Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/357

Rh gets some large hard-skin beans, and makes them very hot in the fire; these are put into the hole, and the boy lies across the hole above the hot beans; there he is steamed for some time, and then goes off to wash in a stream. Next some grass stems are burnt, and the ashes rubbed on the wound, and he thereupon goes to his house and waits until he is well, when he puts on a new cloth, and the affair is finished.

I find that some operation is also performed on girls, but my informants cannot tell me what it is, as it is a secret between the "nganga kumbi" and the girls. All they can tell me is that a house is built on a platform (the girls not being permitted to touch the ground), and in this house the girls live, sing, and dance for some three or four months. The "nganga kumbi" visits them occasionally to instruct them in marital matters. The girls think, and are taught by the town women and their mothers to believe, that unless they go through this operation or ceremony they will have no children.

In the books of old travellers on the lower Congo one comes very often upon the phrase "Casa de tinta" or "nzo a tinta," i.e., house of paint, and they refer to the vile customs and immoralities practised in these "paint houses." It is probable that these writers refer either to the "ndembo," the gateway to which is very gaudily painted, or to the "kumbi" house where the girls go, and where they used to powder themselves with the red powder of the camwood. Their description of the vile practices pursued in the "nzo a tinta" would well fit either the "ndembo" or the "kumbi" house. I am rather inclined to think, for several reasons, that the latter place was in the minds of the writers.

The tabus I would divide into two classes,—the "mpangu," or inherited tabu, and the "nlongo," or