Among the Nyanja-speaking tribes of Central Angoniland, in British Central Africa, when a young girl finds that she has become a woman, she stands silent by the pathway leading to the village, her face wrapt in her calico.  An old woman, finding her there, takes her off to a stream to bathe; after that the girl is secluded for six days in the old woman’s hut.  She eats her porridge out of an old basket and her relish, in which no salt is put, from a potsherd.  The basket is afterwards thrown away.  On the seventh day the aged matrons gather together, go with the girl to a stream, and throw her into the water.  In returning they sing songs, and the old woman, who directs the proceedings, carries the maiden on her back.  Then they spread a mat and fetch her husband and set the two down on the mat and shave his head.  When it is dark, the old women escort the girl to her husband’s hut.  There the ndiwo relish is cooking on the fire.  During the night the woman rises and puts some salt in the pot.  Next morning, before dawn, while all is dark and the villagers have not yet opened their doors, the young married woman goes off and gives some of the relish to her mother and to the old woman who was mistress of the ceremony.  This relish she sets down at the doors of their houses and goes away.  And in the morning, when the sun has risen and all is light in the village, the two women open their doors, and there they find the relish with the salt in it; and they take of it and rub it on their feet and under their arm-pits; and if there are little children in the house, they eat of it.  And if the young wife has a kinsman who is absent from the village, some of the relish is put on a splinter of bamboo and kept against his return, that when he comes he, too, may rub his feet with it.  But if the woman finds that her husband is impotent, she does not rise betimes and go out in the dark to lay the relish at the doors of her mother and the old woman.  And in the morning, when the sun is up and all the village is light, the old women open their doors, and see no relish there, and they know what has happened, and so they go wilily to work.  For they persuade the husband to consult the diviner that he may discover how to cure his impotence; and while he is closeted with the wizard, they fetch another man, who finishes the ceremony with the young wife, in order that the relish may be given out and that people may rub their feet with it.  But if it happens that when a girl comes to maturity she is not yet betrothed to any man, and therefore has no husband to go to, the matrons tell her that she must go to a lover instead.  And this is the custom which they call chigango.  So in the evening she takes her cooking pot and relish and hies away to the quarters of the young bachelors, and they very civilly sleep somewhere else that night.  And in the morning the girl goes back to the kuka hut.[73]

[Abstinence from salt associated with a rule of chastity in many tribes.]