A man circumcised according to Masai fashion can marry a girl circumcised according to Kikuyu fashion and vice…
- Date of account
- Published 1922
- Source
- Bantu Beliefs and Magic With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war
- Reference
- Bantu Beliefs and Magic With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war · selected passage 35
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
A man circumcised according to Masai fashion can marry a girl circumcised according to Kikuyu fashion and vice versâ; but a medicine man and the elders have to perform a ceremony to change the girl from Kikuyu to Masai before the marriage can take place
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyA man circumcised according to Masai fashion can marry a girl circumcised according to Kikuyu fashion and vice versâ; but a medicine man and the elders have to perform a ceremony to change the girl from Kikuyu to Masai before the marriage can take place. The ceremony is said to be as follows: a male sheep is killed, and the small intestines are extracted. The medicine man and the girl take hold of them, and the elders then cut the intestines with three pieces of wood sharpened to a knife edge and made of mathakwa, mukeo, and mukenya bushes. A piece of intestine is cut with each knife. The girl is then anointed with the fat of the sheep by another woman and smeared over with tatha (the stomach contents) mixed with water.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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