One of them reminded me of a cellphone or something. These markings are what we would call gang graffiti. There are five families in Songho: Yanoge, Karambe, Guindo, Degova, Seva. Our guide said he was Yanoge. This wins him the right to be in the first group to be circumcised at the ritual. They are sequestered thirty days afterwards. I think he said he was 14 at the time. Ritualized child abuse does seem to be the universal in human culture, doesn't it? It's impossible to avoid abusing children by somebody's standard. You could almost lose custody of your kids in America for allowing them to sleep in your bed, so paranoid has the culture gotten at physical contact between adults and kids; but in most parts of Africa, putting your kid in a separate room with only a Baby Cam to keep him company is considered as neglectful as a prom mom putting her baby in a dumpster would be here. It occurs to me that circumcision fits also into the category of Tobacco and Meat and War — another ritual practice that has fallen into the maw of the American economic monster which Decontextualizes, Hypermarkets, and makes into an Addiction.