West African Bondo -Tenzin

I enjoyed this reading very much because it was very anthropologically based. The coming of age initiation for both boys and girls is their rites of passage, moving from one stage of life to another. Another thing I could not help my self from thinking was the Bondo's initiation ceremony's similarity with that of the Trobrianders tribe in Papa New Guinea. The males are usually taken away from the villages to forests where they go through harsh beatings and obstacles by older adults to mark their rebirth as adults and are sent back to the village. For the females, when they first start to menstruate, they are isolated from the village as well, into menstrual huts where they are accompanied by older women. The rites of passage ritual in Bondo is very similar but it is more intricate and involves their own cultural ideas with performances. In the Bondo tribe, they perform a series of dances symbolizing different aspects of the ceremony. the women dance in a sweeping motion to symbolize the cleaning of the uterus, with their face painted all white. The lack of color symbolized the death of the initiates thus they were being reborn into the society as women and no longer girls. The females and males are not to interfere in each others separate initiation which is the same in with the trobrianders too. The trobrianders male initiates are beaten by older men, made to go through various obstacles and in the end when they complete everything, they are made to crawl through a long tunnel made of plants, leaves and branches to symbolize the initiates rebirth into the community as an adult. The similarities in their rites of passage amuse me especially with all the connections that can be made. Regardless, both tribes have unique way of portraying their rites of passage. The Bondo do so in style and performances by visually showing the process of the transformation.