The Xhosa Initiation

The journey starts by heading out into the remote parts of the Wild Coast, where Xhosa tradition is still kept almost unchanged. The further you go, the less infrastructure there is. Roads turn to dirt. Signal disappears. Modern South Africa is gradually left behind.

The heart of the experience is witnessing male initiation. Young men go off to remote huts in the bush, where they pass through one of the hardest and most psychologically demanding stages of their lives. In a sense it is an artificially created existential crisis, one a person must go through in order to come back a man. You will have the chance to enter the initiates' huts, talk with them, see their daily life and watch how the process works from the inside. What matters here is respect and observation. For the whole Xhosa nation this is a deeply intimate subject. Hundreds of people die or are disabled every year, so we do not put pointed questions to anyone directly.

One of the strongest parts of the experience is witnessing the tradition of The Game. This is the moment when the young men emerge after initiation and find themselves inside an enormous circle of other men. Then the ritual stick fighting begins. From the outside it looks close to gladiatorial combat. Hard. Chaotic. With injuries. Here you see male energy in an extremely concentrated form, ancient and unprocessed. This is the moment when many people start genuinely thinking about how far apart cultures can be in their ideas of manhood and in the ways a person is expected to grow up.

The rest of the time you live beside the Xhosa villages and watch their everyday life. How they cook. How they fish. How they rest. How they gather around the fire at night. At times it will feel as though you have stepped into a world running parallel to modern civilisation. We suggest switching off your signal and your phone, sitting by the fire, breaking off a piece of the shared bread, and watching.