“Have fun, love, but don’t do anything silly”

ON PENTECOST Island in the South Pacific, boys engage in the coming-of-age ceremony, Naghol. They climb a 70ft rickety tower, tie vines to their ankles and dive to the ground, falling at speeds of around 45mph. A dive is considered successful when the boy gets close enough to touch his head or shoulders to the ground. When the boy miscalculates the vine length and shatters Humpty-Dumpty style, it’s considered unsuccessful. While the boy makes his first dive, his mother watches. She holds an item representing his childhood and when he jumps, she throws the item away.

In Kenya and northern Tanzania, Maasai mothers are made of even sterner stuff. Their role in the coming of age ritual, Emuratare, requires them to accompany their daughters to a ceremonial ground and put them in a hut, where part of their daughters’ genitals will be excised with unsterilised knives and no anaesthetic. Three weeks later, if their daughters are still alive, their mothers return to reunite with them.

And there I was thinking that the Irish Debs rite of passage was elaborate, silly and fraught with danger. There’s nothing like looking at the wider picture, to put the smaller one into perspective. The only trouble with perspective however, is that it’s easy to lose, especially when the debs is just around the corner, and your daughter is losing hers.