Among various peoples in British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months, and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the nymphae.

A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement.

When the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is marriageable (C.Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," _British Medical Journal_, April 29, 1905).
Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown.

(2) In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex separately, during the day.

(3) In the final stage, which is that of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults, with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev.E.
Gottschling, "The Bawenda," _Journal Anthropological Institution_, July to Dec., 1905, p.372.Cf., an interesting account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary, Wessmann, _The Bawenda_, pp.