To enter the world of men, the young Sambia boy must go through an initiation that starts before his puberty and only ends after his twentieth birthday. This initiation is divided into six phases. The first three phases take place in a purely homosexual context in which the boy practices fellatio, sometimes in a very intense manner. At the beginning of his initiation, according to this people's culture, the boy must ingest the semen of older men – his genitors – in order to begin to produce his own semen and fortify his masculinity [1].
During all this period, he is not allowed to have any other sexual activity, even when he gets formally married at the end of the third phase. During the fourth phase, he may have his first sexual intercourse with his wife, but it must be limited to fellatio. Throughout this phase, homosexual activity continues but the roles are now reversed, the young man having become the genitor of younger boys. He learns to “renew” the semen that he loses during ejaculation without having to resort to ingestion by drinking the sap from a tree named “the milk of the mother-tree.”
During the fifth phase, he is taught the purifying rituals that he must practice after having sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman. At that time, he may have normal sexual relationships with his wife.
The sixth phase starts when his wife has her first child. Homosexual activity disappears. This last phase is marked by ceremonies of purification and by nose bleedings, the nose symbolizing the penis. The idea is that the man learns to renew autonomously his semen. The initiation ends when his second child is born. The myth of Numboolyu and Chenchi is then revealed to him [2].
Elisabeth Badinter has described the violence of the rituals that awaits the Sambia boy who is by surprise pulled away from his mother and taken into the forest. There, for three days, he will be whipped with nettles to open his skin and stimulate his growth. His nose will bleed to ensure that he gets rid of the female liquids that stop him from growing. On the third day, the secret of the flutes will be revealed to him. No woman should ever hear it from him, or else he will die.
From the moment he is separated from his mother, the boy is not allowed to speak to her, to touch her, or to look at her until he has reached a man’s status, that is to say, when he has a child of his own. Only then he will be able to break the maternal taboo and speak to her, offer her food and eat in her presence. [3]
The same author [Badinter, 1992] describes the extraordinary energy that the Bimin-Kuskusmin dedicate to masculine ritual activities. To begin with, the young boys are undressed, their clothes are burnt, and they are washed by female initiators who smear their body with funeral yellow mud while making unpleasant remarks about their sexual organs. After this humiliating experience, they are told that they are going to be killed because they have been weakened and polluted by their mother. The already extremely nervous boys begin to cry and scream. In such a state, they are shown to their mothers who cry as well and prepare themselves for mourning.
Brought into isolation in the forest, the terrorized boys are then whipped, humiliated, mistreated, purged, incised, and burnt. Swallowing blood and urine, they vomit constantly, faint or become completely hysterical, while their initiators tell them they are dying. In the end, their wounds are healed, and the boys get a masculine name.
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