Zolani Mkiva, secretary general of the Congress for Traditional Leaders of South Africa, said unscrupulous illegal schools saw initiation as a money-making venture.

He told the state broadcaster: “This now has become a national disaster. We can’t afford that year on year we lose 50 children in a sacred ritual that’s meant to prepare young men for leadership and the future.”

South Africa’s traditional affairs minister Velenkosini Hlabisa has blamed negligence by the initiation schools, but also said parents were failing to heed advice.

He said: “There is negligence in terms of meeting health standards in some of the initiation schools. If you take your child to an initiation school, you never make a follow-up, you do not monitor, you do not go there to see whether the child does drink water, you are placing your child at risk.”

Under South African law, only children who are 16 years and above may be admitted to initiation school with parental consent.

Mr Hlabisa said 41 people have been arrested in relation to illegal initiation schools, including parents who had supplied wrong ages for their children to be admitted.

Previous crackdowns have failed to stem the deaths.

Several schools in Eastern Cape province were suspended in 2019 after a spate of deaths, but the province has again this year seen the highest death toll.

Initiations usually take place in two seasons, one in the summer and one in the winter. Some 94 people in total are reported to have died during the whole of 2024, though the secrecy surrounding the initiations means the circumstances are often unclear.

Despite the deaths, any attempt to ban traditional initiation, or to place the circumcisions under heavy-handed state medical regulation, is likely to face stiff resistance.

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