He Would Not Deny
The Extortion To Me; That Would Be `Boherehere' (Swindling)."
He Thus Thought Extortion Better Than Swindling.
I could not detect
any difference in the morality of the two transactions,
but Sekomi's ideas of honesty are
The lowest I have met with
in any Bechuana chief, and this instance is mentioned as the only approach
to demanding payment for leave to pass that I have met with in the south.
In all other cases the difficulty has been to get a chief to give us men
to show the way, and the payment has only been for guides.
Englishmen have always very properly avoided giving that idea
to the native mind which we shall hereafter find prove troublesome,
that payment ought to be made for passage through a country.
All the Bechuana and Caffre tribes south of the Zambesi
practice circumcision (`boguera'), but the rites observed
are carefully concealed. The initiated alone can approach, but in this town
I was once a spectator of the second part of the ceremony of the circumcision,
called "sechu". Just at the dawn of day, a row of boys of nearly
fourteen years of age stood naked in the kotla, each having a pair of sandals
as a shield on his hands. Facing them stood the men of the town
in a similar state of nudity, all armed with long thin wands,
of a tough, strong, supple bush called moretloa (`Grewia flava'),
and engaged in a dance named "koha", in which questions are put to the boys,
as "Will you guard the chief well?" "Will you herd the cattle well?" and,
while the latter give an affirmative response, the men rush forward to them,
and each aims a full-weight blow at the back of one of the boys.
Shielding himself with the sandals above his head, he causes the supple wand
to descend and bend into his back, and every stroke inflicted thus
makes the blood squirt out of a wound a foot or eighteen inches long.
At the end of the dance, the boys' backs are seamed with wounds and weals,
the scars of which remain through life. This is intended
to harden the young soldiers, and prepare them for the rank of men.
After this ceremony, and after killing a rhinoceros, they may marry a wife.
In the "koha" the same respect is shown to age as in many other
of their customs. A younger man, rushing from the ranks
to exercise his wand on the backs of the youths, may be himself
the object of chastisement by the older, and, on the occasion referred to,
Sekomi received a severe cut on the leg from one of his gray-haired people.
On my joking with some of the young men on their want of courage,
notwithstanding all the beatings of which they bore marks,
and hinting that our soldiers were brave without suffering so much,
one rose up and said, "Ask him if, when he and I were compelled by a lion
to stop and make a fire, I did not lie down and sleep as well as himself."
In other parts a challenge to try a race would have been given,
and you may frequently see grown men adopting that means
of testing superiority, like so many children.
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