Animal Rights Africa's Saga Continues With Bull Killing
The Animal Rights Africa's saga against the Zulu ritual of bull killing continues. It's now being punctuated by phrases which can only be described as a load of bull.
When the judge who presided over the hearing likened the halting of the ritual to ordering Catholics to stop taking holy communion, the absurdities soared. How you compare the eating of a waver and a sip of wine to the cruel mutilation of a bull, only he knows.
Then someone suggested that instead of a living bull, why not create one out of papier mache - a symbol of the real flesh and blood one. The idea has tremendous appeal until you realize that no Zulu man, or boy for that matter, would dream of testing his manhood against the ferocity of paper.
Then we have the one about Zulu identity being lost should the court uphold the request of ARA for an interim interdict against the ritual. If Zulu identity is lost because a bull is not cruelly killed with the bare hands of a group of men, then, perhaps it's an identity that deserves to be lost. It's certainly not an identity that should flourish in the new South Africa.
Finally, the argument that this practice should continue because "it has been done for years" - what an argument! A minority group once declared apartheid as its culture and we know what that gave rise to. Some would say, "Ah, but you can't compare apartheid with cruelly killing bulls," and they're right; but there's an underlying principle here. Certain cultural idiosyncrasies have to be let go of. They're not only an affront to human decency, but our very survival depends on their disappearance. Africa in its search for relative identity is finding that out the hard way.
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