30 minutes Colour 1982
Film-maker: Peter Ramsden
Anthropologist: Patricia Caplan
Circumcision is the centre of a ritual which marks a stage in the life-cycle. The film shows part of the typical pattern of such rites - separation from the old, a marginal period, and a ritual of renewal and integration into the community with a new status. The film concentrates on the fact that circumcision is social change. The boys are very young so it is not connected with the biological changes at puberty. It also demonstrates the mixture of Islam and the customary ritual characteristic of most people of Chole Island in Tanzania.
Mwalim Manzi has three sons and has decided that all three are ready to be circumcised. A circumcisor is engaged and the labour of drying, pounding and winnowing rice for the necessary feeding of kin and neighbours is begun. A goat is slaughtered to provide meat. Men carry out a reading of the Koran, which acts as a form of blessing. That night there is a Maulid, a different Muslim ritual, in the mosque. Girls now participate in this ceremony, a recent change.-gender; Muslim Maulid ritual on Chole Island
The next day the boys are separated from the community and normal life. They are carried into the coconut plantation where they are circumcised. After each operation the knife is dipped in rice-flour to cleanse it. While this is going on, other men complete the building of a special hut in which the boys will stay, in seclusion, until their wounds are healed. The film shows the circumcised boys being brought into the seclusion hut and ends with the celebrations which mark the occasion. The circumcisor and his assistants perform a special dance in the women's area and receive money from the women, whose songs celebrate the creation of a new man and the sexual pleasure men give to women. The songs emphasize that the boys are now socially men, though this ritual has been performed for little boys. This film was made as part of the BBC series, Other People's Lives. A study guide for the series is available from the RAI. Catalogue number (16mm): 3RA114.
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A.P. Caplan, 1975. Choice and Constraint in a Swahili Community: Property, Hierarchy and Cognatic Descent on the East African Coast. Oxford University Press for International African Institute, London.
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A.P. Caplan, 1976. `Boys' Circumcision and Girls' Puberty Rites among the Swahili of Mafia Island, Tanzania'. Africa, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 21-34.
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A.P. Caplan, 1978. `The Swahili of Chole Island, Tanzania'. In A. Sutherland (ed.) Face Values. BBC Publications, London.
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A.P. Caplan, 1984. `Cognatic Descent, Islamic Law and Women's Property on the East African Coast'. In R. Hirschon (ed.) Women and Property, Women as Property, pp. 23-43. Croom Helm, London.
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N. Chittick, 1961. Kisimani Mafia: Excavations at an Islamic Settlement on the East African Coast. Occ. Paper No. 1, Tanganyika Ministry of Education, Antiquities Division, Dar es Salaam.
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N. Chittick, 1965. `The Shirazi Colonization of East Africa'. Journal of African History, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 275-94.
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A.H.J. Prins, 1961. The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast: Arabs, Shirazi and Swahili. Ethnographic Survey of Africa: East Central Africa, Part 12, International African Institute, London
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