult against African traditions by the depiction of Zuma’s imagined penis, yet another dreadful replay of the effects of the inherited misunderstandings of the racialised and tribalised pasts that made us into who we are.

Black people as a whole did not come out well from that story too.

Like other ugly stories of race, Manyi’s words and the exchanges that followed entrapped our imaginations because they played on the masochism and misrecognition that have become, since apartheid at least, an unhappy part of what is erroneously called African tradition or culture.

Read more here: http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2012/05/29/black-men-and-women-are-the-most-post-modern-subjects-of-all-ilive

Changing traditions of naming

For most women changing your surname when you marry is the norm. It’s traditional, it’s expected, and it’s just the way it is.

But more and more women are questioning this notion and choosing to either keep their maiden names or opting for the double-barrel option.

Being married for nine years and having kept my maiden name throughout has become a non-issue for my husband and me. I haven’t given it much thought in years until a colleague recently asked me about it. This got me thinking about this issue once again, and this time with an added maturity.

I guess I never really understood the reason women changed their surnames. It is something that perplexed me even as a young girl. I remember being 9 years old and for the first time hearing that a woman changes her name after she gets married. I questioned my mother about this 'but why must the woman be the one to change' and she responded with a 'that’s just the way it is'. I knew I wasn’t going to get the answers from her and for the next two weeks this issue weighed heavy on my heart. I kept asking myself questions like, ‘why can’t men change their surname?’, and ‘who decided that this is how it should be?’ and even came up with the idea that it would be more fair if a married couple abandoned their own surnames and instead opted for a brand new one. Having found something that in my young mind made sense, I felt the issue was temporarily resolved and would be revisited one day when I get married.

When I did get married I was still a student and for academic purposes kept my maiden name.

But it was more than that. I didn’t feel that I had changed as a person to the extent that I needed a new name. Sure, being married was a new part of my identity; it is an added identity, not one that changed me in any significant way. I was still the person I was before getting married. All I had accomplished before marriage was still part of me. I didn’t want to let go of the person I spent all those years becoming – not even for a start afresh.

Reactions to my decision are varied. My friends thought it was a brilliant idea and whilst many of them would have liked to do the same, none of them did. Their reasons include disapproval by either their husbands or families, not wanting to offend their in-laws or for the sake of their children.

My extended family just thought that it was typical of me to try to be different and until this day some still extend invites to us using my husband’s name only.

Strangers sometimes ask weird and inappropriate questions such as do I not love my husband; is his name not good enough; if I’m modern or just a feminist.

It’s sometimes difficult to have to keep assuring people that I do love my husband and have respect for his family name but what endears him to be even more is the fact that he is fully supportive of me keeping my maiden name and, by doing so, he is telling me that he accepts me for who I am.

Our family has since started to expand and our first son was born a year ago. We knew the day would come when we would have to revisit the surname issue. I wanted to keep my maiden name and wanted my son to have his father’s surname. But I didn’t want to be the only one in our familial unit with a different surname. So we decided upon giving our son both surnames. And this works for our family.

I’m sure my boy will have questions when he is older, but I am confident that we will be able to explain it to him in a way that he understands and give him the freedom to choose his own naming tradition when the time comes.

After all, traditions are ever-evolving.

This blog was first posted on Timeslive on the 11-05-2012. To see the original article please click on the following link: http://m.timeslive.co.za/?name=timeslive&i=11270/1/0&artId=24299

You say violence, rape, murder. I say love, peace and happiness!



Love can offer you a place of safety



There is all this enraged talk about rape, violence and murders in South Africa right now - and rightly so. But we have known for a while that there are just too many people being murdered, too many being raped, and that crime and violence are highly prevalent. We have known this for a long time.

In an earlier post, a colleague stated that: 

"the leaders are either out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black men and women".

I can agree with the possibility of the second bit, but tend to disagree with the first part. It may not be that the leaders have run out of ideas, and instead that the options that might work are the options that they regard as insignificant. The options that might work, like paying attention and changing the small, daily aspects of our lives, that might make the difference are not even given a look-in. Small things like the need for love and the meaning of happiness and what they mean to young men.

So after interviewing a few young black South African males about the importance of love and happiness in ideologies of masculinity, I found that most young men need love. They actually do. Really.

This got me thinking and reading even more about men, love and happiness. Then I had to remind myself that I am a psychologist too, not just a researcher. I am new in this business of being a psychologist, so I forget sometimes.

Psychology, as you might know, is a field that could make significant contributions to the current depressing state South Africa finds itself in, emotionally speaking. The discipline continues to underchieve, but it has such a great potential for this society. Through the discipline psychology we learn the undeniable role of emotions in our lives, and currently, for me, the importance of paying attention to the affective lives of young black men.

Of course, cognitions and behaviour are important, but even though we all would agree that we are "feeling beings", affect tends to be regarded with suspicion by business and political creatures, or otherwise relegated to the private sphere. However, through psychological studies prove again and again that emotions like love, hope, gratitude, shame, and happiness can actually change a person's perceptions and outlook on life. But let me stick to love. As one of the young men I interviewed stated:

"since I met her, she has shown me so much love, and I have become a responsible man, I do not only think of myself, but I have to think of her too. When I buy myself a chocolate, I know I have to buy for baby too..".

So please tell me you don't think love can make a difference in this world. I will wait for your response.

Of course this is not irrefutable proof about the importance of love in young men's lives. But it tells you this young man thinks love has changed him. 

Anyway, all I am saying is that our political leaders and government directors and corporate heads need to forget, for a moment at least, about the traditionalist way of doing things as being the only way that works. Don't buy more guns and bullets for the police to intimidate black young men. Take down the boom gates. Stop building prisons. Ignore that traditionalist leader's voice inside that says love if for "birds". Young men, like young women, need love. Black men, like white men, need to be cared for and to care for others. We need to teach these men that it is okay to love, to be loved. That it's not so bad to laugh, you know. That being happy is just what one needs sometimes, maybe ultimately. That it is okay to cry if you want to. Pat Conroy puts it very well for me when he says

"I thought that at birth men are allowed just as many tears as women, but because they are forbidden to shed them, they die long before women do, with their hearts exploding or their blood pressure rising or their livers eaten away by alcohol, because that lake of grief inside them has no outlet. Men die because their faces were not watered enough".  

So in my quest to understand how young men experience love and happiness I came across more than I had expected. The look of a young men who is in love and is not ashamed to say that he is, the look on his face when he talks about his loved one and how she has influenced the positive change in his life...just priceless.

I really do believe that love can make a difference. Maybe the rates of murder won't drop by tomorrow, maybe there won't be less cases of rape in the next week, but surely in the long run we will have a society filled with caring, loving, responsible men who are good fathers too and not men who will abuse their families. If men love, in the long run we won't have 12-year-olds who repeatedly rape their 3-year-old sisters. We will not have men who abuse other young men. We shall not have have young men who are frustrated by the fact that they cannot meet the standards of white men or older, wealthier black men. 

We all suffer from the effects of violent crimes in one way or the other. And currently the situation of continuous traumatisation is just causing further and widespread decay in our societies and hearts. We are causing all manner of injury to ourselves, by ignoring our emotions. Violence has become so normalised, so ordinary. Murder is normalised, rape is normalised, abuse is normalised, and all these and more are reported on our televisions and radios eachday and all because, YES, they are happening.

But so is laughter, so are acts of peace: these are happening too. What if we made love, like a normal thing. How about getting strange and weird stories on television and radio about tenderness to each other. What about each of us making it okay for the 5-year-old to see mom kissing dad, granddad embracing uncle, friends enjoying each other. What if we teach the kid to understand that it is good to love and see if there will be a change later on.

I have a good feeling things will change for the better then. Not instantly, but they will. If, that is, we try something different. Like teach love. If we let ourselves change traditions that are not getting us anywhere. Like pay close attention to positive emotions. If we  transform ourselves and this way change our societies. Like hugging a young man today.