Being a man is no easy task, but back in the days, transitioning from boy to man was an even harder task.
This is as some cultures practiced unconventional rites of passage from boyhood to manhood. An example is that of the Australian Mardudjara Aborigines tribe. The rites of passage for males consists of two parts: circumcision and subincision.
In this tribe a boy of around 15 or 16 years is ready to become a man and has to go through this painful ritual. This begins with the elders taking the boy to a fire and have him lie down next to it.
The young man is surrounded by other members of the tribe, some of whom sing and dance while others, called mourners, cry.
Then the circumcision begins. This involves the tribal elder in charge of the circumcision sitting on top of the boy’s chest facing his penis. The young man is given a boomerang to bite and then this elder pulls up the foreskin, twists it and two other persons, cut it off with knives.
Next, the boy is told to kneel on a shield that’s placed over the fire so the smoke can rise up and purify his wound.
Then the weirdest part of the ritual begins. This is where the boy is given his freshly removed foreskin to swallow without chewing. As soon as this is done, the boy is told that he has now eaten “his own boy” which will grow inside him, making him a strong man.
This does not mark the end of the ritual as there is another stage called the subincision. Subincision happens a few months after the circumcision, where the young man is taken to a fire again and this time, a small wooden rod is inserted into his urethra to act as a backing for a knife.
Then the knife is used to make a split on the underside of the penis from the frenulum to near the scrotum.
After this incredibly painful process, the boy is told to stand above the fire and allows his blood to drip into it. From that day, the boy squats when he urinates.
While this ritual was pretty compulsory for all males back in the day, the successive generations are quickly abandoning this tradition as they are less willing to go through so much pain and also eat their foreskin.
