At the recent world AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, a research emerging from South Africa sug­gests that circumcised males are 60 per cent high resistant to HIV.

 

Anti-AIDS cam­paigners and organisations have re­acted swiftly with op­posing views claiming that maximum highlights of the research findings will give men the green light to be promiscuous or stop the use of condoms as a means of protection.

 

The findings of the research state that uncircumcised men whose foreskins are not re­moved are more irritated and more susceptible to sex and infections. “If the foreskin is not re­moved, it creates con­ducive hide-out for mi­cro-organisms leading to infections that ab­sorbs the HIV virus rap­idly.”

 

The history of male circumcision has been variously proposed with cultural, religious and social perspectives. Male circumcision as written in history, was common. Although not universal, it began as a religious sacrifice. It started as a rite of passage making boys’ en­trance into adulthood a means of suppressing sexual pleasure, an aid to hygiene where regu­lar bathing was impractical. It served as a means of dis­couraging masturbation, to increase a man’s attractiveness to women, as a demon­stration of one’s ability to endure pain, or a means of differencing a circumcising group from their non-circum­cising neighbours.

 

The oldest docu­mentary evidence for circumcision was ob­tained in Egypt. Exami­nations done on Egyp­tian mummies have found both circumcised and uncircumcised men.

In Ghana, the practice has not been differ­ent from other cultures’ historical accounts. It is believed in the Akan setting that an uncir­cumcised man cannot be enthroned as a chief or king. This statement contradicts the views of an elderly man at Ofankor in Accra who won’t disclose his ethnicity and home­town because of pos­sible stereotype attacks against his tribesmen. According to him in 1955 when he was entering the sec­ondary school, “I was compelled to circumcise at age 16.”  He said, knowing the-life style of that prestigious school, and the boarding house facilities, he did not feel any royalty in him to re­main uncircumcised.

 

He told me his par­ents, especially his grandmother convinced him that as a royal, he­ was not to endure pain and that explained why his foreskin was not removed at birth. He con­firms the practice as a traditional custom but, ironically, all his two boys are circumcised.

He strengthens his view that royals, as custom demands, are to be served and not be stressful or endure difficulties, including pain.