The Nomadic Alternative – Page 250

VI

The puberty ceremony is staged as an ordeal to prove to all that the boy is now a man, fit to mate with a woman and defend her. (Similarly, the first sight of menstrual blood signifies that the girl has now grown up, and is an occasion for trumpeted hurrahs.)

At Bushman puberty ceremonies Miss Bleek described the appearance of a supernatural being which hovered over the young dancers, "about three feet high with a flat head, red eyes underneath, a black body, wings and claws". The male initiate introduces himself to the Devil, and if the devil of reality has become extinct, he endures a devil of his imagination, or some other substitute for its fangs. Young manhood thrives in the jaws of death, and if they fail to snap, the man is less than a man.

The ritual of circumcision is incidental to health and hygiene. The sharp knife of the circumcisor replaces the teeth of the predator locked round the erect penis. Cicatrices and tattoos are the claw marks of the Beast and visible proof of virility. Women delight in a scar or two because they mark the man who can defend her. The connection between male sexual arousal and the need to fight we can recognize in the universal phallic charms against the malicious evil eye, known the world over. Demon drivers in Japan wear minia-ture penis-amulets round their necks to protect them from an oncoming motorized beast. And where the predators no longer roam, peoples who wish to make their children grow up compensate for their loss by the increased ferocity of their puberty rites - the splitting of the urethra or skinning of the groin. Girls also are frequently called on to submit to such ordeals as cicatrizing or subincision.

For they too are indispensable to the unit of defence.

To coincide with the beast fighting episode, the elders hold a seminar. In a crash course that would put most modern education methods to shame, they impart to the initiates - boys and girls at