Dialogues: Tailored interventions now needed to curb initiation deaths

During the initiation season, every winter and summer, families across the Eastern Cape prepare to welcome their sons back from initiation school dressed in blankets of honour and pride. Unfortunately, other families instead prepare coffins because of tragic, preventable deaths of initiates that occur in the name of a valuable cultural rite meant to affirm life, responsibility and manhood. These deaths are avoidable, predictable and entirely unnecessary and yet they continue.

Over the past two decades, many boys and young men have died during initiation seasons in SA, with the Eastern Cape consistently bearing the highest toll. This is not a cultural tragedy but a governance failure. Recently, during the summer initiation season that began on November 14 2025, at least 41 initiates died in the Eastern Cape, with most of the fatalities occurring in the OR Tambo and Amathole districts.

We treat these deaths as seasonal news items rather than as what they truly are — a recurring atrocity. Imagine if dozens of children died every winter from unsafe schools or unsafe scholar transport. There would be outrage, resignations, prosecutions and emergency interventions.

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But because these deaths happen in rural villages, in traditional spaces, among socially vulnerable families and under the banner of culture, they are tolerated. That is not respect for culture, it is abandonment. Initiation schools long predate colonialism and the modern state.

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