Whipping ceremony in Ethiopia
From a 2006 entry on the “Quit the City” blog, describing a vacation in Ethiopia:
Probably the most memorable occasion was our visit to the Hamer people, where we were lucky enough to see a ‘Bull Jumping’ ceremony. I was suspicious that the Hamer were putting on the ceremony for the benefit of tourists, but as soon as we arrived it was clear that was not the case. The ceremony is an initiation ceremony performed by men before they marry. The star of the occasion is the ‘jumper’ who… stark naked, attempts to run over several bulls lined up in a row, while the people of the village yell in support. The jumper is successful and is permitted to marry if he manages to run over the bulls four times without falling off…
Prior to the jumping, the other ‘event’ is the whipping of women. And I don’t mean a tongue lashing, I mean actual whipping with long, thin, flexible branches. Although the thorns are removed before the whipping takes place, by the end of the day backs are severely slashed…
The meaning of all this was explained to us as follows . . . The men doing the whipping are previous successful ‘jumpers’ who have, therefore, graduated to be to be ‘beaters’. The women being whipped are not randomly chosen, they are the female relatives of the jumper (sisters, nieces, cousins, aunts, mother). The more they are whipped, the more pain they suffer for him and the more he feels their pain. The jumper will never forget the whipping of his female relatives and so he will never forget them…
For the Hamer woman – the more she is whipped, the more she shows her love for the ‘jumper’. We saw women begging men to whip them and crying when the men refused or did not whip them hard enough… The whipping was brutal and not easy to watch.
Here’s a photo of a Hamer man with a whip used “for ritual flogging of women”, from Lonely Planet:
