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CIRCUMCISION REGIMENTS AS A NATIVE CHRONOLOGY. 
By the Rev. Professor W. A. Norton, M.A., B.Litt. 
The regiments of the successive circumcision lodges, holden about every 
five years in most tribes, form a rough method of fixing the chronology, 
by comparing the mephato or regiments circumcised in different tribes at 
the time of the same event or reign. For example, the well-known chief 
Sechele, Livingstone's friend, was remembered in the neighbouring tribes 
as having been contemporary with such-and-such a chief, by circumcision, 
as a youth. Having fixed the date in last century, therefore, of his circum- 
cision, one can deduce the dates of mephato in the other tribes. At the 
beginning of my work as a Government research grantee I cast about for 
some subject which would be virgin ground, and at the same time have a 
wide general bearing on the comparative history and folklore of the tribes. 
I lit upon this interesting subject, and found my researches well rewarded ; 
seeing that I was able to collect regiment lists in some thirty of the central 
South African tribes, some of these lists running well back into the eighteenth 
century. That veteran scholar, Fr. Bryant of Natal, has worked out a 
valuable list of Zulu regiments : but practically nothing seems to have been 
done in the case of the more Western tribes. 
The interest of these regiment lists is manifold. They are the natural 
scaffolding of native history. For years, as a missionary, I wasted hours, 
as had my predecessors, in dating the births of baptismal candidates by 
wars or comets, before discovering that the terse query " 0 leng ? " brought 
the terse answer " Ke le-tlhaselwa " or " Ke le-fitlha-Kgosi," at once 
approximately dated the person's circumcision (usually about the age of 
eighteen). However adequate dating by wars may be in the war-worn 
South-East Africa, the wars of the Bechwana or Basuto were mostly short 
raids, and infinitely more cumbersome and uncertain for dating purposes 
than the regiments. Of course the regiments must first themselves be 
dated once for all, to which necessary work this paper is contributory. 
I withhold further remarks on the lists in detail till readers, who are 
working with the individual tribes, have had the opportunity and goodness 
to check them, as I hope they will, by researching into tribal history with 
their help. I shall be deeply grateful if those who are not arranging to 
publish such research themselves will kindly put it at our disposal, to be 
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