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The Mende‐speaking people are located in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea and consist of a number of geographic branches across these countries. All three western African countries fell under colonial rule and all three emerged from this rule in the second half of the twentieth century. With the formal withdrawal of colonial powers, what was left in the wake was corruption and crumbling infrastructure. As Mariane Ferme wrote:

Like other parts of postcolonial Africa, the natural landscape of Sierra Leona was littered in the 1980s with relics – traces left behind by the colonial state and its modernizing project. These relics were being swallowed up by vegetation, which was reclaiming these sites at a time when the postcolonial state no longer provided services, or constituted much of a presence, in rural areas lacking significant mineral resources.

(2001: 23)

Emerging from colonialism, Sierra Leone fell foul of corrupt politics, civil war, and violence involving blood diamonds, which took the lives of 50,000 people or more in the period from 1992 to 2002, all of which conspired to push the country into economic and social despair. Although the political system was stabilized by 2002 and Sierra Leone began the long road to recovery, in 2014 an Ebola outbreak began that did not end until March 2016 and took the lives of over 3,000 Sierra Leoneans (Richards, 2016: 81).

An enduring social institution among the Mende are the closed sodalities of the Sande and the Poro. The Sande and Poro societies predate colonization and have continued after its more explicit forms have fallen by the wayside (Arewa and Hale, 1975: 81; Richards, 1973). The most common demogonic myth that speaks to the foundation of the Poro relates a story of murder and deception, the outcome of which is the founding of the Poro society.³ Entrance into the Poro, within which necessary and important knowledge was disseminated while significant ritual, social, political, and economic relations were forged, requires that boys become men. The rite that opened the way to the Poro Society was/is the cutting off of the foreskin of the penis (Kalous, 1995: 318; Pemunta and Tabenyang). Equally so with girls and the Sande Society, whose demogonic myth is not known: forged through the fire of ritual, the cutting off of the clitoris is seen to open the way to acquire knowledge, and gain access to social, political and economic positions (Pemunta and Tabenyang, 2017; Ferme, 2001; Phillips, 1978). Furthermore, like the initiates of the Poro, the newly initiated gender adults of the Sande secured the support and protection of their society (Richards, 2016: 81). The cutting of the genitals created the gender of the initiates, allowing them access to proper knowledge. The knowledge provided explicit social rules as to the proper performance of their allotted gender. Implicit and important to Mende gender ideology is also heteronormativity and reproduction, both of which are expected of, and celebrated by, the Mende (Ferme, 2001: 61–79; Kalous, 1995: 318; Cosentino, 1982: 22–4).

The rite of circumcision for Mende preteens and teens requires that they be removed from their families to the “bush school,” with “bush” marking off a space wherein the Sande and Poro conduct their induction of young Mende folk into their respective societies. This marked off space, on the boundary between the town and bush, is only open to the members and initiates of either the Sande or Poro. Entering this space without proper permission may well mean severe retribution. For example, in the past girls or women who trespassed into the Poro bush were killed. This practice, however, has changed and such girls/women are ritually brought into the Poro to serve the needs of the society. This person is known as the Mabɔle and she is considered as sharing equally in the masculine and feminine, thus challenging, while reaffirming, Mende gender ideology (Ferme, 2001: 74–76). Sande members who take up chieftain roles are also initiated into the Poro society (Pemunta and Tabenyang, 2017: 9; Phillips, 1995).

Paul Richards writes of the Mende bush school that:

Specifically in Poro and Sande, the sodalities protect the knowledge that includes how to ensure correct management of the spirits of the bush, upon which so many vital resources depend. Initiation and associated ordeals are two key means through which sodality members are bonded, emotionally, to maintain these secrets.

(2016: 81)

Sande and Poro initiates return to their homes and work during the day, but in the evening they go back to the bush school until they are “pulled out”: that is, they have completed their rite of passage into gendered adulthood (Ferme, 2001: 76–9; Phillips, 1995: 85). During this phase of the rite they are in both liminal space and liminal time, being neither child nor fully adult. Bodily marked by circumcision, a mark that is required but properly unseen, young girls’ bodies, including the head, are covered with white clay, while white head ties bind their heads. Both signifiers are used to represent the girls’ state of liminality and their journey into knowledge acquisition – a knowledge accessible only through the endurance of the pain of circumcision. Male initiates, whose bodily cut of the genitals is also necessary but unseen, have their heads shaved to mark their liminal status (Ferme, 2001). For both female and male initiates the head becomes the site of the representation of the unseen cut, a not uncommon homology (see, for example, Eilberg‐Schwartz and Doniger (1995), wherein the head and genitals are seen to be stand‐ins for each other). Upon the completion of the rite of passage, both male and female initiates “sit in state” at a very public meeting place where they are given gifts and recognized by their new name, conferred upon them during their rite of passage. Newly made women sit in their best clothes for three days, while newly made men, with head now covered, sit for four days (Ferme, 2001: 75–7; Ahmadu, 2000; Phillips, 1995: 76–95; Phillips, 1978: 269–71). Completing the rite, they rejoin the larger social body as gendered adults ready to take up their assigned roles.

Circumcision, the cut of the flesh, opened the way for children to learn Mende knowledge related to Mende ontology, or bodily being, which included gender, marriage, and reproduction; philosophy which introduced abstract knowledge; sociology, which directed behavioral norms in all things; psychology, which spoke to the correct gendered mindset and ritual; and mythology, which legitimated and reinforced all forms of knowledge. In the bush school, initiates, female, male and female‐male, learned to be proper Mende folk (see also Little, 1965: 356). Female‐males included female husbands or powerful women who are positioned to take wives, wives who increase their wealth, as well as male daughters who can assume power and act on behalf of their family. These are similar to the female husbands and male daughters among the Igbo of Nigeria, as studied by Ifa Amadiume (1987).

Without circumcision there was and is no entrance into either the Sande or the Poro and without the Sande and Poro those who remained uninitiated cannot enter Mende society as an adult, and certainly cannot take up any significant social, political, or economic role, because they did not have the proper education by which to succeed in Mende life. Mariane Ferme wrote that: “In Mende, uninitiated children are referred to as kpowanga (pl.), a term that also means “mad” and “mentally deficient.” She further comments that “two processes overlap in initiation: one assumes the moral and ideal attributes of Mende men and women at the same time as one learns how to interpret the surrounding world” ((2001: 210). Ruth Phillips, following Carol MacCormack (1979), also wrote that “the Mende regard circumcision as necessary in order to change children, whose sexuality is regarded as ambiguous or neutral, into heterosexual, gendered adults” (1995: 78).