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.

The sechu is practiced by three tribes only.  Boguera is observed by all the Bechuanas and Caffres, but not by the negro tribes beyond 20 Deg. south.  The “boguera” is a civil rather than a religious rite.  All the boys of an age between ten and fourteen or fifteen are selected to be the companions for life of one of the sons of the chief.  They are taken out to some retired spot in the forest, and huts are erected for their accommodation; the old men go out and teach them to dance, initiating them, at the same time, into all the mysteries of African politics and government.  Each one is expected to compose an oration in praise of himself, called a “leina” or name, and to be able to repeat it with sufficient fluency.  A good deal of beating