Rites of passage in Basotho culture.

Women give birth with the assistance of female birth attends. Traditionally relatives and friends soaked the father with water when his first born child was a girl. If first born was a boy the father was beaten with a stick. The philosophy of this is that Basotho people noticed that life of males is occupied warfare, females by domestic duties such as fetching water. For two months or three months the child was kept secluded with the mother in a special marked hut. The seclusion could be temporarily broken when the baby was brought outside to be introduced to the first rain.
Rite of initiation boys and girls will be introduced into adult hood. Boys initiation involves a lengthy stay in a lodge in a secluded area away from the village they taught appropriate male conduct in marriage, special initiation traditions, cords words and signs and praise songs. In basotho the initiation is marked by the community festival during which the new initiates (mokolwane) sing the praises they have compose. Traditional belief a man who has not undergone the initiation is not considered as adult.
Initiation for girls (bale) also involves seclusion but ritual huts of the bale are generally located near village. Bale wear masks and goat skin skirts and they smear thier bodies with a chalky white substance. They may sometimes may be seen as a group near the home relatives singing dancing and making requests for presents. Among some clans the girls are subjected to tests of pain and endurance. After the period of seclusion the initiates now called litswejane, wear cowhide skirts and anoint themselves with red ocher initiation for girls does not involve any surgical operation in basotho.
In Basotho a period of working in mines was considered a kind of rite of passage that one as a man. Lastly in Basotho when someone dies the whole community takes part in the burial. Speeches are made at the grave side by relatives and friends. Then adult man take turns shoveling soil into the grave with silence. After all things are done as a group to wash thier hands, there may also be a funeral feast.