A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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Identity, of course, is central to belonging to the group and to a sense of self within the context of the group. Among the Kuria, without circumcision one is marginal to the group. For Kuria boys transiting to manhood requires that they must not show fear before, during, or after their circumcision. Standing strong, shoulder to shoulder with their cohort they are cut with a knife, short sword, or razor, whatever sharp instrument the boys have brought with them, by the circumciser. Miroslava Prazak notes that the circumciser will test the blade of the boy and if found not sharp enough will use his own instrument, and that any kind of body gesture that suggests fear is read as marking the youth as a coward, a mark that he may well carry for his life (Prazak, 2016: 72–3).
Rites of circumcision do not stand alone and are enmeshed in a larger ritual process that began with the separation of children from their families and ended with the recognition of the adult gendered status of the initiates by their community. The process can take years in some locations and often is only completed when the initiate marries. Arnold van Gennep (1960) developed a structural model by which to understand rites of passage. Rites of passage, he demonstrated, have three separate parts: separation, or the preliminal segment/phase; the liminal segment/phase; and reintroduction or the postliminal segment/phase. All three segments/phases are interconnected and allow each segment/phase to make sense. Separation, for example, creates the conditions for the liminal segment/phase, while the liminal segment/phase creates the conditions for the reincorporation back into the social body with a new identity: in the case of circumcision a new gendered adult identity. Drawing on the Mende rite of circumcision as a preliminary rite to allow for the acquisition of knowledge and social power secured through the secret societies of the Sande and Poro, in the next section I speak to the three segments/phases of the rite using van Gennep’s model by which to think about the circumcision of the fleshy bits called/named genitals.
Circumcision and the Sande and Poro of the Mende of Sierra Leone
The Mende‐speaking people are located in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea and consist of a number of geographic branches across these countries. All three western African countries fell under colonial rule and all three emerged from this rule in the second half of the twentieth century. With the formal withdrawal of colonial powers, what was left in the wake was corruption and crumbling infrastructure. As Mariane Ferme wrote:
Like other parts of postcolonial Africa, the natural landscape of Sierra Leona was littered in the 1980s with relics – traces left behind by the colonial state and its modernizing project. These relics were being swallowed up by vegetation, which was reclaiming these sites at a time when the postcolonial state no longer provided services, or constituted much of a presence, in rural areas lacking significant mineral resources.
(2001: 23)
Emerging from colonialism, Sierra Leone fell foul of corrupt politics, civil war, and violence involving blood diamonds, which took the lives of 50,000 people or more in the period from 1992 to 2002, all of which conspired to push the country into economic and social despair. Although the political system was stabilized by 2002 and Sierra Leone began the long road to recovery, in 2014 an Ebola outbreak began that did not end until March 2016 and took the lives of over 3,000 Sierra Leoneans (Richards, 2016: 81).
An enduring social institution among the Mende are the closed sodalities of the Sande and the Poro. The Sande and Poro societies predate colonization and have continued after its more explicit forms have fallen by the wayside (Arewa and Hale, 1975: 81; Richards, 1973). The most common demogonic myth that speaks to the foundation of the Poro relates a story of murder and deception, the outcome of which is the founding of the Poro society.3 Entrance into the Poro, within which necessary and important knowledge was disseminated while significant ritual, social, political, and economic relations were forged, requires that boys become men. The rite that opened the way to the Poro Society was/is the cutting off of the foreskin of the penis (Kalous, 1995: 318; Pemunta and Tabenyang). Equally so with girls and the Sande Society, whose demogonic myth is not known: forged through the fire of ritual, the cutting off of the clitoris is seen to open the way to acquire knowledge, and gain access to social, political and economic positions (Pemunta and Tabenyang, 2017; Ferme, 2001; Phillips, 1978). Furthermore, like the initiates of the Poro, the newly initiated gender adults of the Sande secured the support and protection of their society (Richards, 2016: 81). The cutting of the genitals created the gender of the initiates, allowing them access to proper knowledge. The knowledge provided explicit social rules as to the proper performance of their allotted gender. Implicit and important to Mende gender ideology is also heteronormativity and reproduction, both of which are expected of, and celebrated by, the Mende (Ferme, 2001: 61–79; Kalous, 1995: 318; Cosentino, 1982: 22–4).
The rite of circumcision for Mende preteens and teens requires that they be removed from their families to the “bush school,” with “bush” marking off a space wherein the Sande and Poro conduct their induction of young Mende folk into their respective societies. This marked off space, on the boundary between the town and bush, is only open to the members and initiates of either the Sande or Poro. Entering this space without proper permission may well mean severe retribution. For example, in the past girls or women who trespassed into the Poro bush were killed. This practice, however, has changed and such girls/women are ritually brought into the Poro to serve the needs of the society. This person is known as the Mabɔle and she is considered as sharing equally in the masculine and feminine, thus challenging, while reaffirming, Mende gender ideology (Ferme, 2001: 74–76). Sande members who take up chieftain roles are also initiated into the Poro society (Pemunta and Tabenyang, 2017: 9; Phillips, 1995).
Paul Richards writes of the Mende bush school that:
Specifically in Poro and Sande, the sodalities protect the knowledge that includes how to ensure correct management of the spirits of the bush, upon which so many vital resources depend. Initiation and associated ordeals are two key means through which sodality members are bonded, emotionally, to maintain these secrets.
(2016: 81)
Sande and Poro initiates return to their homes and work during the day, but in the evening they go back to the bush school until they are “pulled out”: that is, they have completed their rite of passage into gendered adulthood (Ferme, 2001: 76–9; Phillips, 1995: 85). During this phase of the rite they are in both liminal space and liminal time, being neither child nor fully adult. Bodily marked by circumcision, a mark that is required but properly unseen, young girls’ bodies, including the head, are covered with white clay, while white head ties bind their heads. Both signifiers are used to represent the girls’ state of liminality and their journey into knowledge acquisition – a knowledge accessible only through the endurance of the pain of circumcision. Male initiates, whose bodily cut of the genitals is also necessary but unseen, have their heads shaved to mark their liminal status (Ferme, 2001). For both female and male initiates the head becomes the site of the representation of the unseen cut, a not uncommon homology (see, for example, Eilberg‐Schwartz and Doniger (1995), wherein the head and genitals are seen to be stand‐ins for each other). Upon the completion of the rite of passage, both male and female initiates “sit in state” at a very public meeting place where they are given gifts and recognized by their new name, conferred upon them during their rite of passage. Newly made women sit in their best clothes for three days, while newly made men, with head now covered, sit for four days (Ferme, 2001: 75–7; Ahmadu, 2000; Phillips, 1995: 76–95; Phillips, 1978: 269–71). Completing the rite, they rejoin the larger social body as gendered adults ready to take up their assigned roles.
Circumcision, the cut of the flesh, opened the way for children to learn Mende knowledge related to Mende ontology, or bodily being, which included gender, marriage, and reproduction; philosophy which introduced abstract knowledge; sociology, which directed behavioral norms in all things; psychology, which spoke to the correct gendered mindset and ritual; and mythology, which legitimated and reinforced all forms of knowledge. In the bush school, initiates, female, male and female‐male, learned