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Rite of Passage in Gambia

Funerals Masquerades
   
Naming Ceremony Weddings
A person's life in Gambia is marked by a series of African rites of passage or traditional rituals. These include the so called naming ceremonies, male initiation and circumcision, marriages and funerals. People of both the main faiths and all ethnic groups more or less go through all the rituals. An initiatory rite is a ritual marking the change of social or sexual status of an individual, most generally puberty but also for other events like the birth or the menopause.

The rites of passage make it possible to bind the individual to the group, but also to structure the life of the individual in precise stages which allow an alleviating perception of the individual compared to his temporality and to its mortality. This phenomenon thus has an important stake for the individual, the relation between the individual and the group, and for the cohesion of the group as a whole.

There are several ceremonies that are connected to special events in a Gambian’s life. Naming ceremonies are held exactly 7 days after a baby is born, when the father announces the name he has chosen for his new son or daughter. Circumcision ceremonies are performed when adolescents are circumcised to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. Performed in same-sex groups, circumcisions are customarily accompanied by “bush school,” when the young adults are taken into the bush and taught about their culture and the responsibilities they must undertake as adults.

As expected, wedding denotes the joining of husband and wife. It is fairly common for marriages to be arranged between parents (especially in rural areas) and it is not necessary for both the bride and groom to be present at the actual ceremony. The wedding ceremony, as well as the naming and circumcision ceremonies in themselves are usually smaller affairs, with close family only. Larger parties, held afterwards, include a larger group of acquaintances.

The Foni district is inhabited by the Diolas, Mandjaques and Balanta who perform their initiation ceremonies in their sacred holy woods. Some of these traditional ceremonies take place every year whilst others take place once every 30 to 40 years.

In Gambia the rite of passage generally proceeds in three stages:

• Separation (the individual is isolated from the group);

• the margin or liminality (moment when the effectiveness of the ritual is carried out, with the variation of the group);

• aggregation (return in the group).

The most studied transition is undoubtedly the time of adolescence which corresponds in the passing biological and social of the child to the adult through the state-limit or the interval of penal responsibility / irresponsibility, the reproductive capacity / incapacity and autonomy / heteronomy on the plans biological, legal, psychological and social.

Birth with death, the course of a life is the sum and the chronicle of a multitude of passages where each passage is the rupture of an unspecified identity as the birth of a child is the rupture of a wife who becomes mother, of a "girl of..." who becomes "mother of..." and of a "mother of..." who becomes a "grandmother of." for the female kind as for the male kind. Another illustrative example of passage in childhood is the rupture between the privative one of the family and the public of the first days at the nursery.

The passage from primary school to secondary school corresponds to the preadolescence stage where the child passes through the school holidays, of the group at "large" at the primary school with the group of "small" at the secondary school.

This passage is also at the same time the abandonment of the old identity which of "figure" becomes "bottom", in Gestalt or "totality figure-bottom" and the acquisition of a new identity which replaces "figure". The rite of passage is a ceremony of public recognition and approval of the abandonment of the old identity and acquisition of the new identity.

It is essentially an accompaniment of training in the abandonment of the old identity and the acquisition of the new identity.

The rite of passage is also this guide of voyage and training and an accompaniment of a trade-guild of road in the abandonment of the old identity and the acquisition of the new identity, a tended hand of the close relations and distances to cross turbid water of the life.

Among Gambia's Christians the principal rites are the baptism, the communion and the marriage.
 
 
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