ABSTRACT
This chapter is a report of the findings of an investigation into the Babukusu circumcision song text as an object of masculine gaze. It engages with the general African trickster motif as a ‘nomadological’ framing that can be used to read Bukusu circumcision songs as cultural discourses that gesture towards a male hegemonic instrumentality. Songs as cultural discourses are often sites of gender contests. Liz Gunner argues that the song genre often gets entangled in ‘seamless masculinity with little place for gendered identities’. Aside from the embarrassing idioms that are sung by circumcision retinues in the rural spaces, advertising agencies, musicians and even politicians have appropriated the Bukusu circumcision song genre for commercial and political purposes. Among the Bukusu, circumcision is a cultural instrument of performing power, and it acts as ‘a symbolic message concerning personhood, gender, cosmology, status and community inscribed in the body’.
