Liberia <+- 



have given up the initiation schools for boys in favour of a 

 number of leagues and societies, secret or otherwise. An in- 

 teresting description of those which were in force amongst 

 the Grebo people about sixty years ago is given by the late 

 Rev. J. S. Payne (see p. 1078). Though these institutions 

 have weakened very much in the vicinity of Cape Palmas and 

 the Christian missions established in that part of Maryland 

 County, they remain in other parts of Eastern Liberia practically 

 unaltered at the present day. 



Beyond the coast belt, the boy and girl initiation schools 

 appear to be pretty much the same amongst the people of 

 Kru stock, the Ngere or Gon, and all the Kpwesi and Gora 

 tribes, except that the Kru peoples do not circumcise. The 

 Basa-Gibi people follow much the same customs as the Kpwesi, 

 the Vai, the Kisi, and the other tribes of Western Liberia. 

 The Vai only differ from the others in that, being Muhammadan 

 (as are also most of the Goras), circumcision is performed on 

 the boys soon after birth. They do not wait to perform this 

 rite on the approach of puberty. It is in this particular that 

 one may discriminate in Africa between the aboriginal rite of 

 circumcision, which was mainly prophylactic, and the introduc- 

 tion of that practice as a solemn religious rite derived from 

 the teaching of the Semitic races of Palestine and Arabia. In 

 these, as in the Ancient Egyptians, the practice of circumcision 

 no doubt arose, as it did amongst the Negroes, for reasons of 

 purely physical necessity. But to enforce compliance with this 

 rite superstition gradually wove round it a religious significance, 1 

 so that when it was reintroduced into Africa after the uprising 



1 I do not think that sufficent evidence has been quoted anywhere to show 

 that the rite of circumcision had anything to do with Phallic worship. The 

 Phallic rult has sometimes been practised by races that ignored the idea of 

 circumcision. 



I0 34 



