Saafi people
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The Saafi people, also called Serer-Safene, Safene, etc., are an ethnic group found in
Religion
The Saafi mainly adhere to the tenets of Serer religion.[3]
History
Culture
Unlike the Serer-Sine, and most ethnic groups of the
The Saafi people inhabit a fertile, well-watered region on the downward slope and valleys of an escarpment with underground streams feeding into the Somone River. Fertility permits relatively intense farming combined with herding cattle and goats, a combination crucial to the Saafi identity and social institutions.[7]
The male life cycle is particular tied to the combination of farming and herding. Boys herd from approximately eight or ten years old until the age of initiation, which occurs between fifteen and twenty years of age. After being called by the father (in consultation with the maternal uncle) to circumcision, the boys enter an age class of initiates made up of forty to sixty young men. After a celebration, the boys are circumcised in a special enclosure where they spend three months studying cosaan (a term corresponding to history, culture, etc.) by learning songs and their meaning. By the end of the period, sustained by meat feasts supplied by fathers and uncles, the initiates emerge as an age class of bachelors with their own secret song. These bachelors receive the weapons and tools of men as gifts from the father, but from this point on they farm for themselves and their uncles. The age class is bound together for the rest of their lives, helping each other to farm, fight, raid (in particular, European colonizers - see Timeline of Serer history), and marry. Married men continue farming but leave the bachelor class. The age classes gathered together males from all clans, and they were the main potential counterweight to the power of the clan leaders. Although the bachelor class formed the military class, people placed greater stress on the protecting power of the village shrines.[5][7]
Language
They speak the
[...] the ability to decipher a Serer symbol, for example, does not automatically follow from membership in this group nor from having simply lived with these people, the knowledge of signs is neither innate nor acquired by mere association, but rather the result of a long and patient apprenticeship.[8]
Notes
- ISBN 0195139771 [1]
- ISBN 1604977248 [2]
- ^ "Religion en Afrique, Volumes 15-17", E.J. Brill, 1985, p 203-205
- ^ Animal and crop offerings : See Serer religion and Saltigue
- ^ ISBN 0230606482 [3]
- ISBN 0230606482 [4]
- ^ ISBN 0230606482 [5]
- ^ ISBN 0-660-15965-1