Banele Shabangu is scared because he should be scared. Because a man in a mask is about to stick a needle into the base of his penis. “Are you ready?” the man asks.
“No one could be ready for this.”
“Don’t touch, don’t jump,” says Nurse Justin, the man with the needle. Then he injects Banele with a local anesthetic. Banele shouts. It hurts, but it’s more where it hurts than how much it hurts.
Banele, an 18-year-old in his last year of high school, has come to the clinic in Matsapha, Swaziland, to get circumcised. Like the dozens of teenagers and men packed into the waiting room, he’s doing so because he heard that circumcision offers partial protection against HIV, the virus that is obliterating the future of his country.
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