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While we were all obsessing about the gun-toting Paralympian and the red-eyed monster at the public broadcaster, serial killers and mutilators were running amok in the country.
Last week, about 20 young boys were killed in the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Gauteng by these killers who call themselves initiation doctors. Scores more were hospitalised.
These deaths and mutilations have become so normal that eyebrows are hardly raised when the figures are read out.
Hearing about them is almost as normal as hearing a traffic update during peak hour.
In 2013, 30 boys died during initiation season in the Eastern Cape alone. In 2014, the figure was 35. Last year, 40 children were killed.
In the media industry, we mark initiation season killings on our year planners as we would pencil in annual events such as Wimbledon and the Carling Black Label Cup.
It has become one of those things that we know will happen.
The government does exactly the same thing in the worst-hit provinces, the health departments and law enforcement agencies gear up to deal with the phenomenon as they would for the Easter and December road rush.
We always know it is coming, but we are all helpless in dealing with it. We know children will be killed and many others deprived of one of the essential elements of masculinity.
While the serial killers and mutilators have squads of goons who kidnap children and take them to initiation schools, most of the time the boys voluntarily turn up or get sent to their deaths by their own parents.
At the camps, they are subjected to intolerable abuse by the surgeons.
They are beaten, deprived of water and food and have their penises operated on – in unhygienic conditions – with instruments that should only touch a human body during a drunken brawl in a rough neighbourhood.
Before cultural conservatives train their guns on this lowly newspaperman and accuse him of undermining tradition, let us be clear that he does not have issues with the practice.
It is an integral part of the transition to manhood for millions of South Africans, and no apology is required for practising it.
But the wanton killing and injuring of young people that occurs as a result of the practice should jolt us into crisis mode.
These deaths should sit heavily on the conscience of the nation because they are entirely avoidable.
But those who have the power to stop these deaths have applied superficial remedies. And over the years, government has implemented lame measures to curb the deaths.
There have been awareness campaigns, raids on illegal initiation schools, arrests of initiation “surgeons” and policy interventions on making initiation schools surgically safe.
But the deaths have continued unabated.
Obed Bapela, deputy minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs – who is the first senior national leader to take the scourge seriously – sounded helpless this week when commenting on the crisis:
“The high number of deaths is a result of illegal initiation schools and kidnapping of children. The unregistered schools are undermining the good work done by government.”
The chair of the Eastern Cape House of Traditional Leaders, Chief Ngangomhlaba Matanzima, sounded like a stuck record when he repeated what others had said last year and the year before, and the year before that.
“This [the crisis] shows that a lot still has to be done in this area, which is always problematic. But we need to continue providing the necessary support and awareness campaigns,” he said.
We need a bold reassessment of the practice of young men going up the mountain or to a remote location to get their foreskins cut off.
This element of the cultural practice comes from a time when the world was different.
The environment was cleaner, culture was purer, the commercial motive was virtually nonexistent and society was much better ordered than it is today.
Once these are taken into account, brave political decisions that will pitch the government against cultural purists will have to be taken.
There is no reason the circumcision part of the practice cannot be undertaken at a normal clinic by a trained doctor, using instruments and pharmaceutical products that the taxpayer has paid for.
Thereafter, the young men can be taken to wherever the parents and the community deem fit for them to learn about manhood.
The change of mindset will have to include human rights training in communities. In the same way that we frown upon corporal punishment in urban areas, so we should frown upon the abuse of the rights of initiates in the camps.
Being deprived of water and being beaten is no passage to manhood.
It is torture.
A society that was progressive enough to be a world leader on matters such as capital punishment, sexual orientation and women’s control over their bodies surely should not be held hostage by deadly practices from ancient times.
