It is considered most unlucky for a woman to become pregnant while still suckling a child, and native tradition holds that the first child will always die, as after the mother becomes pregnant the milk then belongs to the unborn child and the bigger child will not thrive on it. Children are always carried on their mothers’ backs, supported by a skin, until about two years old, after which age, if the journey is any distance, the child is placed astride one shoulder of the father and so carried. A child is never beaten till about two years old and after that chastisement is very mild. At six or seven boys are chastised by father or mother, but girls of the same age are only chastised by their mothers. _Arrival at the Age of Puberty._—Boys have no initiation ceremony, and circumcision, though practised among one or two of the tribes absorbed by the Barozi, such as the Balunda and Bankoya, is not practised by the Barozi. Girls have a ceremony known as the “Mwalianjo.” Directly a girl has her first periods of menstruation, she immediately goes and hides, if living out on the plains, in an adjacent clump of reeds or, if living near the forest, in the bush near the village. While thus hiding she is not supposed to see or speak to a man or boy, and if one actually approaches through inadvertence, she covers her head with a cloth or skin until he has passed by. Directly her absence from the village is noticed by her contemporaries, the married women go and look for her and stop with her in the bush, singing and dancing. At night after dark, she is brought back to her father’s yard to sleep, but at daybreak she is always hidden again in the bush. This goes on for a month. The women while dancing and singing round the girl beat her with sticks, not severely enough to do damage but hard enough to arouse the tears and lamentations of the novitiate. The married women also show the girl how to receive and how to comport herself during the conjugal embraces of her husband, one woman taking the man’s part for the performance. Much advice is given her how to preserve her husband’s affections. At the end of the month the women take the girl to the nearest water and wash her. One of the elder women then goes and turns the bridegroom out of his house and the girl is then brought and placed in the hut in the blankets, the husband recalled and the newly married pair left. The company then dance and sing all night, drinking and eating largely the while. In the early morning the women take the bride and cut all her hair off, and she is in all senses of the word, a married woman. This “mwalianjo” ceremony was in itself fairly harmless, although possibly a trifle coarse and vulgar from a European point of view, but of later years single girls who had not even arrived at the age of puberty used to attend these ceremonies and join in the obscene jesting that went on, and the married women besides giving