During Nettie’s brief stay in Olinka as part of her missionary work, as she writes, she shares too the ways of the Olinka tribe. This page briefly looks at just a few of those issues, and attempts to make sense of them.

Female Circumcision & Facial Scarification
"Her friends said she’d undergone both the female scarification ceremony and the rite of female initiation." – page 204

Also known as the combined female initiation ceremony, each of these operations has their functions. By scarring the woman’s face, the woman instinctively keeps her head ‘down,’ as Tashi does. While the women keep their head’s down the men keep their's aloft, and in doing so the power structure is conserved. The female circumcision, still carried out today, in countries such as Somali, is sometimes conducted in the most appalling conditions with the vagina often being sewn up with twigs or nettles. It is designed to assure virginity before marriage [a man who thus found his newly wed wife with an open vagina, would know she had slept with somebody else], though in other operations, the clitoris is removed from the woman, denying her sexual pleasure. Governments around the world are now trying to abolish both operations in countries where it is still carried out.

Click here if you would like to find out more about female circumcision.

Education
"The Olinka do not believe that girls should be educated." – page 132

The Olinka believe that only men should be educated. Knowledge is power as they say, and so in order to preserve men as the dominant ‘bread-winners’, it is they who must be educated.

Religion
"We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?" -page 131

The Olinka people worship roofleaf as God for it protects them from the harmful weather that many African countries have a tendency to suffer from during some seasons. This belief that God is everything is otherwise known as pantheism.

Menstruation
"I must keep going on as if nothing is happening, or be an embarrassment to Samuel, the children and myself. Not to mention the villagers, who think women who have their friends should not even be seen." – page 161

Although many of us would see this as ignorant, even women today in Africa are ‘shut up’ while they go through menstruation because people believe that they run the risk of polluting crops, animals or people.

Written by Matthew Kane [2001]

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