Boys in one of South Africa's biggest townships, KwaMashu, to the north of Durban, are set to undergo virginity testing, a controversial custom widely carried out among girls in KwaZulu-Natal.
Female virginity tester Nokulunga Majola is one of the traditionalists pushing for virginity testing to be extended to teenage and unmarried males in the township.
The idea received its strongest backing when a well-known campaigner for a return to traditional customs, Reggie Khumalo, of Isivivane Sama Siko, a body promoting African traditional cultures, offered to train older men to perform the tests. Khumalo said he had been tested as a boy and that was how he had learned about the method.
The boys would have to volunteer to be tested.
Teenage boys in Madadeni, outside Newcastle, Ixopo and at Hlanganani, near Bulwer in the Midlands, had been undergoing the tests for years, he said.
"These tests are done on a monthly basis and are to help young boys and young men to save themselves from sexually-transmitted diseases."
Asked about the test procedure, he said it was an old, well known tradition.
"Young boys also have hymen - white lacy skin on the foreskin. If the foreskin on the penis slips away easily, it means the hymen is gone. If the foreskin is sore and hard to move, then it means he is still a virgin," Khumalo said.
Other methods include checking for a certain vein on the penis.
"The only time the vein can disappear is when a boy sleeps with a virgin because her vaginal opening is still tight," he said. "If a boy urinates straight up into the air, he is a virgin. If the urine sprays, he has had sex before."
Khumalo said expert male virginity testers could determine virginity by looking at the colour of the knees. If a man's knees are dark, he is not a virgin.
